From: Gary M.C. Bean
Subject: Gary Dryfoos

Gary Dryfoos came to Athena about the same time I did.  At that time I was Training manager and he was one of two part-time training consultants, developing minicourses and teaching them to Athena users, mostly students.  As a training Consultant I, he was competent, professional and effective at his job.  When our other part-time training consultant left, Gary was willing to be quite flexible about what percentage of full-time he was working at various times depending on our available budget and our immediate needs.  Eventually, I asked him to become permanently full-time.

Since I became Documentation manager as well, I have depended on him to take on further responsibilities not usually associated with a Consultant I position.  He has designed and conducted the instructor training for our student minicourse instructors.  He has designed and administered the system for scheduling and "checking-in" instuctors and their back-ups for our scheduled minicourse classes.  He has supervised course developers.  He has designed and implemented an entire course materials preparation process based on the Andrew system, our new word-processing and formatting technology from Carnagie-Mellon.  In addition to all this he has remained an exceptional individual contributor to the content and teaching of the minicourses.

While the classification description for Consultant I and Consultant II do not exactly match Mr. Dryfoos' past and current responsibilities, it seems clear to me that inso far as he has "initiated and develped plans for major changes in the computing environment" in which minicourse materials are developed; "exercised functional supervision" of minicourse instructors and course developers; "determined the need for, prepared and conducted professional and educational programs" for our instructors and course developers; his work has clearly gone beyond that of a Consultant I position and taken on many aspects of a Consultant II position.  

Rather than promote him to Consultant II, where the job description as a whole is even less congruent with his job, or trying to design and get approval for two new classification descriptions for training, I felt it would be a more effective effort to simply give him a raise in his salary as recognition of the addtional responsibilities he has taken on and successfully fulfilled.

Gary M.C. Bean
Training and Documentation Manager,
Project Athena, M.I.T.