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New project management tools are coming!

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We're really pleased to announce that we will be updating our project management tools (and process) for CI organizations and employees that request minor and major projects from the Division of Technology & Communication (T&C).

In spring 2014, we entered into a partnership with TeamDynamix, a leader in project management and IT service management solutions for higher education, to begin implementation of a new project and portfolio management information system for T&C.

This new system will provide simpler, more streamlined approach for tracking, reporting, analyzing, editing, communicating, and archiving technology projects. The tool has some great features for project communication and collaboration: routing workflows for request approval, built-in chat and discussion forums, a knowledgebase, document repositories, and reporting dashboards, to name a few. In addition, users will be able to access TeamDynamix through single-sign-on via MyCI, or even add comments to project communications automatically via email. 


This week, TeamDynamix is on-site visiting with T&C managers and staff to provide initial system configuration and training. The implementation team is making great progress and learning the in's and outs of the system flow. 

Within the next several days we should have a draft of the start-to-finish project flow completed, from request to charter to planning/execution to closure, which is really exciting! There's so much to learn, and so many capabilities and options; in some ways it's been like drinking from a firehose. There’s still a lot of other detail to be finished, but it’s all coming together. We still need to tackle creation of our remaining user base (all CI employees), and migrating our open projects and requests to the system. 

We will begin to roll-out the system in August to T&C employees, followed by a wider roll-out for campus organizations and employees in fall 2014. 

Please contact Peter Mosinskis at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu with any further questions. 



Project process update; project close

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On June 16, the A&IT management team met to assess the project management and project portfolio processes and tools that were put into action earlier this year. June marks the completion of the first 6 months of our new project and portfolio management program.

One of the outcomes of the meeting was a SWOT analysis. Here are some of the strengths that the team noted:

  • Documented, defined process for projects
  • Improved communication about projects
  • Improved ability for capacity planning
  • Focused responsibility on managing the project portfolio
  • Improved ability to bill back for cost-recovery activities
  • We have data and history we can use; they can be used for assessment & continuous improvement
The team identified some weaknesses as well:
  • Visibility of project information could be improved
  • Project classification system needs to be further refined (or re-defined)
  • No electronic forms or workflow; as a result, sometimes project approval takes too long.
  • Our project repository in SharePoint has not been fully developed to support our project & portfolio activities
  • The tools in our project toolbox are not tied together 
  • Aggregating data from "electronic paper" forms is cumbersome
  • Some employees perceive that data from project and time on task activities aren't being used, and are skeptical about the process and information. 
By building on the process strengths and addressing the weaknesses, our organization has an opportunity to further improve communication, reduce the amount of time require to complete a project, improve our strategic planning capabilities, and use our project management expertise as a model for other campus organizations to use. 


We are continuing to build on our strengths by launching our new Business Practice on Project Close (BP-00-008) today, which provides project managers and leads with a more consistent way to close projects and to communicate about their closure with our clients. Our new project closure and project cancellation forms will enable us to document key project statistics and lessons learned at the close of every project to enable continuous improvement of our project management capabilities. The process and forms have been distributed to all A&IT staff, and will be available shortly on the A&IT Policy & Procedures web site.

In addition, we are revising our project intake process and project charter form to address project classification issues raised by the group. We expect those changes to be approved and made available in the next 2 weeks.