-: Great, well good morning everyone.
We're on the West Coast here,
California, Berkeley California.
So it's about 8:36 a.m.
And with me, I have my other,
my colleagues today Jodie Couch.
Her pronouns are she and her.
And she's the Executive Director for Enterprise Applications
at our ISNT unit on campus.
We have Shawna Dark.
Her pronouns are she and her as well.
She's our Chief Academic Technology Officer, CATO,
and the Executive Director
for Research, Teaching, and Learning.
And myself, Salwa Ismail, my pronouns are she and her.
And I'm the Associate University Librarian
for Digital Initiatives, NIT,
and the Associate CIO for UC Berkeley Libraries.
And I am the librarian in here,
in our trio group here.
So we actually wanted to talk about
pivoting and bringing about research resilience and teaching
and providing these services in these trying times
and how we implemented this at Berkeley
based on some of our services.
To provide some context, usually the term pivot
is associated with lean startup methodologies.
The works of Eric Rice and Steve Blank
in the early 2011 and '13 led to this work.
And it's generally seen as a substantial change that is made
after extensive customer feedback
and customer feedback and evaluations.
And entrepreneurs have embraced this term as well,
and they describe it as a strategic shift
that an organization makes or even a person.
However, it's usually associated with mature firms
with substantial investments in their existing capabilities,
structures and their user base,
that can actually make these strategic pivots to refresh
and renew their existing strategies.
So generally the pivot, which is a strategic reorientation,
is not achieved with a single decision,
but it's incremental, it exits and adds strategy elements
that are accumulated over time.
During this pandemic, we did not have the privilege of time.
So we actually had to pivot on a dime, within a day.
We were told on Tuesday, we're going home,
start working from home, classes are going to be online.
We had about a week to prepare
and the library had about a day to prepare
before we shuttered.
And we still had faculty to support with their research.
We had students to support with their online classes.
So our talk today will actually focus on
the pivoting principles that we,
on the pivoting principles that we actually used
as we made these changes being leaders
in our respective organizations.
We have about seven different principles
that we will talk about and describe our stories
and how we actually moved to that change.
So with that, I will pass this on to Jody.
-: Actually, you're gonna pass onto Shawna. (laughs)
All right, thank you.
I just wanna provide some quick context
into what happened on our campus.
It is, I realized during the pandemic,
I think every campus responded differently
and this will, most of this will resonate with many of you.
But as Salwa stated, during March 2020,
UC Berkeley went from a fully in-person campus
to a fully remote campus overnight.
We actually had very few online courses,
so this was a really heavy lift
for a large research institution.
We had to pivot to build virtual services
and support research and learning on a scale much broader
than anything we had done before.
And the campus looked to the libraries,
campus IT and partners to provide these virtual services.
So everything had to be re-imagined very quickly:
strategies, services, as well as workflow.
We also need to be agile and iterative,
accept risk, which was a big one for us
and encourage inclusive participation,
which is also really important to our campus.
So we had to develop initiatives that required
strategic leadership, collaboration,
and user centered design.
And I think this is one of the things
that we're really good at at Berkeley,
which kinda gave us a leg up
and made this something that we could actually accomplish.
I'll kick over to Jody
and we'll start talking to you about,
giving you some examples
of where we implemented these principles.
-: All right, so our first principle was that
we need to break down silos.
So Berkeley is a very large, very decentralized place
which makes sense a lot of the time,
'cause we have units that have very specific needs
and sometimes they need to meet their own needs.
But Berkeley has been actively working on a one IT program.
So even if we don't all report to the same person,
we really think of ourselves as one IT unit across campus,
all I think about 900 of us.
And so we really were able to use that
during COVID recovery to not just have to go out
and solve every problem ourselves.
So one example I wanted to share
was our Campus Access Badge.
So there was three or four different units
that tracked compliance information.
So if somebody did need to physically be on campus
they'd have to show this badge.
Instead of having every unit make their own badge
we were able to all come together
in a very self-organizing team
and create something that we can use for all of campus.
And pass it on to our next principle.
-: All right, so the next was
listening to our users, our customers.
As Jody mentioned, Berkeley's a very large campus.
Not only are we a large campus, we're very decentralized.
We have different users.
We have different customers.
We have customers that range
from our donors who wanted access
to materials and items within the library.
We have customers who are public services people,
public patrons who come into the library
and use our computers user electronic resources
that are licensed for our particular
FTE, faculty, and staff.
So user feedback was critical for us
before, after, and during this pivot.
Well, the before really didn't happen
because we were pivoting on a dime.
It was like let's shut this down tomorrow,
make services available as early as tomorrow.
However, the during and the after continues to happen.
So we actually worked with our users,
we realized that our classes were pivoting online,
which meant course reserved materials
were going to be online,
which meant people doing their research
needed access to our special collections.
So we started practicing user centered design,
not around what we thought at libraries we should provide
or we think the users will benefit,
but rather what would the users need during this time,
working with our instructors, teachnet lists.
So one of our examples here is,
we actually implemented a curbside pickup.
However, our initial curbside pickup did not get implemented
for four months after going off,
after pivoting to work from home
and providing services online.
During that time, we actually tried to provide online access
to over 13 million volumes through our HathiTrust program
which is a membership that we're part of,
HathiTrust emergency service that has copyright
and out of copyright materials.
But when Oski Xpress,
because we're the Oski Bear was launched
we actually worked with our users to better understand
how would it work for them
while they're safe to come on campus and pick things up?
How would the quarantine times works?
So it wasn't just all technology,
but things around the technology that helped them feel safe.
And I will now pass it on to the next principle.
-: Thank you, Salwa.
So I wanna talk just little bit about practicing agility.
In our unit and research, teaching, and learning,
we have both classroom, online educate,
classroom technology and online education
and our research compute or research IT facility and team.
Overnight in our unit
we had to implement 14 new technical support services
and modes of delivering those services,
five training or outreach programs
and then we also had three large scale initiatives
that we decided to implement.
We joke around it's like implementing
22 new services in overnight, which was pretty crazy.
And luckily, because of the way our team is organized
in RTO, we were able to do so by moving our staff around
and being really creative with our staff.
So we focused on moving our classroom team
into virtual support services and spaces.
And we were just in the middle of
starting to implement Kaltura.
We did not have an enterprise video management platform
on our campus prior to the pandemic,
if you can believe it or not.
We had our home grown system
but it wasn't really a true enterprise application.
And then also Zoom,
we were in the middle of implementing as well.
We actually took one of our classroom techs
who knew how to use Zoom, did some very quick training
and made him the Zoom service lead for our campus
for faculty to come to for training and that sort of thing.
So we got really creative with our staff
and moved them around quite a bit.
We also used data to drive staffing
and provide insight into the use of tools
and now to pretend the needs of our return to campus.
And if you look at the figure down in the right hand corner,
we track a lot of data on our campus
and this is an example of the quiz tool usage in Canvas,
our learning management system.
And the blue represents 2019 usage
and the red is 2020.
So you can see over the past year
we've had a pretty dramatic increase in our quiz tool usage,
which allowed us to take a look
at that data and to really focus
on new types of training,
training around tools and different aspects
of our learning management system
that our staff had not
or that our faculty had not used before.
And then the last thing I wanted to talk about with agility,
I've thought about this a lot,
and we are practicing a lot of Futures Foresight
and doing a lot of Futures training with our staff.
Which if you've never heard of it
I recommend you go to the Institute for the Futures website.
They have fantastic training.
And really what Futures training is all about
is preparing people for a future that's unknown.
And like really getting people to think
in a more positive light about the fact
that the future is gonna be hard to predict
especially during these times.
And so really preparing my staff
for that with Futures Training
I think is going to help them maintain agility
as we move into the new unknown.
On that note,
I'm gonna pass things over to, I think Jody.
-: All right, so our next principle is
let good enough be good enough.
So we really like to do things well at Berkeley.
There's a strong desire to never do anything halfway.
Sometimes that makes us a little slower
in some cases than we could be.
So this principle was really
about getting the minimal viable product done and out.
So thinking about getting the job done,
not wasting time on something that really didn't
help our mission.
It doesn't help further our mission to have
a really great COVID app, for example.
So we needed the app that would help us be safe
to be able to return to campus
but not to sink so much effort into it
that we were taking away from the work that really is
about the mission of the university.
But I do want to note that that doesn't mean we
don't still consider accessibility and security.
So we always put those first,
even if we are doing something quickly.
So the example, a couple examples for this one,
one was our symptom screener.
So we talked about making a really great app that would
feed data from different places
and really help people track any symptom
that they might have to be able to show on campus.
And then we realized that really,
really was just unnecessary.
We had a HIPAA qualified Qualtrics environment
on campus already, so we just went ahead and used that.
And that has actually served us really well
for the first year without taking up a bunch of time.
We also thought a lot about our dashboards.
So we do a lot of automated flows
to our COVID dashboards on campus.
So folks can see things like COVID rates
or what's happening around campus in that area.
In some cases, we decided to go ahead
and take the low tech way and manually update dashboards.
If it's something we hope to only be doing for a year or so
we didn't want to build a lot of infrastructure into that.
So again, able to meet the campus needs,
let good enough be good enough
and then move on to our other critical responsibilities.
And we'll pass it back to Salwa.
-: So one of the other principles that we worked on
at the library along with our campus IT
was we were not averse to taking risks.
So think about taking risks.
But this comes with evaluating
where can your organization afford to take risks
and what is your risk tolerance.
So some of my story ideas will highlight where
we thought we could actually take risks
and make changes or implement services where
we were willing to push the boundaries.
So think outside the box, experiment with your staff.
What are the new services you can afford?
Where our staff that you can actually share
or bring on to new services?
And go back to basics.
That is actually taking a risk.
We're usually so involved in making sure
it's the most beautiful, most technological updated service.
During this time, when we were all trying to bring about
the most agile of technologies,
it's like let's take a step back to basics.
So for the library,
one of the things we thought of is what does the library do?
We actually provide access to collections.
So capturing a crisis was our way
of going back to the basics
and experimenting actually with the new service
where we decided to do web archiving, web capture,
of anything related to COVID news coming out of China.
So we have an East Asian library,
which specializes in of course the Chinese language,
Mandarin and Cantonese
but they also have, they're very well attuned
to the Chinese news
and the media that was coming out of China.
And we decided we wanted to capture that,
which was really a very basic thing for us,
a collection that has access to information.
But it was just a simple step that we decided to risk with,
take a risk on.
Another one was our HathiTrust ETAS.
So when we pivoted
and we decided to provide access to these 13 million items
through the HathiTrust Digital Library,
there was this question of being able to provide access
to items that are still in copyright, right?
Because publishers, we know would not be happy around this.
However, this was us taking a risk
and wanting to push the boundary
and realizing we're willing to do this.
Our buildings are shuttered.
Our stacks are closed.
Users don't have access to our materials.
So those books that they could normally check out
they're unable to.
Well even if they're on copyright,
we're willing to take, push the boundary
and provide access to it.
This also meant we had to actually increase our
digitization input into,
as we're digitizing materials to submit to HathiTrust,
the platform that was then making these items
from 2020, 2019 available to our users.
And as you can see with some of these page views
sometimes in January and February
we had close to 711,000 page views for items.
These are individual books that were getting viewed
and used by our users.
So with that, I will pass it on to Shawna
to talk about the next principle.
-: Great, thanks.
Thank you Salwa.
So I'm gonna talk very quickly about being inclusive.
This is a core value on our campus,
so it was something that was really important
to us as we went into the pandemic
as well as all the social really challenging times
that we're living in.
And so we really had to think carefully
about how to include our staff in a decision,
the decisions that we were making,
as well as giving them what they needed to be successful
in their jobs, as well as providing them
with the support that they needed.
And everyone needed different types
of support during the pandemic.
So one of the things that we did is wanted to ensure
that our staff had access
to training and resources they needed.
So this meant really redefining
and re-evaluating what type
of materials we need available to our staff.
And we did the same for students
and faculty around technology.
For faculty we spun up a completely new website
that was focused on keep teaching and remote tools
and technology available to them and that kind of thing.
And for staff, we did much of the same as well as students.
We also increased the transparency and communication.
You know, we increased the frequency of our communications.
In my unit, I ended up doing a Friday update
and at the end of every week
I'd review what happened in the week, what I had learned
in some of the leadership meetings that I'm in.
And then also took a moment to be very authentic
with my staff and share out about how I'm feeling
and thinking about them and letting them know
that I'm available to them if they need me.
And I continued to do that throughout the pandemic
and we'll probably do that through the next year.
We also created strategic communications
in coordination with campus leadership.
So frequently I knew about what communications
were gonna be coming out a week in advance.
Would think about how this would make my staff feel
and then work on a communication
to my staff that would help to connect
to whatever the new communication coming out would be.
And then I just really encouraged my staff,
and I think this is true for everyone at Berkeley,
to be present and be your authentic self
when you're working with people,
especially during these difficult times.
And as I said before, I just think
that everyone had trauma in their lives
and still does, right?
And it's different types of trauma
and different needs that people have when they are talking
to you and needing support from you.
And so really just being authentic to that
I think is critical.
We also have engaged our staff
in decision-making whatever possible.
And an example of that is right now,
as we're thinking about returning to work,
a lot of our services in RTL have collapsed
in on each other, right?
So classroom team is now working with online education.
And what does that mean when we go back
to campus and do we need to, you know, untangle that?
And how do we untangle that?
And what does our organization look like
and what services are gonna remain
as being critical and which ones aren't.
And so we're really engaging our staff in two ways.
One is through this Futures Foresight training,
having workshops getting them to think about
the potential options of what the future might look like
and how do we prepare to pivot very quickly
from one outcome to another.
And then we also are doing a lot of work with surveys
and asking staff about what their experiences are
where they are working
and what they're hearing from faculty?
What are they hearing from each other?
And what kind of things they think are coming down
to being really important for us in the fall?
So lots of discussions with our staff about how to prepare
and how to disentangle ourselves from where we're
at right now, in a way that makes sense for the campus.
And I'll pass on to Jody.
-: For our last principle.
So our last principle was to develop relationships
before the crisis.
So the three of us joined campus
shortly before the pandemic.
I think we've all been working remotely now longer
than we actually worked on campus.
And I think we all really understood the value
of partnerships and what a large campus
like Berkeley really thrives on
is the relationships amongst the people.
So we formed trusted relationships with each other
and others on campus before we even went remote.
And that really allowed us
once we did go remote to be able to move really quickly.
We could lean on each other, we could all trust each other
and that folks were gonna say
or do what they said that they were going to do.
And we even managed to have sometimes a little fun
along the way, I think, even during this challenging year.
So just a really big, big pointer
to make sure that you get out there,
meet people on your campus.
Even if you don't think they're directly related to you
it's really good to have a network across campus,
'cause it's amazing how people pop up kinda in meetings
or on projects,
so really great to be able to join together that way.
And with that, we are finished with our content.
We'll just wrap up.
If you do have any questions or anything,
any comments that you'd like to share
please feel free to put them in chat.
Our emails are also listed here.
We're happy to take questions or comments that way.
We'll just run through 'em.
Reminder to break down silos.
Make sure that you listen to your customers.
Don't forget to practice agility.
Let good enough be good enough.
Take risks.
Be inclusive.
And develop relationships before the crisis.
And thank you.
-: Thank you all so much.
I love those tips,
especially like the listen to your customers.
I feel like so often in higher ed, right,
we think we do know what's best.
and so these were some, some excellent, excellent points.