Thank you for agreeing to serve as a Group Leader in Buildings & Grounds. By so doing you have joined the first incarnation of this august body's Steering Committee. As such, your fellow Group Leaders and I will be responsible for planning work parties, projects and tasks for Buildings & Grounds in the coming year. Welcome.
Each of us brings our own personality, style and energies to the Steering Committee. Some enjoy organization and documentation - others like to lead by doing. At minimum, the job requires a couple hours per month of planning by phone and email. Beyond that you may find satisfaction doing hands-on work, or leading tasks at monthly work parties or any time between.
The UUFSD Buildings & Grounds committe (UUBG) is being re-vamped for the 21st century. I have put most of the information we need to organize and plan on a stealth website beneath the UUFSD site. This should allow us to transact most of our meetings by phone and e-mail. I will act as web-secretary updating the UUBG web-pages for us all.
While you read the rest of this letter, please open a separate page in your web-browser to the Index: UUFSD Buildings & Grounds Documents. Most browsers allow you to do this with a right-click. If you have never done this before, try it. Position the two pages side-by-side on your screen. If you've never done this before, try that too. UUBG pages are intentionally designed to fit side-by-side even at a modest screen resolution. While Yahoo forces you to fill your entire screen with their ads, we are more considerate.
The Green Heading with Title, Contents, Scope and Summary is standard for all UUBG pages. Contents reflect the outline of the document.
Click on the "Released Documents" entry under the Index's Contents to pop down to the corresonding heading in the document. Click on the "Released Documents" heading there to pop up to the original entry in the Contents. Most UUBG documents do that, too.
Go to the "Frequently Accessed Documents" table at the beginning of the Index: UUFSD Buildings & Grounds Documents. In that table are all the documents I want you, as a Group Leader, to have at your fingertips.
The headings: Organization, Projects, Tasks, Maintenance are categories of documents.
The rows: B&G Committee, Steering, Landscape, Hardscape, Structures, Furnishings are topics of involvement around which the committee is structured. In each cell are listed the documents relevant to the intersecting category and topic.
The top row has documents of interest to the B&G Committee as a whole: defining the committee's organizational structure, the Work Parties as its major outreach project, the Master Index of all the tasks we are involved with and several policies and procedures documents for maintaining the committee itself.
The Steering Committee row defines organization, projects, tasks for us, the committee leadership.
Your group has its own row in the table. This is what you should find under its column headings:
In the Organization column is your "Organization: Xxxxxx Group" document whose scope is:
"Define organization and responsibilities of the UUFSD Buildings and Grounds Xxxxxx Group."
Please read it. You will want to update it as your Group evolves.
The Projects column will list your Group's active projects. I will help you set these priorities and develop the Project Plans. Project Plans are UUBG-NNN documents in their own right and include several Tasks.
In the Tasks columns are two items: TODO and DONE. TODO links to your Group's section of the UUBG-042 Tasks: TODO List. DONE links to your Group's section of the UUBG-052 Tasks: DONE List. Initially most of these Task Plans were written by me. Greg Brown has written several for the Landscape Group which I pasted into the Task Plan format. I would like that to be the future approach - email me new task plans and I will put them into the standard format and post them to the webpage.
Tasks consist of a sequence of steps. Future steps are described by a NEXT: clause and a NEED: clause. NEXT: defines the Action (who: what; when). NEED: lists the estimated Resources (labor; material; skills; tools). After the step is done, these are converted to DONE: and USED: clauses. So the Task Plan evolves into a history of what actually happened and what it cost. When the task is completed it is moved to the Tasks: DONE List document (see "Getting Things Done" section, below).
In the Maintenance column is your "Tasks: Xxxxxx Maintenance" document whose scope is:
" Briefly list maintenance tasks for which the Xxxxxx Group is responsible. Include monthly, quarterly and annual checklists. Detailed descriptions (beyond a paragraph) should be included by reference as separate UUBG-NNN Task: documents."
Please read it - these documents are at various stages of completion. As we handle the tasks that arise we will convert recurrent tasks to regular maintenance items and this will considerably reduce our Task Planning load.
I beseech you, as a new Group Leader, to take the time to read Organization: Getting Things Done. It describes the method to my madness in restructuring the Buildings & Grounds committee, which many consider overly convoluted. On the other hand they seem to like the fact that we've been getting a lot done. As an unorthodox manager, I've experienced that response before.
It reminds me of Woody Allen telling a friend the story of the brother-in-law who thought he was a chicken. The friend responds, "He must be terribly disturbed! Why don't you get him to counseling?" Allen replies, "We would, but we need the eggs."
I thank you again for being willing to try something new.
Stu Anderson
Chair, Buildings & Grounds
December, 2007