Shift organisation#
The postgraduate team working on Ask-JGI are expected to work collaboratively to manage the Ask-JGI mailbox. This activity has been designed to allow ad-hoc working, so that queries can be picked up within the constraints of Ask-JGI student PhD studies and other work/university commitments.
To make sure that there is always at least one team member checking the Ask-JGI mailbox a throughout the day, Ask-JGI students are required to sign up for so-called Ask-JGI shifts. Students on shift will keep the rest of the team up-to-date at Weekly meetings.
Ask-JGI shifts will be undertaken by Ask-JGI team members in 2 week blocks. There tends to be one Ask-JGI team member on shift at any one time, but occasionally when there have been lots of queries, there have been 2 people on shift at once.
To sign up for a shift, you can add your name to one of the ‘Open Shift’ calendar events in the mailbox.
For each 2 week shift block, a base salary of 2 hours (1 hour per week), will be paid. This is to cover the monitoring of the Ask-JGI mailbox/Teams channel and attendance at the weekly Ask-JGI meetings.
Shifter tasks#
The following tasks are expected of Ask-JGI team members while they are on shift:
Each shift block begins on a Monday.
On Monday you might want to ask the previous shifter if they have anything to hand over
You are expected to monitor the Ask-JGI mailbox at least once per day, checking for any new queries or any follow-up emails from past weeks.
You are expected to monitor the Ask-JGI Teams channel throughout the day in case of any important messages. This is also where you can post any new queries that you would like input on, or that you would like to offer up to other Ask-JGI team members to participate in.
Tip
Remember that the Staff Data Scientists are on the Teams channel too, and they can offer advice and pointers on any query that you need help with.
While they are on shift, Ask-JGI team members should report on the status of the mailbox and any ongoing queries at the weekly meetings
For any query that you pick up, you are responsible for filling out the Ask-JGI tracker as per the instructions here. It is important to keep this up to date to reflect the status of all mailbox queries.
Note
When there are no queries, there may be other work that needs to be done. Check the notes from the last team meeting for any tasks, or feel free to ask the Ask-JGI team coordinator on the Ask-JGI Teams Channel.
Handling lots of queries#
The number of queries each week can be quite variable (sometimes none, but sometimes in the double digits!). We expect that the person on shift handles 1-2 queries depending on their capacity, and that the rest of the queries are handed around to other Ask-JGI team members. When the person on shift receives new queries, it’s good to post them onto the Ask-JGI teams channel. You can just post the subject of the query and a brief summary (in some cases you can just copy and paste the email text). If you want to pick up a query, you can just reply to the thread and say. At each weekly meeting, unassigned queries from the week before should be assigned. Queries can be assigned to more than one person, but we usually try to limit it to two people. If the query needs more than two people to be completed, it’s probably too big to be an Ask-JGI query.
For each query, up to one day of support (7 hours) is freely available to University of Bristol staff and PhD students in all faculties and departments.
When a query is picked up, Ask-JGI team members should report the number of hours spent addressing that query, and they will be paid at the usual rate.