In February 2023, the LSA Technology Services Infrastructure Team began a new, now monthly, in-person initiative they call Innovation Days. These gatherings started within a team that is mostly remote in an effort to “foster a culture of innovation and push our own boundaries to learn new and exciting things,” according to Josh Tishhouse, OS Programming Supervisor. With technology constantly changing, Tishhouse believes that providing space for learning about what others are doing and what is new and up-and-coming in the field is vital.
By setting aside a regular time for professional development and continued growth, the team has found innovative ways to improve their services to the college. One significant impact was finding ways to improve LSA Technology Services’ disaster recovery plans. During two successive Innovation Days, the team worked together to “gamify” current disaster recovery plans through tabletop exercises. The team was given a service area and was asked to work together to walk through an emergency outage to determine how well the current disaster recovery plans held up to a theoretical outage. Just these exercises alone led to making various strides towards the improvement of build and configuration automation.
Innovation Days can also include bringing in outside parties to present or participate. While exploring different cloud offerings, the team brought in experts from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and asked them to provide training and a hands-on lab session to learn about the tools they offer. During that session, the team also learned how they might leverage Terraform as a way to automate provisioning of services. Other staff within LSA Technology Services have also been invited to participate in topics they find interesting or want to potentially incorporate into their daily work.
Tishhouse wants to encourage other managers and supervisors to start thinking about answering the question: How could my team spend time on innovation and planning for potential future improvements?
Allowing staff to have dedicated time to think creatively is important, especially in an ever-changing environment. In an effort to keep with with the industry, the team has used Innovation Days to familiarize themselves with “infrastructure-as-code,” which is an umbrella term encompassing the modernization of the duties of a systems administrator and bring DevOps practices into use for the purposes of automation, self-documentation, and change management. Once fully implemented, these technologies will save time for everyone on the Infrastructure Team, improve uniformity of configuration, and provide transparency for security and compliance.
After seeing the amazing work being done by his team, Tishhouse wants to encourage other managers and supervisors to start thinking about answering the question: How could my team spend time on innovation and planning for potential future improvements? “The most important things are to be inclusive and keep the team engaged. Everyone’s voice should be heard, even if guided or led by team leadership. Give permission and space for the team to set aside their "day jobs" to focus on being creative and trying new things. Be consistent. One day per month, in a space separate from their desks. Work with management to ensure this can be tailored to count as individual professional development time for their performance planning,” urged Tishhouse.
If you’d like to get started with creating an Innovation Day within your team or organization, Tishhouse would love to hear from you. Reach out to him at joshtish@umich.edu and inspire your staff to think outside the box.
