The Wrongheadedness of Best Practice Thinking
I’ve come across a gem of a book introduction, and I’m writing to recommend that you read it. Yes, all of you. The introduction is from the book Strategic Procurement in Construction
Cox and Townsend argue in their introduction, and throughout the book, that best practice thinking is wrong-headed and leaves us playing catch up. One of my favorite bits of the introduction reads:
They will be searching for the ‘Holy Grail’ of best practice. By this one means practitioners are looking for the answer that provides the solution to all of the problems which they face managerially. Unfortunately, this desire to discover the single solution (best practice), that will allow the practitioner to avoid the need for thought and risk taking, is an illusion.
They go on to discuss concepts such as appropriateness and leverage and recognize that many practitioners would call their discussions “common sense.” Their response?
Some of the practitioners who read these pages may accept what has been said, and argue that this is just common sense (which it is), and that they already know this. If that is the case then this book may have little to teach them, however, because experience leads the authors to conclude that such a form of sense (in a business context) does not appear to be all that common.
I wish I’d written something like that in the paper Andy and I submitted recently that was rejected for having results that were not surprising enough. The results we found in our onboarding study were surprising because we found them and not necessarily in their content. For instance, it’s surprising that teams still behave as though new employees will be immediately productive even though the sense that onboarding takes time is apparently common. Much like Cox and Townsend find that strategic procurement is not all that common, neither are teams who smoothly onboard their new members.
My questions as I continue to read Cox and Townsend’s book are really about how one encourages strategic, reflective thinking over best practice thinking and how one should present research results that show just how uncommon common sense can be. See, one can learn things by studying construction projects. This message brought to you by my dissertation, a work in progress.
NSF Workshop Report on Qualitative Research
The report for NSF's two-day workshop on Interdisciplinary Standards for Systematic Qualitative Research is now available. The goals of the workshop were to (quoted from the report):
- articulate the standards used in their particular field to ensure rigor across the range of qualitative methodological approaches;
- identify common criteria shared across the four disciplines for designing and evaluating research proposals and fostering multidisciplinary collaborations; and
- develop an agenda for strengthening the tools, training, data, research design, and infrastructure for research using qualitative approaches.
The whole report is 180 pages long, but you can get the gist from the executive summary. For graduate students, the longer sections on "Recommendations for Producing Top Notch Qualitative Research" and "Promising New Research Areas and Topics" are especially interesting reads. I'll post more details when I have a little more time. We don't get to see into the minds of our faculty members every day, and reports like this one give us a glimpse. Take a look, and keep working on your top notch research.
Almost! A blog commenter’s story
I posted a comment to Freakonomics today, and I almost made it on the first page of comments. Sadly, mine is #27 and is unlikely to be read by anyone but those of you who clicked it from here. Or maybe, if I get really lucky, someone else procrastinating bigger things will post a "re: #27" comment later.
The Freakonomics post was about a website where potential employers could post mini projects for students and other job seekers to complete. The idea is that then job seekers can demonstrate their skills before being interviewed or hired. Sadly, I think such a site would get plenty of traffic. I sympathize with all the students who would feel compelled to do those extra projects during what little remains of their sleeping hours. And no, I don't think it would help them get jobs.
Oh, I also commented on Question: Where to Study Information Visualization or Infographics at Information Aesthetics today. Yes, I gave the School of Information a shout out. I would love to have more infoaesthetics types around.
On the employer side, I doubt that such a site would actually help find appropriate employees. If my work at Microsoft taught me nothing else, it showed that domain proficiency does not indicate success in employment. Great engineers have mad social skills. All engineers spend more time in meetings than any student could ever imagine. A site for mini projects might get work done for free, but it won't help people weed through CS graduates to find the ones that can work in teams and on large-scale projects. Now if only there were some way to figure out whether a potential employee could work well with others...
Relational Engagement in Project Teams
I participated in the ICOS dissertation poster session today, and while there had a number of helpful conversations about my dissertation. One of the preliminary findings I included on my poster discussed the perspective-taking and social language use I've noticed in interviews with members of the bridge project. Perspective-taking is a concept found in psychology literature, and it usually refers to our developed abilities to understand that other people have experiences different from our own. Some education researchers such as Hunter Gehlbach at Harvard use the idea of social perspective taking as a way to help students develop social skills. Linguists such as James Pennebaker at UT-Austin use the term social thinking to refer to language that indicates an awareness of other people.
In my data, members of the bridge building project indicate their perspective taking abilities and social thinking when they make comments such as
I would think that if you guys got involved with maybe [a community college], they have a concrete technology program up there. You could get a lot of free help with a lot of experiments up there, and they’re more than willing to work with concrete and do labs and anything you guys don’t like doing.
By saying, "I would think...," the interviewee indicates awareness that someone else might think something else. The speaker implies that there is more than one idea about what the listener ("you guys") might want to do. In other interviews, my participants express concern about the goals other members of the project have when they make statements such as, "Well, I know he's more concerned about cost." Here, the speaker explicitly tells us that he understand another person's concerns and knows their relative importance.
Why does it matter that my participants demonstrate perspective taking and use social language? Project teams that include people who respect and understand perspectives that differ from their own are more successful. By "more successful" I mean those teams are more likely to accomplish their goals, have positive affect and impressions of their work, and maybe even to work together again. The social aspects of the relational engagement that perspective taking produces eases tension and builds commitment among project team members, making it easier for project teams to work together smoothly. It may be that positive relational engagement - interactions among team members characterized by perspective taking and social thinking - is more important than project structure or timing. When we talk about projects, especially engineering projects, we often focus on how they should be managed at the project level; when should what get done, who should do it, to whom should that guy report. It may make more sense for us to focus on managing interpersonal relationships on the project team, developing trust and concern for one another. The way we relate to our project teammates is likely to have a huge impact on our ability to work together successfully.
Poster Printing
Grad students print a lot of posters. Every time this grad student tries, something goes horribly wrong. So, finally, I've documented a successful poster printing process, and now I'll share it with you.
Background Info:
Before you even begin to design your poster, make sure you know
- The dimensions your poster is allowed to be
- How wide the poster printer's paper is
- What file format the poster printer likes best
- Whether you will be allowed to install fonts on the computer from which you send your poster to the printer
Standard posters for conferences are often 36" x 48" or something close to it. Some poster sessions require portrait orientation, some landscape. Most poster printers on my campus (and at FedEx Kinkos) print on paper 42" wide. Poster printing is usually charged by linear foot. Most poster print shops use Windows PCs and Windows-based software to manage poster print jobs. Using a file format such as PDF with embedded fonts should ensure that your poster looks the same on a Mac and on Windows.
Now, you're ready to design your poster. Many people use PowerPoint. I am not one of those people. If you'd like help designing and printing a large poster in PowerPoint, go here instead. I use Inkscape, an open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Inkscape produces .SVG files and allows you to save in a variety of formats including .EPS, .PDF, and .AI. Inkscape is available for Mac, PC, and Linux. I'm a Mac user, so I use the Mac version.
The instructions below assume you have already finalized your design. I recommend designing a poster with edges no longer than 42" because that's the size of the poster printer's paper. By designing a poster that's 36" x 42" instead of 36" x 48", you'll save yourself a linear foot of printing cost and the hassle of trimming the extra paper off your poster. If you use another tool such as PowerPoint or Illustrator to design your poster, you can still use the instructions but start at #12.
I perfected these instructions using the poster printers, Macs, and PCs, available at the Tech Deck and Angell Hall computing sites at the University of Michigan. Both poster printing shops use HP printers. Both places also offer user support, and all the staff I worked with rocked! See special notes below about each of these poster printing sites.
The Instructions:
- Open your SVG file in Inkscape
- Go to
File -> Save As... - Choose EPS from the drop down at the bottom right
- Choose a location, probably a jump drive, to save your poster as a EPS
- Take your jump drive to a computer at the poster print shop that has Illustrator (I'd stick with a Mac at this point if you can)
- Open Illustrator
- Choose
New Print Documentand set the dimensions to the size of your poster - Choose
File -> Placeand select your EPS file - Quadruple check all the parts of your poster to make sure it looks right (See Note 1 for tips perfecting your poster in Illustrator)
- When it's perfect, save your poster as PDF. DO NOT print to PDF. SAVE AS PDF.
- Take your PDF on your jump drive over to a PC that can print to the poster printer
- Open the PDF
- Quadruple check your poster in Acrobat on the PC
- Send your poster to the poster printer (See Note 2 for details about appropriate settings in the print dialog box)
- Cross your fingers, and hope for the best
- Enjoy your perfect poster!
Note 1: Illustrator and File Formats
Where ever you print your poster probably uses Illustrator. Illustrator will be happy to make a nice PDF of your poster, and you may be able to go straight from placing your EPS file to saving as a PDF. If you use transparent fonts or have placed images from PowerPoint, you will have to make some adjustments. Changing the fonts should be easy enough - you can simply select the text and change its opacity. If you've placed an image from PowerPoint, and it looks wrong, go to PowerPoint, save as a PNG, and place the PNG using File -> Place in Illustrator.
Note 2: Setting Properties in the Print Dialog
You're using Windows because the print dialog box will let you adjust the settings appropriately. The Mac print dialog box will probably not work. Remember, these instructions are for HP poster printers (e.g. HP DesignJet 5500) So, in the print dialog box
- Select the poster printer from the drop down list of available printers.
- Click on the Properties button.
- In the Properties window, select the "Advanced" tab.
- Expand the Paper/Output selection and select "PostScript Custom Page Size" from the Paper Size: drop down menu.
- In the PostScipt Custom Page Size Definition window enter your document's height and width.
- If the longest edge of your poster is the width of the printer (in my case 42") or shorter, from the Paper Feed Direction: drop down menu select "Long Edge First."
- In the print window, verify that your document size is correct.
- Click the Print button to send your document to the printer.
Tech Deck Notes:
The Tech Deck uses some software on a PC directly attached to the printer. You can print directly from Illustrator on the Mac to the poster printer, and then you'll do your last quadruple checking over on the PC attached to the printer. Tech Deck staff will help you through all of this. You will pay for your poster at the Shapiro Undergraduate Library's Circulation desk.
Angell Hall Notes:
The Sites personnel may or may not be able to help you. The instructions above will work if you design your poster in Inkscape on a Mac, use a Sites Mac to make a PDF, and then use a Sites PC to print to the poster printer. After you click "OK" to print your poster, you must visit http://mprint.umich.edu/poster and release your job to the printer. Your student account will be billed for the cost of printing your poster.
Dissertation Abstract and Update
A number of wonderful, attentive, concerned friends and family members have asked for a dissertation update, and here it is. Thank you for thinking of me! Now all of you who wanted to know but were afraid to ask can know too. The latest short abstract is:
In the fall of 2005, drivers in a small midwestern city began crossing over an interstate on a new kind of bridge. The bridge beneath them looked like other bridges carrying city streets over the interstate, but this bridge could bend. It couldn't bend like Gumby, but it could bend like steel. Building the deck of this bendable bridge involved a state transportation department, a university research lab, and several private contractors. Given the complexity of construction projects, the challenges in doing innovative construction work, and the potential pitfalls of collaboration projects, the success of the bridge is surprising. This dissertation explores how the team managed to build a bridge with a remarkable new kind of deck.
Existing scholarship provides insight on the problems that plague projects and collaborations and identifies many mechanisms to help meet these challenges. My analysis suggests that the bridge project avoided possible problems common in projects such as (1) loose coupling among actors in a project limiting the information sharing that occurs and (2) procurement processes that encourage builders and clients to see one another as adversaries through (a) social language and its associated attention to others, (b) the flexibility and localized control loose coupling affords, and (c) the motivating influences of affect. This study will combine and extend theories about social capital, creative projects, and loose coupling in order to better understand the nature of collaborative projects involving multiple communities of practice and how those projects can be successful.
I've written at least 68 good pages and probably about 50 not-so-good ones that will eventually work their way, in part, into the good stuff. I have a few (< 10) interviews remaining, and that means more time in analysis. I'm on target for my personal deadline of a spring/summer defense and am actively seeking new opportunities beginning summer or fall of 2009.
Storing, sharing, editing data
I'm starting a new research project on which I collaborate with two other people, one in Ann Arbor, MI and one in Phoenix, AZ. We use Macs and PCs. We have no budget for software. We're likely to have a bunch of qualitative data to keep track of and share.
My first task is to gather some information on potential participants for our study. I've spent enough time working with databases to prefer them to files and folder structures for these purposes. Databases have advantages in that they can store relational information, can sort data, are easy to search, can be viewed and edited by more than one person at a time, the list goes on. Bottom line, I want a database. I starting by building a Drupal site to keep track of the data about those potential participants - who they are, where they are, how to contact them, how they're related to each other, what my thoughts are about them. I ended up abandoning Drupal to build my own MySQL/PHP website that stores and displays the data; I also built insert and edit pages to ease those data functions.
This is my third try-and-abandon with Drupal. I can understand how Drupal might make maintenance easier for non-technical users, but as a quasi-technical user, Drupal gets in my way at every turn. My MySQL database has 9 tables with 2 - 10 fields. I would have to add all <90 of those fields by hand in Drupal. Then, I'd have to create views to see them and views to edit and views to add/insert. How is that better than just building a PHP site myself? If most of the work is during setup, how does Drupal save any time or frustration at all? It seems like Drupal has taken the command line, coding aspects of building my own database-driven site and replaced them with a convoluted web-based GUI. I'm not sure I see the point or the cost savings there.
The real problem here is not that I still haven't found Drupal useful or advantageous. The problem is that I still don't have a great, easy, usable way to enter, edit, store, and share data with my colleagues. Even after I build this mySQL/PHP site by hand, I'll still have to figure out a way to get the data back out so we can analyze it. That opens a whole host of problems whose current solutions such as NVivo and Atlas.ti are expensive ($240 and $119 for students, respectively). Opportunities abound for helping qualitative researchers capture, store, share, and analyze their data collaboratively. What price point would be appropriate here? If you're a researcher, how much would you be willing to pay for a personalized, secure, web-based data sharing solution? Would anyone else even want such a thing?
Comparing Collaboration Tools
Choosing a tool or set of tools to use when collaborating presents many challenges. Will my colleagues be willing to get yet another login? Will we use just email for communication, or should we make sure some IM or audio is available? How will we share documents?
All the systems included here allow you to store and share files of many types, including images, Stata files, video, etc. Here's a summary of a few of the off-the-shelf options available to people looking for a new online collaboration tool. I'll post more information about each system and how to tell which is right for you. Please feel free to email me if you'd like help planning for and setting up a new collaboration. I'm sure we can work something out.
| System | View/edit docs | White- board |
Chat | Video | Wiki | Platform | Login | Support | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CTools | x (text) | X | Any | UMich | Email, phone | Free | |||
| Groove | X | X (text, audio) | PC | Groove | Online | part of Office 2007; $149.95 and up | |||
| Basecamp | X | X | Any | Basecamp or OpenID | $24/month and up | ||||
| Vyew | X | X (text) | X | Any | Vyew | Online | Free/ $6.95/ $13.95 and up per month | ||
| Google (combine Docs/Sites/Groups) | X | X (text) | X | Any | Online | Free | |||
| Zoho | X | X (text) | X | Any | Zoho | Email/online | Free/$50 | ||
| Adobe Connect | X | X (text, audio) | X | Any | Adobe | Email/online | $750/month |
Honorable mention: eXpresso lets you upload and edit an Excel document together. Support for other Office documents is coming but no timeline is set.