Week 2: Winners of the Innovation/Collaboration Survey

Post by Charles McIntyre, UCSC. This week, we randomly picked two entries in the UC NeXt survey for the free UCCSC tickets.  The winners are:

  1. Jonathon Wilson (UCLA)
  2. David Rusting (UCOP)

See you at Riverside this summer!

A common theme emerged

Although we weren’t able to pick one favorite story this week, one theme came through multiple entries: time.  Here are a few of the comments about how we can support more collaboration and innovation:

  • “Legitimized time spent doing R&D. Often times it’s prioritized out of rotation.
  • “Management that supports the collaboration by allowing staff to invest time.
  • Have time in my workweek officially devoted to innovation

I have definitely found this to be the case within my team and the greater IT division at UC Santa Cruz.  We’re already overloaded with technical debt, increased demands from security, constant feature development, patching, etc. Often, if collaboration isn’t a simple and quick win, it’s considered “too expensive” time-wise.  Then add on top of that, dedicating time for research and innovation?  How can we fit it all in?

Our challenge

Perhaps that frames the challenge we face as managers and engineers:  How do we create capacity and incentivize collaboration and innovation with all of our work?

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