Category: User Support Services

The User Support Services Implementation project is planning how groups will transition into the new User Support Services (USS) structure, and to exercise these plans, the School of Journalism and Communication and College of Design will move into the new USS structure beginning in January or February, 2020. The transition is a pilot that is expected to last 60 days. After SOJC and Design have moved, work will pause briefly. Staff will gather lessons learned and upgrade transition planning and checklists based on that information so that future transitions are more efficient.

These plans have been incorporated into the milestone timeline on the Transform IT website.

The User Support Services organizational chart will be presented to the Transform IT Steering Committee on Dec. 13. This deliverable is a key component of the review and approval required by UO Human Resources, and it is necessary for User Support Services to proceed.

After the Transform IT Steering Committee’s review in mid-December, project staff plan to share the organizational chart more broadly. The chart and associated plans will be discussed at a Town Hall on Transform IT. That town hall will be held in mid-December or early January.

Three work streams have been merged into one: The Delivery and Support Models work stream now have responsibilities for both service desk locations and zone IT as part of a small work stream restructuring.

The Service Desk Locations and Zone IT group responsibilities overlapped significantly with the Delivery and Support Models scope, so the decision was made to merge these two work streams into Delivery and Support Models.

During the October 2 meeting of the USS Implementation project, the work stream team leads mapped their milestones and identified dependencies between milestones so that decisions can be made in the right order. The project’s business analyst will take the output of this exercise and develop a dependency map for the group to review and use at future meetings.

Gary Sullivan, an IT leader with 20 years’ experience at UO and in the private sector, will be the university’s first Director of User Support Services.

Sullivan joined the university in 2010 and has led IT in College of Design and the School of Journalism and Communication. He is also co-program manager for Transform IT, working closely with the chief information officer and the project team.

“The Director of User Support Services will work with faculty and deans as well as students and staff,” said Patrick Chinn, associate chief information officer for customer experience, “and in the time Gary has worked at the university, he’s successfully built strong support teams and robust relationships with faculty, students, and staff.” 

Sullivan’s first day as Director of User Support Services is Tuesday, September 3.

The Director of User Support Services is a new role that will lead the teams that will provide deskside support, help desk services, classroom technology support, account and access management, device management, and knowledge management as Transform IT’s User Support Services (USS) Implementation project moves forward.

The USS Implementation project kicked off in July with the launch of 13 work streams. Each work stream is focused on an important dimension of restructuring IT support services, such as delivery and support models, zone-based IT, and service desk locations. (For a complete list of work streams, see USS Implementation Project and Work Stream Teams.)

During fall term, Sullivan will lead several of these work streams, continue participating as co-program manager, and continue providing IT leadership at the College of Design and School of Journalism and Communication.

All students and employees are welcome to attend a town hall on Transform IT on Wednesday, September 18 from 9:30am to 11:00am. A video feed to Portland will be available in White Stag 149.

The meeting’s agenda:

• Jessie Minton, CIO, will be available for questions and answers
• The work stream team leads will each briefly present on the work their teams are engaged in

For more information, see the slide deck for this Town Hall: IT Town Hall – USS Implementation Report Out September 2019 (PDF).

Change can feel uncomfortable, especially in volume. At its core, Transform IT requires change: changes to processes, teams, and office space. To help ease the university through these changes, the USS Implementation project team has created an Employee Engagement and Experience work stream to focus on the human aspects of Transform IT.

During broad restructuring programs such as Transform IT, it’s typical for employees to encounter change saturation and change collisions, which can result in staff disengagement, anxiety, confusion, stress, and fatigue. UO’s students and employees are the most important element of Transform IT. Anxious employees or confused students will not promote a successful transition. The Employee Engagement and Experience work stream, coached by Jill O’Dea, HR’s Learning and Development Manager, is focusing on helping university employees adapt to change and adopt new processes.

To track the success of this effort, the work stream will also develop metrics to monitor project adoption. Many of these measures will be quantitative, but the key metrics will focus on the qualitative outcomes.

The Employee Engagement and Experience work stream held its first meeting on Wednesday, July 31. The group meets monthly.