Behind the Curtain at TCG

NITRC Now Acccepting Externally-Issued Identity Credentials in Advance of Government Directive

NITRC--the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse--recently promoted code to allow for externally-issued identity credentials one week before Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel instructed federal agency CIOs to begin accepting non-government, externally-issued identity credentials. The ability to link a Google ID account to a NITRC log-in was included in TCG's September 2011 release. TCG built and operates NITRC for NIH. Under this contract, TCG established a web-based clearinghouse for neuroimaging analysis tools, vocabularies, datasets, and databases to facilitate the dissemination of these resources and the discussion of needs and limitations. The site provides opportunities for community comment on neuroimaging informatics knowledge resources to guide development and enhance their use by the research community. The NITRC initiative also offers a framework for other scientific areas: tools and resources created under Federal grants for scientific research in any specialty can be shared with scientific communities using the NITRC approach. For more details on NITRC, see our case study on TCG's web site.

NGMA Issues Call for Journal Articles

The National Grants Management Association (NGMA) Editorial Review Committee has issued a call for articles for upcoming issues of its bi-annual Journal of the National Grants Management Association.

The peer-reviewed NGMA Journal publishes articles dealing with specific grants management issues that are of interest to the grants management community.

Prospective authors should contact the editor at ngmaeditor@aol.com before submitting an article. For more information and submission guidelines click here. The deadline for articles for the next issue is December 1, 2011.

TCG Is #36 on 2011 WBJ 50 Fastest Growing Companies List

TCG has been ranked in position 36 on the Washington Business Journal list of the 50 Fastest Growing Companies in the Washington, DC  region for 2011. This is TCG’s first time on the list, which is based on consecutive growth over the last three years. Click here to read the full press release.

TCG's Brian Ibbison Featured in Federal Computer Week Rising Star Profile

Brian Ibbison, who is a technical and project lead with TCG, has been featured in a Rising Star Award profile in Federal Computer Week. Brian's receipt of this award represents the third year in a row that a TCG team member has been recognized as a Federal Computer Week Rising Star. Click here to read the profile.

Telework Exchange Announces Fall 2011 Town Hall Meeting

The Telework Exchange--a public-private partnership focused on eliminating telework gridlock--has announced that its Fall 2011 Town Hall Meeting, Take IT Home, will be held Tuesday, October 18, from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center (1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW).

The program will consist of two tracks addressing both technology requirements and management needs for putting Federal telework programs into action.

Registration is complimentary to government employees (industry rates apply) and Town Hall Meeting attendees are eligible to receive continuing professional education credits.

For more information and to register, click here.

NGMA Announces Monthly Training Luncheon and Webcast Series Schedule

The National Grants Management Association (NGMA) has announced its monthly training series schedule for 2011-2012. The series will have 8 sessions running from October through June and registration is now open. Here is the full schedule:

• 10/19/11  Grants 101: Featuring Stephen Daniels, CGMS, US Environmental Protection Agency
• 11/16/11   An Update from the OMB: Speaker(s) to be confirmaed
• 12/7/11    Ask a Grants Lawyer: Featuring Stacia Le Blanc, J.D., CGMS, James Drummond, Peter Wathen-Dunn and Jana Gagner
• 1/18/12    Preventing Fraud in Grant Funded Programs: Featuring Kenneth Dieffenbach, US Department of Justice
• 2/15/12    Internal Controls: Speaker(s) to be confirmed
• 3/21/12    The Need for Business Management Systems: Featuring Richard Solloway, Solloway & Associates
• 5/16/12    Performance Measures: Featuring Rose Bynum, Administration of Children & Families
• 6/20/12    Needs Assessment: Speakers to be confirmed

Session 1: Grants 101, with a Twist, featuring Stephen Daniels, National Policy, Training and Compliance Division, US Environmental Protection Agency, will be held Wednesday, October 19, 2011, 11:30 a.m. - 1: p.m. at Maggiano's Little Italy (5533 Wisconsin Avenue, NW, Washington, DC / Metro: Red Line - Friendship Heights station)

For more information and to register click here.

Holding Meetings for Fun and Productivity!

How many times have you said (or, depending on your place in the pecking order, thought), “Let’s end this meeting so we can get to work!”

You may be thinking about meetings wrong. Meetings aren’t a distraction from our jobs. For the vast majority of us working in knowledge fields, meetings ARE our jobs. And even when they’re not, even when we’re programmers or ditch-diggers or whatever, meetings are a vital part of the day.

It’s often been said that if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never know when you get there. What’s more, even when you do know where you are going, if you don’t check your bearings on a regular basis, after a while you’ll probably find yourself far off course. Business is just the same: if you don’t have a goal, you won’t know when you’ve achieved it. And if you don’t check your location against your planned progress on a regular basis, you’ll find yourself far afield, off course, and confused.

The best way to check your bearings is to have a meeting.

There are boring ways to hold meetings and there are exciting ways. We highly recommend Death By Meeting by Pat Lencioni; it teaches how make sure nobody is falling asleep in your meetings.

But that’s another article. Today we’ll focus on the meeting rhythm (first presented to us by Verne Harnish with Gazelles). A meeting rhythm is established by a series of meetings that, together, cover strategy and tactics so you can run your project or organization far more smoothly.

The first type of meeting is the Daily Huddle. This is a 5- to 8-minute stand-up meeting (in our case, a 5- to 17-minute conference call—calls almost always take a bit longer than in-person meetings) that takes place every day at the same time. The one I’m in occurs at 8:43. I like “odd” times because it’s paradoxically harder to forget about them. Every day, I meet with the other five people in TCG who make up our executive management team. We always have the same agenda: Each person announces the major items they’ll be working on that day and any blockers to their progress. We’ve tried more than 20 other agendae over the years, but this one seems to be the most effective. It gives everyone an idea of what the others will be doing, provides an opportunity to discuss problems (whether solvable or just a valuable opportunity to vent), and most importantly gives everyone one time per day when they can be sure that they’ll get to talk to their coworkers.

It took us months to get used to this and more months to decide it was the best for the company, but now that we’ve been doing it for more than 10 years, we wouldn’t give it up. I advocate that we have daily huddles in all our projects, as well; with the deadlines we always have, it’s vital for everyone to make sure they’re on the same page and nobody is inadvertently working against the team. It’s not always possible given schedules, team makeup, or client demands for everyone on a team to attend each and every meeting, but that’s what we aim for.

The Daily Huddle is the most tactical of the meetings we have. We also have Weekly Meetings, which last an hour and allow us to go down into tactical challenges we’re having. Our Monthly Meetings are longer still, lasting 2-4 hours; at them we discuss our most thorny tactical problems as well as a small amount of strategy. All these tactical meetings means when it’s time for us to think strategically, there’s less down-in-the-weeds discussion and more long-term decision making. Our Quarterly Strategic Planning Meetings last a whole day, our Half-Yearly Strategic Planning Meetings two days, and our Annual Strategic Planning Meetings a full three days. Little of the time is spent in deciding where to hold our picnic or whom we should hire to clean the office; issues like those are decided in our weekly meetings. We don’t spend a lot of time on employee-related problems; those are resolved in our monthly meetings. And we certainly don’t talk about the day-to-day gripes, which are resolved (or at least discussed) in the dailies. Our strategic meetings are devoted to strategy, and that’s a major advantage for us: we created a strategy seven years ago and stuck to it, tweaking where necessary. That strategy has grown TCG 12-fold, from $1m in revenue to around $12m this year.