Showing posts with label annual report. Show all posts

Annual Report Part 2, and Lessons Learned

by in , 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.

Annual report and finding

by in 0

We've recently completed and sent an annual report about the first year of our project and portfolio management program to Division staff and key campus stakeholders. 

The report is presented as a 14-minute narrated presentation. It discusses the goals, successes and challenges of the program from the perspective of our customers, and summarizes the feedback that campus stakeholders provided to us a questionnaire sent at the end of September.

Here are a few key finding from the report:
  1. Capacity is key. We opened 46 new projects during our first year, and completed 76 projects (66% of which were legacy projects). As of November 1, 2011, we have 42 open projects. On average, 86% of T&C staff time is spent on support of operations, leaving only 14% of time for projects. More importantly, over 80% of T&C staff spent less than 20% of their time on projects over the last year. The Division's ability to complete projects on time, on budget and to our customers' satisfaction is directly tied to our capacity to take on projects, and the division must take care to ensure that it has the capacity to take on new projects.
  2. While the tools could be improved, they have paid for themselves. Although staff reactions to using Freshbooks to track time for project and cost-recovery activity tasks has been mixed, the use of this tool has enabled us to fully recover the cost of the service. In addition, staff spent less than 100 hours total over the course of the year tracking time on project tasks.
  3. We met our initial goals. We are now able to make better strategic decisions because we have data; we have created a process that has enabled us to correct problems as we move along and stay flexible to adapt to projects of different sizes; and most importantly, we have created more predictable project outcomes for our customers. 77% of our completed projects were completed on time, and all were within 5% of their proposed budget. 
Members of the campus community that wish to view the narrated presentation may request a link to the presentation by contacting me via email at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu.

In other news, we've recently reorganized and updated the T&C Projects web site to make it easier than ever for our customers to find project information and submit new project requests. 

We look forward to working with our customers and Division staff to continue to improve our project service over the next year, and we wish happy holidays to you and yours!