News and Information about the University of Oregon's Transform IT Program
Jessie Minton, CIO and Vice Provost for Information Services, presented to the campus community updates on Transform IT and IT Governance at a Town Hall meeting on Friday, March 16. For more information about this meeting, see Slides from March 16, 2018.
Most of the project management and business analysis team has been hired and working on Transform IT. (In December, we shared news about the searches under way for project managers and business analysts.) Those searches resulted in the hires of Heather Dean and Kelsey Lunsmann as IT Business Analysts.
Currently, the Transform IT project team is comprised of:
These meetings use follow-up questions to clarify information provided using the campus engagement template.
See Transform IT Enters Execution Phase with Campus Engagement Project for schedule and more information.
The project team has developed a template for information gathering done as part of the Campus Engagement project that is part of Transform IT.
See the Documents section of this website or view the Campus Engagement template directly.
February marks the transition of Transform IT from the planning phase to the execution phase of the program. During the last 8 months, significant work occurred behind the scenes. Jessie Minton, chief information officer, announced in July 2018 that Transform IT would shift to a service-based approach. Since that July announcement, staff working on Transform IT have assembled a program team, collected data from past consulting engagements, developed templates, held an IT governance workshop, and designed an IT governance structure. In addition, program managers have aligned the Campus Engagement project with the UO Service Portal’s data gathering requirements so that data gathered by this project can be used efficiently for both Transform IT and the UO Service Portal deployment project.
As Transform IT enters the execution phase, it is launching its first project, the Campus Engagement project. The Campus Engagement project will inventory IT services provided across the university, determine service delivery costs, validate existing information about those services, identify the staff, skills, and knowledge necessary to provide those services. (NOTE: since this article was published, determining service delivery costs and staff skills have been removed from the scope of the Campus Engagement project.)
During the planning phase, staff developed templates for validating existing information from past consulting engagements and gathering missing information. The Campus Engagement project will first engage five units: School of Music and Dance, the College of Design, the School of Journalism and Communications, Information Services, and UO Libraries. This project will be completed by the end of September 2018.
As the Campus Engagement project starts gathering and validating information about IT services, the Transform IT program managers will begin developing the next project, which will analyze all the IT service data gathered and propose service changes where sensible.
In October 2017, we announced that the university would hire a project manager and business analyst to work in conjunction with Garron Hale and Tony Saxman. We have hired a project manager and will soon have a business analyst hired as well. Both employees will be announced to campus shortly.
Continue visiting this website for more information about Transform IT. Program updates are posted at least twice a month.
Behind-the-scenes work on Transform IT continued through winter break on charters, information gathering and staff searches.
Program and project charters
A draft version of the Transform IT program charter has been completed. After review by Jessie Minton, it has gone back to Transform IT and IS staff for revisions.
Staff completed a draft charter for the new Information Gathering project, the first project to be spawned under the Transform IT program. The draft charter will be reviewed and revised as needed.
Information Gathering project
The co-program managers and IS staff have finished gathering data from past consulting engagements, including Baker Tilly, Moran Consulting, and Harvey Blustain. They have also developed a draft template that will align collected data with the service catalog framework developed and implemented as part of the Service Portal project. This template will be used to by departments to validate the aforementioned data and gather any missing data. Work on the template continues. The School of Music and Dance will take the template for a trial run and use the outcome to improve the tool. Once revisions are complete, the template will be populated with each unit’s data and then distributed to campus units to update, validate, and augment the data collected to date.
Project manager and business analyst searches
The search for business analysts continues, with on-campus interviews this week for several candidates.
On-campus interviews for project managers concluded in mid-December, and staff conducted reference checks during the second half of the month. We will provide another update on these searches with the next Transform IT post the week of January 22, 2018.