The Production Calendar

The work of the registrar is cyclical and complex. Dependencies abound between and among systems and offices. How do you keep track of all of the tasks required to make everything run smoothly in your office and on your campus? Use a production calendar. In this episode we’ll talk about what a production calendar is, how to use one, its relationship to the academic calendar, along with tips and tricks for getting the most out of this critical tool in a registrar’s resources. 

Key Takeaways:

• Your production calendar should be informed by your academic calendar. The academic calendar governs the flow of each term for the institution, while your production calendar governs the work your office does to support each action in the term.
• Your production calendar doesn’t have to be fancy or have a lot of whistles and bells, but it needs to be shared across your office (and potentially with other offices) and it needs to be used. Make it a habit to review your production calendar regularly, and have your teams review it, as well, to be more proactive.  
• Getting started with a production calendar can seem overwhelming, but take it a little at a time. Go through one academic cycle and track all the things that you or your team does. Over time, include more granularity for the tasks with links to documentation or the text of repeated messages. Operate with a mindset of “progressive elaboration,” or “continuous improvement.”

Host:

Doug McKenna, University Registrar
George Mason University
cmckenn@gmu.edu 

Guests:

Amber Cellotti, Deputy Registrar & Director, Office of the Registrar
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
knap0071@umn.edu 

Nicolas Jobe, University Registrar
Seton Hill University
njobe@setonhill.edu 

Traci Rees, Associate University Registrar for Student Systems & Information Services
University of Pennsylvania
rtraci@upenn.edu 

Elissa Thoman, Registrar Services Coordinator
University of Iowa
elissa-thoman@uiowa.edu 

References and Additional Information:

AACRAO Core Competencies - Change Management

AACRAO Core Competencies - Leadership & Management

AACRAO Professional Proficiencies - Records and Academic Services

Pivot to a Successful Production Calendar - Annual Meeting Presentation by Traci Rees

Transcript

0:00

You are listening to for the record, a registrar podcast sponsored by Acro. I'm Tracy Reese Associate Registrar for student Services and Information Services at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm Nick Job University registrar at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I'm Amber Salla Deputy registrar and director of the office of the registrar at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.-- I'm-- Melissa Thoman registrar services coordinator, University of Iowa. And this is the production calendar. Hello, welcome to for the record. I'm your host, Doug mckenna University Registrar at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. The Great Carl Sagan is quoted as saying, if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe as registrars. A lot of what we do. Maybe most of what we do requires a complex set of actions performed in specific sequence and in co ordination with other offices or other systems set up in order to achieve the desired outcome. Registration doesn't just happen first. You have to go through academic schedule development and classroom scheduling, publish the schedule of classes inactivate students no longer attending, assign registration priorities and communicate about all the things with all sorts of different constituents. We do a lot. It can get overwhelming and sometimes important things can get missed. We're going to talk today about ways you and your team can avoid missing important things, provide better communication across the office, save your staff time and improve the overall service you're providing to the institution by using a very simple tool, the production calendar. We're very fortunate to be joined by our distinguished panel of guests today. So let's talk to them. Tracy Nick Amber Alyssa, welcome to the podcast. Good to be here, Doug Doug Doug, thank you for agreeing to be guests. Each of you comes at this topic from a slightly different vantage point, which is gonna be great. So let's start off with you introducing yourselves, just your name, your title institution and where it's located, how many students go there and then also about how many people work in the office where you work. Tracy kick us off. Hi. Yeah. So my name is Tracy Rees and I am the associate registrar for student systems and information services at the University of Pennsylvania located in Philadelphia. We are comprised of four undergraduate schools and 12 graduate and professional schools and have a total student population of just over 28,000. In the registrar's office. We have about 18 staff members right on. And formerly Tracy, where did you work? I worked with you, Doug George Mason. I miss you. I miss you too. It's great to have you back. Nick. Hi, I'm Nick. I'm the university registrar at Seton Hill University. Not to be confused with Seton Hall. University. Seaton Hill is located in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. It's about 35 miles east of Pittsburgh. We have five schools a little over 80 undergraduate programs. We have some graduate programs as well. We're very excited to have just graduated our first class of doctoral students in the DPT program just a about a week and a half ago. So that's really exciting enrollment here is about 1900 in the registrar's office here at Seton Hill.-- There are currently 2.5 of us.-- Big time. That's going to be a different approach to the production calendar-- than a larger team and-- staff. Yes,-- Amber,-- thanks Doug. Hi, I'm Amber Salati. I'm the Deputy Registrar and director of the Office of the Registrar at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus. We're the State's land grant institution and we serve undergraduate graduate and professional career students within the University of Minnesota System. We have five campuses located in Crookston, Duluth, Morris Rochester and the Twin Cities, which is where I'm located. The office of the registrar is housed in our larger umbrella organization, academic support resources and that also houses our Office of Student Finance Office of Classroom management. One stop student services, a dedicated team of it professionals that support our er P peoplesoft and Office of uh operations and strategic initiatives within academic support resources. We have a little over 200 staff within the office of the Registrar directly. We have about 33 staff are total population for students is about 52,000. So we do have a relatively large and robust student body that we are supporting within the office of the Registrar. We have teams that support our degree, audit services transfer value system, data quality, ad hoc reporting, non credit registration, athletic certification, residency, reciprocity records and enrollment. And then within my role in particular, I serve as the campus registrar for the Twin Cities campus and also serve as the student records, data custodian and policy contact for a number of institutional policies.-- Right-- on. That's a big operation. Alyssa. What about you? I'm the registrar services coordinator at the University of Iowa, located in Iowa City. Uh We are one of the top public research institutions in the nation and we offer a world class education in over 200 areas of study to more than 31,000 students. We operate on a semester based academic calendar which helps us structure a diverse academic journey uh of our students in my role, particular I work on our student records and systems team overseeing great administration and our academic standing and GPA calculations. I also am involved with our system access for our homegrown student-- information system called Maui as the data steward for academic-- records. Fantastic. Thanks for being here and thank you. All we have a lot to talk about. So let's jump in Tracy. What is a production calendar? Sure. Sure. So production calendar is really an artifact that is used to support the events that take place on the academic calendar. So your academic calendar supports your university on a term by term basis. But the the the production calendar is really the task and events that are associated with really making that work happen behind the scenes to ensure that everything is successful for both your students and your faculty. Awesome. I gave a presentation on this topic at the Acro conference and I used Tetris as a metaphor. I feel like most people know about Tetris and understand how the game is played. If you think about Tetris and how to play the blocks coming at, you are like your work tasks and the different jobs that you have to perform. And a production calendar is like a way to plan for those blocks in advance. So you can see the path that's laid out ahead, you know, which blocks are coming and the production calendar is the tool that helps you fit them into all the right places at the right time so that things don't become jumbled up and turned into a traffic jam. I know I love it. Amber, if you had to describe a production calendar in an elevator to someone,-- I-- would describe our production calendar is a bit of the central nervous system of all of where all of those pieces are coming together is similar to what uh Nick was sharing of the the pieces that are keeping us on track with the work that needs to be done. The place where we are documenting the recurring events, the dependent events, we use our production calendar primarily for our scheduled batch jobs. Our product is that are running as things on schedule and a place for individuals to be made aware of the events that are taking place, who is responsible the timing and any dependencies associated with those events? Alyssa, how would you describe a production calendar to someone in an elevator? A production calendar is a shared document that various teams can contribute to. We all manage our own timelines deadlines but they all sync together in our operational rhythm. So we come together as a larger group to discuss the impact our deadlines have on each other and to um maintain transparency across the office and keep us on track. As Amber said,-- I-- I think the shared document aspect of this is so because one of the things that a production calendar can and should do is sort of surface the work that's being done across teams and across the office so that people don't get stepped on with one thing because they didn't know that another team was doing a particular thing before we dive into sort of more details about what is in or what you include in your production calendar and then we'll tell some stories about how our production calendars came to be. What is the relationship between the production calendar with the academic calendar? So, Tracy, I think you hit on this a little bit with your introduction of the the academic calendar being the the way in which the university kind of rhythm is flowing throughout the academic year and the production calendar being that place that is identifying and defining the particular tasks, events, processes, jobs, what have you that are being keyed off of those specific things that are happening throughout that academic year? Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think that having a refined production calor really helps ensure that your academic calendar goes off with success each term. Yeah. Part of my presentation at Acro was giving some people tips and tricks for developing their very first production calendar. And the advice that I gave was start with your academic calendar because you don't want to re invent the wheel, the dates are already out there. You have everything kind of in sequential order already. So the academic calendar really should be the starting point when you think about putting a production calendar together. Yeah, and so much of our work is cyclical and so you get a template of here's the calendar, here's the flow. And I like in a production calendar to the academic calendar in this way where you know that Thanksgiving is coming up and maybe on your academic calendar, you've got the break noted as Thanksgiving Day and maybe you get the Friday off. If you're lucky on a production calendar, you would track back to see how many people are coming for Thanksgiving dinner. You would track back to see how big of a turkey you need to purchase. And then if you get it on sale a month before you're probably storing that turkey in the freezer. But then you have to know how far in advance to take the turkey out of the freezer in order to have it thawed in order to cook it so that you can serve it at Thanksgiving. And so the production calendar in my brain are all of those steps about related to the turkey before the dinner service actually happens. And so like here's the date when you have to take the turkey from the freezer to the refrigerator because it's X number of pounds and it takes a wide number of days to thought or I don't know, there's a Butterball hotline call that, but that's how I think of the production calendar. So all of the little stuff that has to happen before the thing can happen. And so let's talk about experiences with production calendars and Nick, I'm going to go to you because first I went to your presentation, it was great and you told a fun story about being handed a list. And like that was your first experience of a production calendar. So, tell us more about that. What was that first go around of like, oh, this is a thing that I probably need to be putting together. Yeah, thanks Doug. So my first foray into registrar work, I was hired to be the registrar at a, a very small seminary in Ohio. And I took over for somebody who had been in the role for decades and did not document very much distrusted the computer. And so the institution hired me in to kind of rebuild the office from the ground up. So it was very much a a learn as I go experience for me. And fortunately, I had a lot of support within the institution, people who had been there a long time and kind of helped me figure it out as I went. But at the end of that first cycle through the whole academic calendar, you know, after I'd been there for about a year, my dean came to me and said, now we've gone through all of this at least once. Some of the things we've gone through a couple of times like registration or scheduling those kinds of things. But for the most part, everything has been gone through at least once. Let's write everything down and think back over the past year, take all your notes, write everything down so that we can be prepared for the upcoming year. What do we need to be thinking ahead to so we can plan effectively and make sure that all the steps that need to be carried out in the proper order are done correctly. So that was my first experience with a production calendar. I didn't know it was called that at the time. It was just our 12 month list of tasks and responsibilities I think was the, the basically more or less the name of the file that, that we built based on that. So yeah, the 12 month calendar or 12 month list or something like that. It was, it was designed to be, this is everything that my office does over the course of-- a year and it's-- grown a bit since then and expanded. How has that process worked? What does that look like? Yeah, quite a bit. So I've, I've now moved on to a couple of different institutions since that. But there's this terminology in the project management space and I'll, I'll refer to that a little bit because I'm currently working on my MB A in project management. So there's some terminology in the project management space that would call this process progressive elaboration. So you go through the process repeatedly and each time you go through it, you clarify things, you make adjustments, little tweaks, you add explanations or notes or maybe this isn't in the right spot. It really should go over here. So over time, the more you go through this process, the clearer and more consistent, the production calendar should be so that when you use it again, next time it's better when you use it again. The next time after that, it's better still. And so you keep making improvements and enhancements to build the best production calendar that you can for the, the situation in which you find yourself, Tracy, when you were at Mason, I asked you to put together a production calendar for the office and we didn't have any budget to purchase a tool or anything. So tell me a little bit about the process that you used to explore sort of tools that we had on hand and how you went about constructing the production calendar at Mason.-- Sure.-- Sure. So, right. So there was no budget. But at that point in time after COVID, um the our, at the time had had gotten quite familiar with using teams to collaborate. And so I investigated using sharepoint that we already had available to us. That was no cost to convert, what was a Excel over to a sharepoint calendar that we were able to share across all of the teams in the office. And it was quite fun because Nick, you touched on, I'm gonna mess up the term that you use, but I would call what you were describing continuous improvement where we, we started with something we crafted, we drafted the calendar and then we created a template where everyone could add in their events. But the key for us in getting everyone to buy into. This was really starting small, right? I think there can be a bit of uneasiness when you, when you're introducing another new thing to a team who might already be building, you know, working on several projects. So for us at Mason, when we were rolling that out to the team, it was really critical for us to just start with what we had and then we built on it over time and that ended up working out pretty well. I think we built on it over time where we ended up adding tags for different events or different processes or communications that were scheduled and clearly and color. The color coding, we were able to identify both primary and backups for each event which was critical to continuity of operations. The color coding I always laugh about because when we were rolling that out, there were only a certain number of colors we could share and someone ended up with brown and I don't think they were happy, but I'm hoping that the color list has expanded since then. So great. And that is one thing we'll talk about your experiences at U Penn too. But for the production calendar in the registrar's office at Mason, it has really expanded and there's a form and you identify as Tracy said, the people who are associated with it, the teams that are associated with it. And then we're going to talk about documentation in a couple of minutes as well. And how we link the production calendar to the documentation for the task. So we'll talk through some of those things Amber Alyssa. Do you want to talk about the impetus for or the origin story of your production calendars? I don't know that I know the full origin story of our production calendar though. I do wish we had some color coding because I think that would be very helpful with a number of things that we are maintaining. I mentioned in my intro that we have five campuses within the University of Minnesota system. And our it unit within an academic support resources, manages our production calendar and they manage that for all five campuses. So we have five different academic calendars that we're managing because all of our campuses are on a different academic calendar. The various undergraduate graduate professional schools are on different calendars. So I'm not all because of course they are because we're unique. Um So everyone, everyone has a different start and times that I would say that having, having some color coding would be beneficial in, in that space. But the production calendar itself is we're a Google school. So we manage it through Google calendar. And it's been a really effective tool to be able to really get a lot of information into one place. We have our public facing calendars, our academic calendar primarily that we are feeding to our one stop site through an A I and then we have other dates and deadlines that we manage. Some that are, are driven by dates that are in our term session tables in Peoplesoft, some that are more arbitrary dates that were like the end of the term. Is this the grading deadline? Is this two weeks from that deadline is, you know, an event. So having a number of different calendars that are being managed, that production calendar is really critical to making sure that we have the necessary transparency that we are managing uh multiple campuses, multiple careers and the various tasks of processes that are associated with that. I believe though I cannot say with certainty that the prior to being in Google calendar, some of this was managed through the prior calendar system that we had before Google and before that in the spreadsheet. And I think there's that, that's still being kind of maintained in a spreadsheet before it makes its way into a Google calendar. But the other piece with that for us is we have one person who is managing that calendar and it is an overwhelming amount of work. But the Brenda shout out to Brenda, she does an amazing job with our production calendar-- and keeping everybody on on-- task. Nice work, Brenda. She's the best, Alyssa. What about you?-- So,-- at the University of Iowa, our calendar is within our si S Maui and it was custom built for us. So we are very fortunate. It replicates year by year based on calculations that we've given. Now that varies based on board of regents, start and dates, that sort of thing. But because we have, we're very similar to Minnesota in that we have a lot of different teams in our office that manage different processes. So what our calendar does is allow us to tag by office, then team and then we have our individuals, they're not tagged in there, but they know what pieces they manage. Additionally, we have separate calendars for our professional colleges because their dates don't always align with our standard population. But the way we manage this is we, we after replication happens, we jump into our calendar and we all have our own manual calculations and we verify that they are correct and we mark it as reviewed and if everything looks great, it's pushed out to the public eye. If it's meant to be seen by the public, if not, if it's a batch process and something that runs behind the scenes, it's just internal within our si S, it's not shared with everyone, but we all can see that it's been reviewed, looked over um and have confidence that it aligns with all of our other processes. Right on. I want to go back to something that you just said about the calculations and say a little bit more about that because one of the things that I want to stress in production calendar and making them useful is not tying things to specific dates on the calendar, but the production, the academic calendar floats. And so you want to make sure that your production calendar is responsive. So maybe talk a little bit more about what do you mean by calculations are done? That's a great question. Within our manual. We have everything outlined by day, one of the semester or session. Day two, day, three, day four. So I it's all mapped out. We know exactly what day falls where. So I might say I manage grades, I might say uh grades are due within three business days from the last day of final exams. So based on the calendar, I can look at the final exam date that's calculated by my friend Caroline Jens who manages our exams. I know she's looked at it and I can jump right in and say, ok, based on what this is listed, I know confidently that our grades are going to be due on this date. And I can make that calculation based on the rules within our manual. So it is flexible but also provides that consistency that's needed as time moves on because we do have changes that come down from the board of Regents-- as-- much as I can stress not to tie things to a specific date. But in fact, to use the methodology that you are using Alyssa to say it's X number of days in relation to this other event that happens in the semester. It makes it more reusable, extensible, flexible, et cetera. Tracy. Before we move on, from beginnings with production calendars, I want to give you an opportunity to talk about anything that's happening in the production calendar space at U Penn. I only asked you about the mason stuff universe at University of Pennsylvania. We actually use smart cheat for our production calendar and it's quite neat because right now the production calendar is comprised of all of the units within SRFS. So that's the registrar's office, Financial Aid and also the university bursar. So an even great picture of what's happening and even larger opportunity to collaborate across teams to really see those like you were saying the bump up against other things, that sort of thing. Our calendar is is through smartsheet and we have the event and we have the functional unit that is responsible for carrying out that event, primary contact dates, such documentation. We also have some indicators that are really helpful. One, we have an indicator for public or private and that's really more for various views that we share within the university, which is also helpful to share out our catalog and curriculum team and scheduling team use subsets of the calendar to help guide things like the scheduling cycle or the uh the catalog publication cycle. Another indicator that we're using is a compliance indicator. So we can filter on all of the compliancy type aspects that we're working on throughout the semester, things like va 8515 reporting, enrollment reporting submission schedules, things like that. So we can keep a pulse on all of those things. In addition to the compliance indicator, we are also rolling out um fostering that sense of continuous improvement. We're rolling out uh with support from pennant operations, which is another subset of the University of Pennsylvania that really supports SRFS in all of our work. We're rolling out a form that will be triggered based on the academic calendar to really sign off that something has been completed and when it was completed, so that we can go back when we're doing our weekly review and see, do we need to tweak these dates in the future?-- So lots of exciting work happening in that space.-- That's awesome. Nick. What kinds of things do you put on your production calendar? And then what elements of those events do you include? And are you currently tying things to existing documentation?-- Yeah,-- great question. I imagine that our production calendar at a very small institution probably looks a lot different from one of a large institution, but a lot of the building blocks are, are similar. So currently our production calendar operates in Excel. We're a Google school as well. So I've actually moved all of our Excel spreadsheets into a Google sheet so that changes can be made and those changes are reflected for everybody's version of it simultaneously. Rather than referring back to an old copy and wondering is this current or not? So within that sheet, I'll just take a look at the particular area for registration, for example. So this most recent registration cycle, there's something in here that says send letters to students who have a financial hold to indicate you can't register. Registration starts soon. You need to resolve this hole before you can register. There's a line item for send email regarding advising and registration to faculty. There's one for creating and populating the web groups for registration cohorts in freshman, sophomore, junior senior, there's one for posting this schedules of classes on the website and the student portal. So those kind of go ahead. Are you when you have the line item there to send the message to students about the financial hold? Do you have a link to the text of the message or is there a reference to the message that sent before so that you're not rec creating the message every time?-- Is that part of what your production calendar is and does?-- Yeah, absolutely. So going, I was going down the rows and then if I go across the columns, I can see when each of these tasks needs to be done. So like this one's beginning of March, uh this one's after the midterm grades are due, this one's before spring break, those kinds of things and then further out in another column for each item there are notes that indicate here's where this file is saved or here's where this process lives in the system or here's a link to the documentation that, that we've written to carry out this specific process. Fantastic. Thank you. Everybody's made reference to items that they include on their production calendar. How do you decide what goes on the production calendar and what doesn't? And who decides at your institutions? The space where we're at currently as far as what is included is a remnant of what has been included from past times to current and maybe not, not so much of that analysis of what should be included on there. So we, we have kind of four different categories of things that go on the production calendar. Is it a process? Is it a scheduled job? Is it a notification or a reminder to a subset of individuals to let them know something is going to be kicked off or an event? So a process being, for example, our auto enroll from the waitlist is going to be starting or a scheduled job like we're running the dean's list, we're running academic standing, an event could be marking the start or the end of a term or a session. And within those items, we generally designate the campus that it's identified for. So TC for the Twin Cities campus DL for Duluth campus and so on. So we, when you're looking at the, the Google calendar and all of the events and things that are queued up for that particular day, you can kind of associate what some of the items are and what they're related to. It does take some sleuthing if you have not used the production calendar before. Um, so that, that is one, I guess tipper trick of know your audience and who's going to be looking at that information. But within, within the item itself, there is a lot of that detail of what is this, who is it for? Who is the contact if something is going bump in the night that you need to be reaching out to and a lot of those kind of pertinent detail sales. So that is, that's kind of the the inclusion of what we have on our production calendar. I think it could be more though. It's already a lot to look at. Yeah, I think one of the things that we struggled with as a team at Mason was people immediately went 100% to the weeds and some of that absolutely needs to go in the production calendar, but not 100% of it. And so I guess I, I'm interested in finding that sweet spot where you want to make sure that it's a meaningful reminder, but not an overwhelming amount of information. Nick, I think to a certain extent, it depends on who the production calendar is really for. So I shared the example earlier that I first built that 12 month list of responsibilities primarily for myself and for my dean just to keep ourselves accountable for this is what's coming, here's what's next, here's what we need to be thinking about. So, in one sense, it was just kind of a reminder for myself as I approached, sort of the end of my term at that particular institution. And I knew that I was going to be moving on to something else that production calendar, even though I didn't call it that at the time became much more of a tool of educating the new person coming in. So this was about continuity of business process, more than it was about just reminding myself what's coming. And so from that perspective, the documentation behind the production calendar became that much more important. And in fact, when I was preparing all my transition documents, I used that production calendar as my starting point to determine. Here's all the documentation that I need to make sure is part of this manual or this transition binder, whatever I'm handing over to the next registrar to be able to say this is what you need to be aware of.-- And here are all the steps to carry out everything that's in-- here. I I absolutely agree with you about it serving as that documentation and really a reference point for transitioning staff that may be exiting or moving on to another opportunity, but then also your new staff and really serving as an onboarding tool. But for us, I think we like to think about it in the context of what would happen if this doesn't get done. Who doesn't impact? Is it one person? Is it one school? Is it in an entire college? Thinking about it through this, through that sort of lens of how impactful this is, is really a great exercise for teams. Because I think as registrars, we often feel little tunnel vision and what we're doing. And we, we get really focused on our specific task, not necessarily realizing the impact it has on our students, our faculty and our staff. And I think that thinking about it in that context and going through that exercise with your teams can really help, not only them understand how their, their work impacts others, but really have a moment of like, wow, I, what I'm doing is important and validate what they're doing for the institution. Alyssa, I just want to talk a little bit about our regional organization. I know we're talking a lot about what we did at our institutions, but I have the pleasure of putting together a production calendar for um Maro the upper Midwest Acro and it was kind of an accident and it was because of the steps that Tracy talked about. We wanted to outline position descriptions for our leaders and it all started with a survey. When are your busiest times of the year? Uh What are your main task or responsibilities. When do you try to get these jobs done? And it was all to be transparent and let membership know what the responsibilities are. So they have more confidence, stepping into a leadership position that maybe they didn't know a lot about before. So after gathering all of that information via surveys, it was very easy to put it all together in individual descriptions and task list for these committees that was then compiled and put together for a larger production calendar that supports the continuity of our organization, but also supports the president, the person who is leading all of this and orchestrating it because that person might not have served in all these roles and understand what the details are, the smaller sub tasks are. So it's been a really great process. And I think to what Nick said earlier, it's just continuous improvement. We started off, it's a living document. Everyone who serves in the chair role has the opportunity to make adjustments and say, you know, I know this is listed as maybe we do this in the fall, but it seems really last minute, let's push it up a bit more and I think it will flow a lot better. So it's just that living document that everybody has gotten together and collaborated on to make it super successful. I love that. And it's leveraging some of the strengths that registrars have in particular in order to support our regional associations, which in turn support registrars and the people who work in registrars offices.-- So I love that. Thank you for sharing that-- Amber. I wanted to affirm what everyone's saying in that the documentation of dependencies, relational impacts all of that is so critical and why a production calendar is so helpful and important. I know during the very early days of the pandemic when we were changing our grading practices and whatnot of having that production calendar to look to, to know if we're changing this one thing here, what's going to be the chain of impact along the way towards the end of the term? And what sort of documentation do we have so that we can set ourselves up for success and being able to make that one change and know-- what those future impacts are going to be-- co-signed. All of that. Let's talk about what tips or tricks or recommendations do you have about ways that you get your staff involved and engaged? And then how do you make sure that your teams are using the production calendar? Because it's one thing to have a production calendar, but it's a totally different thing to use the production calendar. And so Nick, we're going to start with you because you have the fewest people that need coordinating, but that doesn't make your task any less challenging. So if you have tips or tricks and then how do you make sure that your-- team is engaged and using the production-- calendar. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I was just about to say, well, it's probably easier for us because we're a smaller school. But no, it's really not. It's about the buy in, into the process. It's not about how many people or how detailed or involved the production calendar is. It really is about the process and getting people on board with it. And I think one of the biggest and most helpful things that I've done so far is as I said earlier to move this production calendar that we have in our current institution from Excel into Google sheets. So that any changes that get made are immediately reflected across the the document for everybody to be able to see them. And then within that space, we can also start linking to other things because now we're in the cloud instead of being on a a locally saved file. And within Google cloud itself, I can start making documentation in Google Docs or I can have a file saved in Google drive. And I can start linking all of those things through hyperlinks within the cells in Google Sheets. And so that has reduced the barriers a lot for my staff so far to be able to, to leverage this tool more effectively. It's still difficult. There's still the temptation to just respond to every fire that comes in and because we're in a reactive state, it feels like a lot of the time.-- That's, that's not unusual.-- Yeah, but the more we can have that production calendar pulled up, even if it's kind of off to the side on our desktop just having it there open gets us thinking about this more regularly and more consistently and we can start to start to get ourselves into a more proactive state instead of reactive. I agree with what Nick said, having everybody involved in the documentation, making updates and sharing, I really think part of the buy in is the shared accountability. So having it out there, everybody knows who owns which process or which deadline. But also if they're struggling, maybe they're feeling more open or comfortable to say, you know, I think I want to make an adjustment to this, but I'm not quite sure what are some of the other things going on that I need to think about before I make this adjustment. That's a really interesting point. I like that a lot and I don't think that's one that I've articulated explicitly to my teams.-- I, I like that a lot. So-- I think that naturally comes in the process and that's probably why it's harder to articulate because it just happens. I I think it maybe it's the culture of a production calendar. So I would just say the more buy in you get from people the better and maybe just involving them from the beginning if you have the opportunity is ideal. So, so our production calendar is primarily used by our it staff. There are individuals, you can add that Google calendar to uh you know, your calendar views and anyone can, well, I guess I shouldn't say anyone can get access to it. Those who have access can access. But the calendar itself is one that I would say is not necessarily widely used across academic support resources or within the office of the registrar outside of the individuals who need to know and need to have access to that information. I think it could be more widely used, but part of it is knowing the audience. And right now the way that the production calendar displays, it's very technical. It has, you know, people soft job code names in them that if you don't know what it means, you wouldn't necessarily be able to infer directly what it is that you're looking at.-- So it's like a foreign language.-- It is. And so there, there is part of that where I have mentioned before, of having to kind of learn how to decipher what it is that I'm looking for and looking at. So the getting, getting buy in to the calendar would mean making some pretty big adjustments to the way in which we are naming our calendar invites. The nomenclature is very it specific right now. Interesting, but that's working for you. Yeah, I would say it's working for those individuals who need to need to access the calendar for the very specific purpose of understanding when is a job running, the events that we have on there for a term start and, and we generally know those, we have those published in our academic calendar that's on our one stop website. So for me, it's, if I'm needing to look to see, ok, when specifically are we running the dean's list? Like I have a general understanding of, you know, what's happening after grading deadlines and whatnot. But um needing to know those specific dates and from campus to campus when those processes are running, I know what I'm looking for, but the anyone who is, who is new to looking at that production calendar wouldn't be able to necessarily pinpoint exactly what it is. They need to see without some pretty big adjustments to our naming conventions. Tracy, how do you get your teams involved engaged and make sure that they're using the production calendar? Sure. So I would say, um try to eat the elephant one bite at a time. The work that we do is complex. It can be quite overwhelming if you're looking at it all in one view. And like you were saying, it can be quite technical at sometimes as well. So I would say start with those high level, high level events and then work your way down and encourage your staff, whether it be assistant registrars or, you know, maybe even all of your staff, encourage them and enable them to enter their work on the production calendar. I find that that can be quite empowering for someone to say this is what I'm doing and be able to speak to those, to those events and to the work that they're doing. But also I think it's really important um if you're authoring a production calendar to be able to embrace feedback and, and really celebrate engagement. So if someone reaches out to you and they say I'm really struggling with how to read this, can you help me make the time to do that? Because you're only going to improve the engagement and the successful of your calendar and the work that you're doing by making it more accessible to others. Um Some of us are more technical than others and that's wonderful. So share that with the staff and help them engage with that production calendar even more, right? Especially for people who might be listening and thinking, I don't have a production calendar. How do I even get started? That was what my session at Acro was about. And the first thing you can do is just define your contexts. Some other language around this might be like, figure out what the buckets of work are. So you might have a bucket that's registration, you might have a bucket, that's graduation, you might have one that's course scheduling. So start with that, just figure out the big picture things and then start to add over time. What are the specific projects within each of those buckets, write those down. And then once you have the projects all written down, then you can start writing down the, the task list in order for each of those projects from start to finish. And would that be, uh, the one of the examples of progressive elaboration? Yes, absolutely. Somebody at my session, I'm so glad they said this. You have to learn how to crawl before you can run a marathon. So start small, but just get something started and then you can continue to build on it over time. Tracy Nick, that's what I was going to add to this. Really start with what you have. Um, we've all been to conferences where we see fancy tools and some of us just don't have the budget at our institution to be able to invest in those tools. So start with what you have. Maybe you have, you know, a sharepoint calendar. You can, you can link into but also reach out. I think sometimes we think we don't have access to technology, but we just need to ask. So reach out to your it service, see what licenses they have available and see if you can connect into it, even if it's just for a trial just to see if it might be something that will work for your office. I think that's great. I do like the start small. I like to use what you have what's on hand. You don't need to go out and buy a brand new shiny system to put a production calendar in place. But a production calendar is super critical in whatever format you're able to put it into. At this point in time, every cycle that you go through you should be reviewing what's on it? Expanding, removing, adjusting, as you said, it's progressive elaboration and continuous improvement. Pithy answers for our closing question. What would your life be like without a production calendar?-- Nick-- chaotic, disorganized mess, Tracy, serious chaos,-- Amber,-- uncontrolled chaos.-- Alyssa,-- unpredictable and reactive, unpredictable and reactive. I like it. So I thank you all for your time today. These tips tricks and information sharing about your experiences with the production calendar. Recommendations for people on how to get the most out of their production calendar is really valuable. And so thank you all for being here. Thank you. Thank you Doug having and using a production calendar can go a long way to ensuring your team stays on top of all of the minutia that we have to keep up with in a registrar's office. As our guests pointed out, it doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to have a lot of whistles and bells, but it has to be used. Anything you can do to encourage your team to review the production calendar on a regular basis, the better. Thank you again to Tracy Nick Amber and Alyssa for sharing their insights and tips for how to get started. And how to improve your production calendars functionality. Thanks for listening, forward a link to this episode on to a friend or colleague, especially one you think might benefit from having and using a production calendar or improving the one they're already using. Until next time, stretch your legs, drink some more water, maybe do a little silly dance in the kitchen while you're fixing a meal just for fun. I'm Doug mckenna and this is for the record.