Transitions

Documenting all the steps to transition to a new exec team.

Debriefing / Feedback

One of cuHacking’s core values is Development; we want to improve and develop ourselves into a better organization in order to better reach our goals and provide a better event for the community.

The crucial first step of improvement is retrospection; we need to look back and analyze ourselves and how well we did in the last year. We need to pinpoint what we did well, what we didn’t do so well, and why these things went well / not-so-well.

Anonymous Feedback Form

The purpose of this is to broadly see the perspectives of other team members, including what went well, what did not go so well, and how to improve things going forward. These responses give you a trend but they don’t tend to be very in-depth; the results are good for bringing up in retrospective meetings.

A simple google form will work for this.

Questions

1. What department were you in?
2. Rate your experience within your department (1-5)
   • Communication
   • Clear Instructions
   • Clear and Reasonable Deadlines
   • Quality of Meetings
   • Personal Fulfillment
   • Cooperation with other team members
3. Were you ever expected to complete a task outside your comfort level?
   • For example, you were rushed to complete a deadline, or you weren't knowledgeable on what you were asked to do. Did the director know or help in any way? What could have been done differently to make the situation better?
4. Did you feel like the director or the team was disorganized?
   • Were your tasks unclear or were you left with no delegation from the director? What changes could have been made to improve this (such as smaller teams, more specific roles for coordinators, better communication from directors, etc)
5. Did a director or team member ever make you feel discouraged or frustrated?
   • What caused this frustration? Could this situation have been avoided, how?
6. Make any open comments about each of the following departments.
   • Feel free to touch on any topic, and you're open to comment on a department you were not a part of. You can talk about your personal experience, or what you would change if you could.
     • Coleads
     • Design
     • Development
     • Hacker Experience
     • Logistics
     • Marketing
     • Operations
     • Sponsorship
7. Rate the event execution overall (1-5)
8. Based on your experience on the organizing team, would you be interested in organizing again next year?

Feedback from cuHacking 2019 can be found here.

Debriefing Meetings

These are important in order to get more in-depth insights about how things went and how they could be improved.

The best approach is to schedule one-on-one meetings with each of the outgoing team leaders and have a conversation about:

• What went well and why?
• What didn’t go well and why?
• How could things be improved next year?

These should be focused on both cuHacking as a whole and personally.

Exec Applications

Every year there will be execs that move on and leave the organization due to personal reasons or graduation, and as such it is a good opportunity to recruit new execs or promote existing execs to leadership roles.

The exec application process is divided into three distinct phases:

1. Refactoring
2. Applications
3. Onboarding

Refactoring

The purpose of this phase is to improve on the organizational structure based on the previous year’s experience. Perhaps teams should be divided into smaller teams, or merged due to shared tasks. Team responsibilities can be redefined and redistributed.

The current team responsibilities can be found in: Exec Responsibilities 2020.

Applications

This phase is where you receive applications for the new exec positions. You should post on social media, send out emails, and have the team reach out to personal contacts that would be good team members.

The marketing team should be responsible for promoting the exec applications on social media and through emails.

This process should begin as soon as the event is over, especially since exams will be coming up and certain execs will graduate / leave as soon as the semester is over. Everything should ideally be prepared before the event including the Exec Responsibility doc, Application form, and social media campaign assets + emails.

Application Form

The application form should give an overview of what cuHacking is and what our goal as an organization is. It should provide links to the Exec responsibilities so that applicants can read them and know what they are actually applying for / getting themselves into. The application deadline should also be included.

Application forms can be created on google forms with the following questions:

1. Email address (google email account)
2. Who are you?
   1. First name
   2. Last name
   3. Program
   4. City
   5. Program
   6. Expected Graduation
   7. Do you know anyone on the cuHacking organizing team?
3. Why should we pick you?
   1. Which team(s) would you like to be on?
   2. Rank your picks?
   3. Do you prefer a leadership role?
   4. What makes you qualified for a leadership position?
   5. What relevant experience do you have?
   6. What would you change / add to cuHacking to make it better?
   7. Will you be on coop?

Previous application form: Exec Application Form 2020

After the application deadline is past, it is time to decide on who to put into which roles. This is a complicated process which is made easier with the use of a spreadsheet such as this one used for the cuHacking 2020 Exec Positions.

Ask for feedback from team members especially those that personally know the applicants for more insight; also don’t hesitate to reach out to the applicants about their preferences between possible teams.

The priority should be on deciding team members since they will have a much larger impact on the overall success of cuHacking.

Onboarding

Onboarding Transition Meetings

Once you have decided on the new exec team composition, you should begin the onboarding process as soon as possible; if you put this off, people will begin to lose interest and once you need tasks done they won’t be committed to the team anymore. It is also important to start it early before the current execs leave for the summer or graduate and leave the city. You should ensure that the current team leaders have one-on-one onboarding meetings with their replacements to ensure a smooth transition.

These meetings should cover:

• Duties and responsibilities
• How to carry out tasks
• Common issues + how to solve them
• How to best organize a team

Onboarding Meetings

As well as these transition onboarding meetings, the coleads should have one-on-one meetings with the incoming team leaders both to build rapport and to ensure the new execs know what their responsibilities are, how to use the team’s software tools (trello, slack, zoho), and so that they know where to ask for help. This is crucial for ensuring a tight-knit and effective team.

You can find the meeting minutes from these meetings here.

More information on these meetings will be covered in the later sections.

Accounts

Collect google emails + github usernames collected in a google form from all your team members from the beginning so that you don’t have to repeated have to hunt people down.

• The google email is needed for trello and google drive.
• The github username is used to add people to the cuHacking team on github so that the developer can work, and so that everyone can add to the wiki.

Tasks

These are the general tasks that need to be completed in order to complete a transition to a new exec team.

Resetting passwords

Passwords must be reset every year in order to control who has access to which accounts; it would be devastating if someone were to compromise certain accounts such as the sponsorship@cuhacking.com email account.

All cuHacking accounts are stored in the cuHacking Accounts document.

Each password should be reset to a strong password generated using a password generator.

A similar document to cuHacking Accounts should be created for each team, with the accounts that they need access to. These should be restricted access only to the team leads of their respective team, at least initially.

Migrating files to new folders

It is important reorganize files at the end of the year so that they can easily be referenced in future years. This also ensures that nothing gets lost, and and so that new team members have an idea of what they need to do.

Each team leader should be responsible for doing this task for their respective team folders. It is also helpful if the outgoing team leaders sit down with the coleads and go through the folder contents with them.

Onboarding Meetings

These are one-on-one meetings between the new coleads and the new team leaders.

In these meetings you should go over all the responsibilities and duties that they will be responsible for with their team. Make sure they know what the expectations are of them, that they know who their team members are, and they know how to use the tools we use for cuHacking.

These meetings should be divided into three sections:

1. Responsibilities
   • Go over the purpose of the team and all its responsibilities
2. Tools + Services
   • Go over all the tools and services they will use
3. Motivation
   • What do you want to get out of this experience?
   • What you think would make a successful cuHacking 2021?
   • Anything that you're worried about?

You can find the meetings here

Team Tools

Slack

• Create new slack workspace for the organizing team
  • how to
• Create new slack workspace for the event
  • Rename the past event workspace so that you can reuse cuHacking as a workspace name

Trello

• Create a new trello team
• Create a board for each sub-team
  • coleads
  • design
  • development
  • hacker Experience
  • logistics
  • operations
  • sponsorship
• create a new roadmap board

Google Drive

Have each team lead go through their folder and organize them so they can be used as a reference in future years.

Move any files that don’t need regular access to into General > Previous Years.

First General Meeting

This meeting is important in order to make sure everyone feels like they are part of the team – to build rapport within the team. The goals of this meeting are:

• Explain what cuHacking is
  • What our mission statement is
  • What our values are
• Go over team tools
  • Trello
  • Slack
  • Zoho
• Go over team structure
• Discussion
  • Make everyone feel included and like they have a say in the organizing team; everyone should feel like they are a valued member of the team.

This meeting should happen as soon as possible – either before or after exams – so that people feel committed to the team; if you wait until after the summer many people will have changed their minds about being on the team because they don’t feel like they were actually part of the team.

• General Meeting 2020 Notes
• General Meeting 2020 Slides

First Directors Meeting

This meeting is important to get the ball rolling on making sure things start getting organized. It may be a challenge to organize since in the summer many people are on coop, on vacations, or in summer school.