Annual Report Part 2, and Lessons Learned
by Peter Mosinskis, Director of IT Strategy in annual report, assessment 0
A few weeks ago, we published and distributed Part 2 of our annual report to Division employees. Part 2 focuses on the employee perspective of our project & portfolio management program, and is available to University employees upon request; please contact Peter Mosinskis at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu to request a copy.
It's always a challenge to launch a new program. For our young IT organization, formal project and portfolio management practices represent a big cultural shift. While some IT operations are still starting up, on the whole our organization has matured significantly over the past 10 years. As we have matured, we have slowly moved from a reactive organization that constantly put out fires to one that is more measured, thoughtful, strategic and ultimately more proactive about how academic and information technology solutions are deployed to the campus community and supported by IT operations.
The results of our employee evaluation reflect how important it is to ensure that your IT project approach matches up with your level of organizational maturity. In our employee survey, we observed a moderate reception of the formal project processes and forms we implemented over the last year. I believe these results reinforce the importance of low start-up cost and low barrier-of-entry to establishing formal project and portfolio management practices in a growing organization, as well as the challenges brought on by the resulting cultural shift.
One major area where we need to improve is how we get the word out about our projects and our project processes. Over the next year we will focus on improving visibility of these areas.
