Smartsheet for Task and Project Management

I recently started to use Smartsheet for helping to manage my tasks, duties, and projects. I found an existing template from them and am using it pretty much as-is. Our college has been using Smartsheet for a couple of years now and it’s been very good overall.

My template features a pretty standard array of fields:

Task
Category
Status
WBS No.
Assigned to
Start Date
End Date
Duration
% Done
Comments
Predecessors
and the standard Smartsheets Conversations (comments), Attachments, etc.

This tool replaces what I had been doing previously. Not long after the start of COVID, I was overwhelmed with work. I don’t mind juggling, but I didn’t even know what I was juggling at that point. My previous system wasn’t working for me so I switched to using hidden, free blocks on an alternate, private Outlook calendar. This helped me to block off time for what I needed to do without cluttering up my main calendar which is shared.

Back to Smartsheet, I’m still able to get a good view of what I need to do and manage everything decently. I’m a visual person, so I’m mostly missing out on the graphical view of a calendar with blocks for time to work on projects. That’s been OK so far. I do have the Gantt feature for larger projects, but I still don’t use that view much. It’s mostly useful for the dates.

Dev/Rev Planning

Dev/Rev Planning Process

Dev/Rev = New Course Development and Course Revision Projects

For the past four to five years, I’ve been assisting with developing processes for our College to improve our Dev/Rev Process. While I am an Assistant Director, that title is rather misleading as I am relatively low in the organizational hierarchy of the College. This is relevant because I wouldn’t have been able to make the progress I have to improve things for the designers, which includes myself, and the faculty if I didn’t have the support of my Directors and the Faculty and Administrative leadership of the College. We still have a lot of work to do together but I am happy for the progress we have made.

The presentation above is a distillation of a more detailed process flowchart.

https://app.diagrams.net/ was a huge find as it is a powerful, open-source option for creating diagrams. I really enjoyed working with this software.

Take time to reflect

This is a quick reminder to myself that it is incredibly important to take a few minutes to reflect and document on my work in a timely basis. I was just asked to reflect on an event back in November and while I remember the event, if I hadn’t made a brief post, I would have lost a lot of the benefits of going through the training. I am working in so many areas that it is easy to lose track of details and progress. I should be capturing reflections and action items after every event. I do a good job of that in my meetings, but cannot forget my training/development opportunities as well.

Last post of 2020 and You Say, “Tomato,” I Say “Pomodoro”

COVID Pandemic–what a year and what a year to come. Right now globally, we’re looking at the highest infection and death rates that we’ve ever seen. I hope humanity can try to agree on protecting one another from this horrible pandemic.

I close out 2020 with something new. Perhaps the start of a New Year’s Resolution of sorts. I’m going to try out the Pomodoro technique to work more effectively. Meetings often drive the structure of my work day. That could make it difficult to complete multiple Pomodoro’s back-to-back, but I’m not really concerned about that. I plan to use this technique on whatever time I have.

I’ve only just start using it and can see how it will improve my ability to focus, manage stress, and get more done. I already have a timer that I’ve customized for work and break sessions. I’ll return to share how this has impacted my work.

Until then, happy holidays to you and best wishes.

Photoshop… still the best for GIFs

Tutorial: Create an animated GIF from a series of photos

I’ve tried some so-called, purpose-built GIF apps like GIF Brewery 3 and Photoshop is still the best for creating compact, quality GIFs. It gives me the most control, but there are a lot of additional steps and things to confuse those new to Photoshop.

I still have to consider the pedagogical application of when to best use a GIF. You have to consider your audience. The size, quality, and timing all play into whether the work I am creating will be effective. I made the GIF below for the director of my office, but chose to send static images because I had to get the information to her quickly and didn’t want to confuse her with how I formatted the information.

Using GIFs of Screencasts, 10/24/19
MOV to GIF, 2/23/16

Additional: to make a screen capture of a specific window on a Mac, click the space bar after pressing command-shift-4 and then position the camera icon over the window you would like to capture and then click the mouse

Including Inclusion and Diversity

I have recently created a new category, “Inclusion and Diversity (I&D),” in our Design Team Fortnight meetings. This will give time in our discussions to share and learn about I&D efforts, initiatives, and professional development. I&D has always been part of our work, but we are doing more explicitly to incorporate I&D best practices and strategies into our design approaches.

In a similar effort, I am going to propose that we also create a new category for I&D in our weekly office meetings. This will give our team the opportunity to voice office-wide (or greater) projects and initiatives related to I&D. I think it will be very important to recognize our questions, strengths, shortcomings, and opportunities in a formal way so that we can improve.

Simulations and Analytical Decision Games

Currently, a few courses have been designed at the College of IST to run simulations or Analytical Decision Games using only Canvas. By using Canvas Groups, Pages, Assignments, and Quizzes we are able to deliver simulations to a class over the course of weeks during class.

Students are formed into groups that in turn are provided specific intelligence reports on a specific schedule. The system allows for injecting additional deliverables at any time. Communication is handled using the Canvas Inbox and the Canvas Group communication tools.

Requests for information (RFIs) can be made by the students to the faculty either automatically without any oversight or manually depending upon the needs.

All grading is integrated with Canvas because we use the native tools to deliver the simulation.

Peer Evaluation of Group Work Options

Qualtrics Peer Evaluation

Qualtrics is a great option for delivering a lightweight option for peer evaluations of group work performance.

At Penn State, faculty and staff are able to request a license to use Qualtrics. This is required for this approach. Please contact your IT department for more details.

Once you have a license make a copy of this project into your list of projects. This is also required because you will be managing the setup, delivery, and analysis of the data.

Click to view/take sample evaluation

To setup your project to use in your course, please follow these directions:

Step 1. Make a copy of the peer evaluation into your Qualtrics account

Step 2. Export your Canvas Grades

Step 3. Download this CSV template

Step 4. Copy-and-paste the first column, all of your student’s names, into the CSV file in the first column replacing the sample data. You can ignore all of the other empty cells under the other columns. Save your changes.

Step 5. Import your CSV roster to your Qualtrics project (see “Importing Reusable Choices” section)

To deliver the peer evaluation in your course, please follow these directions:

Copy the distribution link
Paste the link into your Canvas Course or share via a Canvas Announcement or a class email

To view the results after the evaluation has closed, please follow these directions:

Open the evaluation in Qualtrics
Switch to view the reports

Other Evaluation Approaches Tested

The following tests all fail for the same basic reason: the approaches are not viable because different evaluations are stored in the same position and would require a manual process to separate the results for each student being evaluated. Each test does explore different ways of inputting data and piping text in from previous questions along with using display logic algorithms.

Test 1: Depending on how many teammates an evaluator chooses, they are provided just enough fields to enter the names of their teammates. Based on the names they have entered, the evaluator is provided with a matrix of selections for each teammate.
Test 2: The owner of the survey copies-and-pastes the names of the students into a list of potential choices for the evaluator to chose from to indicate who is on their team. Based on the names selected, the evaluator is provided with a separate slider-matrix of evaluation rankings.
Test 3: Evaluators are provided form entry fields to enter the names of each of their teammates and those names are automatically populated on separate rows of a slider-matrix where the evaluator ranks their teammates contributions to the group work.

Earlier Efforts

I tested a similar evaluation process using a different approach that would be used for evaluations of IA/LA/TAs at the end of a semester. I did not feel this was an approach that would realistically work because of the amount of back-end data manipulation required to make sense of the results. This approach asks evaluators to group selections together to indicate who was in the evaluator’s class sections. Then evaluators would provide rankings for each assistant based on their performance.
In 2018, I worked with Christian Vinten-Johansen <v23@psu.edu> with the Penn State Accessibility Team to create an accessible alternative to a CATME Peer Evaluation. At the time, CATME was not accessible.
I found earlier attempts as well that I’ll eventually document here.

Replacement Plan in Smartsheet

Our leadership is looking at better documentation around Replacement Planning and while we have a lot of the data in existing Smartsheets, I need to work with others to better communicate that data.

Ultimately, we want to share who’s working on what project and who others can go to for “leadership” and “project” backups in the event that the principle is unavailable. In this time of COVID-19, we have determined that it may be necessary to document up to three backup tiers for each project.

Initially, the difference between a “leadership” and “project” backup needed to be defined. Someone identified to provide leadership backup would be expected to know how to get answers related to a specific project but they themselves may be unable to complete the work or task. The person identified as a project backup would be able to accomplish the work that would yield answers to those questions.

The next big hurdle was to determine how to combine information from at least three different Smartsheets and using the Dashboard feature, we will be able to combine that information. We’re starting off with one sheet as the master that will establish the basic style (column names and widths) for the data. A second sheet was edited by changing some of the existing column names and adding new ones. A third sheet is going to prove more difficult. We need to preserve the original column names and will not be able to add more columns to that existing sheet as we had done in the second sheet.

I have decided to create a secondary sheet that pulls in that information using index and match functions and then other formulae to remap that data into columns that we are using in the other two sheets.

How to Make a Perfect Screencast

I have a hard time making concise and direct screencasts while being as time efficient as possible.

I have recorded a screencast on how I make screencasts.

Basically, I make a screen recording without audio first, then I record the audio, and finally I edit them together into a final cut that plays back smoothly and much better than if I just hit record and do everything at once. All I use is iMovie and Quicktime Player on the Mac. Both are available for free.

While this takes a little longer, it is much less frustrating and higher quality than trying to record both my audio and the screen at the same time.