A long summative list of things I do

Follow-up to Work review, part eight – hardware and software from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

This may well be the most boring blog entry ever written! I have been compiling a list of all the things that I do as part of my job. The aim is to try to rationalise and simplify it all. I want to get an idea first of all of the diversity, which is great. I then want to look for things that i can devolve to other people. I will also look for things that I am good at, things that are easy and stress free, and things for which i don't need training or extra support. Conversely, i will look for the things that are stressful, or which i need training and support, and perhaps things that i shouldn't be doing. That's the next stage. To start of with, here's a rather long list, which i'm sure has some ommissions:

1. writing communications information about our activities and the university to a range of audiences including students, staff at all levels including senior officers, funding bodies and other external agencies, the general public, the e-learning community;
2. writing publicity for staff and students about our activities;
3. writing reports on our activities;
4. writing reflective accounts on our activities for the e-learning research community;
5. attending conferences;
6. giving papers on e-learning;
7. writing journal papers;
8. organising conferences;
9. desigining the e-learning web site;
10. writing content for the e-learning web site;
11. reading and reviewing e-learning research from external sources;
12. planning and carrying out e-learning research;
13. identifying hardware and software requirements for departments, team and specific projects;
14. evaluating and chosing hardware and software;
15. identifying hardware and software suppliers;
16. evaluating the performance of hardware and software;
17. managing a pool of loan hardware;
18. trialling hardware and software within teaching activities;
19. recording and reporting on hardware and software trials;
20. keeping track of new hardware and software developments;
21. ensuring sowfware and hardware integrity;
22. developing new team, organisation, working practices, plans;
23. developing team interface and workflows with other teams within eLab;
24. communicating feedback on new developments to other teams within eLab;
25. differentiating areas of responsibility between the teams;
26. communicating new developments from other teams to the clients;
27. ensuring that developments are wherever possible 'joined up';
28. forming new IT Services e-learning policies and practices;
29. contributing to the development and adoption of new generic (not e-learning specific) IT Services policies and practices;
30. working with the helpdesk and other teams to resolve incidents and identify means of preventing them in the future;
31. identifying actions and requests that are contrary to IT Services policies and practices;
32. explaning IT Services practices and policies to clients;
33. briefing other teams within IT Services on the e-learning implications of their activities;
34. informing the whole of IT Services about e-learning developments, and the rationale behing those developments;
35. interpreting and explaining university and government policy;
36. explicating current workflows and practices;
37. mediating between competing interests;
38. identifying implications of adopting IT approaches and modifying current practices;
39. advising on legal issues;
40. identifying projects and activities that benefit departments, faculties and the university as a whole;
41. identifying factors that may impact negatively on staff, students, departments, the university;
42. identifying ways to develop consistent practices across and within departments;
43. persuading individuals to cooperate;
44. responding to individuals in their own time;
45. advising on costs (time, resource, money);
46. identifying tasks, project activities, stages, requirements, milestones, deadlines for others to follow;
47. project managing people without being line manager;
48. advising on the viability of projects and research funding applications;
49. providing technical guidance to funding applications;
50. planning use of and negotiating access to resources;
51. identifying and specifying requirements;
52. advocating requirements as important;
53. proposing solutions;
54. getting agreement for solutions to be developed;
55. monitoring development progress;
56. feeding back development status to clients;
57. considering training and support implications of introducing new developments (for self and other teams and departments);
58. scheduling and arranging meetings
59. definition of agenda
60. task identification and specification
61. identification and agreement of roles and responsibilities
62. delegation
63. time-slot protection
64. tracking of progress
65. communication of progress
66. prioritisation of projects
67. prioritisation of tasks
68. designing sessions to be taught
69. designing series of sessions
70. writing hands-on course IT support materials
71. teaching hands-on technical sessions
72. lectures & large non-interactive presentations
73. writing post-course IT support materials
74. small group (5) technical sessions
75. focus-groups/consultancy sessions
76. postgraduate sessions
77. undergraduate sessions
78. staff sessions
79. working with people in their context to identify key functionality that will make a difference to them.
80. using my own experience of the academic process to understand and empathise with their academic/personal process.
81. creating compact and self-contained bits of web functionality that add interactivity, community and academic-usefulness to web content.
82. creating ways of building links between content and activities in separate systems to make a more cohesive experience.
83. getting feedback from people, seeing it making a difference.
84. writing flexible, resuseable, extendable OO 'business logic' code.
85. writing maintainable code using the same approaches as other members of eLab;
86. good well planned testing.
87. rapid user interface development (Javascript).
88. creating data-storage solutions that give power to end-users in an intuitive and easy to access way.
89. desigining the visual appearance of applications and pages.
90. creating designs in Photoshop.
91. creating designs with css

Robert O'Toole : 16 Dec 2004 11:56 |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem