Behind the Curtain at TCG

TCG Customer Recognized as Excellence.Gov Award Finalist

The American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) has announced that the Department of the Treasury’s Budget Formulation and Execution Manager (BFEM) program is a finalist for the 2012 Excellence.Gov Awards in the Excellence in Enterprise Efficiencies category. TCG supports the BFEM program with a range of services, including program management, business analysis, program implementation, systems architecture and development, and operations and maintenance. To read the full press release, click here.

 

NIH Awards NITRC Phase II Contract to TCG

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded TCG a four-year contract to continue its support of the award winning Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC), a user-friendly collaboration environment for the neuroinformatics community. This support will allow NIH to enhance and expand NITRC’s scientific scope and add new types of resources. To read the full press release, click here.

10+ Years of Telecommuter Wisdom

I have more than 10 years experience as a telecommuter.  Every year I learned something for myself that would have been nice in a set of guidelines to have before I started to work from home.

Year 1: Cancel your cable television.  You will get a lot more done in and out of work.
Year 2: Your bedroom does not make a good office.  Use a dedicated room....with a door.
Year 3: A 5 or 10 minute daily phone check-in with your team can save hours of work later.
Year 4: Be careful writing e-mail.  It can easily offend or be misunderstood.
Year 5: Just because you are “home all day" does not mean that you can babysit your nephew.
Year 6: Wake up on a schedule, work on a schedule.
Year 7: Get an animal companion. 
Year 8: Go outside and see the unfiltered sun at least once every day. 
Year 9: If you still have a land-line coming into your home, don’t answer it when you are working.
Year 10: Get exercise when you can.  It keeps you sharp and awake during the day.

Looking back at my list, I see that these items divide into two categories: ideas that help you to work harder and ideas that help you to get away from work.  Paradoxically, telecommuters suffer from both problems.

To help you work harder you need to bring in the good bits about working in an office.  During work hours, you need to focus on work.  That's a lot easier to do sitting in a cube farm with the rest of your team than sitting at your kitchen table by yourself...with last nights dishes in the sink and every other distraction of your personal life surrounding you.  Every hour you skip working from 9-5 is another hour you need to make up in the evening or weekend.  And that is no fun.  I learned that very quickly.  The solution that worked for me was to make my home office environment feel a lot more like a regular office environment.    

If you have a dedicated room for your office you are surrounded by the trappings (pun intended) of your work life.  Having a door keeps the sounds, and possibly children, of your home life at arms length during business hours.  A 10 minute "stand up" phone conference keeps you in sync with your peers the just as well as stopping by their desk a couple times a day.  Finally, keep as far away from daytime television, classic movie reruns, and 80's era sitcom reruns as possible.  For me, killing my television was the best way to do that.

Then there is the other side of things: feeling like you are working all the time.  When you are in the middle of a big project it is easy to get sucked back to your desk for "just a minute" after dinner.  Colleagues working on a different schedule will still call your desk phone seeing if they can catch you for a question.  When I work at home I don't really break for lunch...I just bring food to my desk to eat.  Then when you finally decide to get away from work, just seeing your office when you walk down the hall can keep you from mentally getting away from work...ever.  These things just don't happen when you work outside the home.

Keeping to a 9-5 schedule, or whatever works for you, gets you in the habit of being away from work for the evening.  I'm lucky because my kids get home from school at 4PM.  That's my quitting time.  I get up early and have a full day's work done by then.  In the best case, I don't even think about work until 6:30 the next morning.  It is necessary to get some down-time if you want to be efficient the next day.  Owning a dog ensures that I will have to get up to take care of it a couple times a day, maybe even a nice 30 minute walk in the fresh air at lunch when the weather is good.  Regular exercise is necessary for everyone, especially us folks sitting at a desk for 8+ hours a day. 

These rules work for me.  Everyone is different and they might be just the change you need to start loving your telecommute job with all your heart...or you might need to do things differently.  Either way, if you have the opportunity to try working from home, I recommend it.

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.

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.

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.

FDP Fall General Meeting Registration Now Open

The Federal Demonstration Partnership (FDP), which is an association of federal agencies, academic research institutions, and research policy organizations that works to streamline the administration of federally sponsored research has announced that registration for the FDP Fall General Meeting, September 14-16, 2011 is now open and will close Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 5:00pm. It will reopen on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 3:00pm for on-site registration with the higher onsite registration fees.  Please click here to register for the meeting. For any questions regarding online registration, please contact Claudette Baylor-Fleming at cbaylor@nas.edu or at (202) 334-3994. Please click on the follow links for frequently asked questions:  General FDP FAQ or Mentoring Program FAQ.

OMB Seeks Comments

In the July 28, 2011 Federal Register, OMB requested comments on the renewal of the SF-425, Federal Financial Report. They are particularly interested in comments on how the SF-425 and SF-426A are an improvement over the data collections they replaced (SF-269, SF-269A, SF-272 and SF-272A), and how using a specification for data exchange or other data model instead of structured forms could facilitate the submission and collection of the financial data identified in the SF-425 and SF-425A. Also of interest are comments regarding any proposals, use cases specifications or models for eliminating redundancies in reporting grant financial information and increasing its usefulness, regardless of how the financial information is reported (form, data input, system-to-system, etc.). For more information read the Federal Register Notice and visit the OMB Grants Forms page.

ACT-IAC releases results of grants management survey

ACT-IAC's Collaboration & Transformation SIG recently released a white paper titled "Industry Survey of Challenges to Improve Federal Grants Management". The group surveyed industry participants to identify opportunities for improvement of the Federal grants management process and associated systems. The conclusions are pretty much what one would expect:

1. Develop additional standardization and a common taxonomy of grants data.

2. Creating a taxonomy is a challenge given the diverse nature of the grants landscape, array of participants, required traceability, difficulty in linking actual expenditures to goals, and the multiple layers of funds distribution.

3. Standardize interface standards and grants business processes such as application workflow, grant evaluation scoring and decision methodologies.

4. Proprietary and open source methodologies and tools can perform data management, virtualization, mining, and analysis. Public data exchanges and data sources may also prove useful.

5. Current websites provide significant amounts of data but struggle with transparency due to a lack of accurate data. 

At the end, of course, the basic recommendation is that the government must establish underlying policies that address these gaps before the gaps themselves can be filled in.

This is the same refrain we've heard many times before: grants management is a complicated beast, which has grown organically as Congress has made laws to serve the nation's needs. A complete, holistic approach to grants management is ambitious -- probably too ambitious, frankly -- but incremental gains can be made by establishing standards in specific areas. We've seen this work with the SF424, for example.

Still, kudos to ACT-IAC for trying to pull this project together into a coherent product.