Since I completed both the UBC Sauder School of Business – Certificate in Management Excellence and the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Software Research International – Certified Enterprise Architect program, I have been looking to take the next step in my education.  Here is an older post where I asked “What Masters Program should I choose?“  I now have an answer to my question!

I applied for and received funding from my employer, BCIT to pursue a graduate level degree.  With the funding approved, I applied to the Masters of Science in Information Management Program at Syracuse University’s iSchool.  Last week, I received my formal letter of acceptance!  I will begin my program in September 2010.  It has been a very long time since I have been in a formal education program.  It should be an interesting ride.  I will be continuing my day job and will be taking most of the program online.  I am looking forward to a trip or two to Syracuse University and will now cheer for the Orange!!

Here is a video about the program:

I will regularly post my progress on this blog. Wish me luck!

I have been thinking a lot about re-engineering the service delivery model for the application services team that I lead. I have been guiding my team to think about:

“We deliver the platform and work with the business to provide services”.

Our applications team is made up of subgroups aligned by major application services.  Here are the major applications:

• Business Intelligence
• Collaboration Tools
• Document Management
• Email and Calendaring
• ERP (Student, Finance, HR, Doc Mgmt)
• Identity Management
• Learning Management Applications
• Microsoft Applications
• Oracle Database
• Portal (for students and employees)
• SQL Server Database

Currently, there are 3 teams in place in our Business Application Services group. Here are the roles in each team:

Support Team

• Oracle DBA
• Document Management
• Business Intelligence
• Project Management
• Business Analysis
• Identity Management

Email and Collaboration Team

• Email
• Calendaring
• Instant Messaging
• Collaboration Platforms
• SQL Server DBA
• Microsoft Applications
• Enterprise Portal

Developer Team

• Oracle Developers
• Lotus Domino Developers
• Microsoft Developers
• Java/Web Services Developers

I am interested in hearing from any of you that lead groups with similar responsibilities.  Do you have a suggested structure for me to consider?  Do you split your team based on roles (technology domains)  or by application (vendor) platforms? Do you split operational work from project delivery?  Does your governance structure influence your teams organization?

Any suggestions are very welcome and I hope to learn from some of your experiences.  Thanks in advance.

Last week, I presented the accomplishments of my applications team in 2009. I was blown away by the number and the scope of the projects my team delivered to our community. I firmly believe that the separation of our operational duties from our project work enabled us to be so productive. While most people would celebrate the project teams |(and we do!), I want to acknowledge the key enabler of this success – our Duty Analyst role.

I blogged previously about our Duty Analyst role here.

Implementing a duty analyst role minimizes the operational interruptions to our team members working on projects. Providing project members focused time to work on project challenges and meeting milestones becomes easier without operational interruptions.

I am proud to say my team delivered on our operational responsibilities and completed 43 projects in 2009.

Here is the breakdown of projects my team delivered:

• Projects by Size : Small = 19, Medium = 14, Large = 10
• Projects by Governance : BCIT Executive = 3, IT Governance Team = 14, Business Applications Committee = 5, Departmental = 11, Operational = 10
• Projects by Community : Learning and Technology Services = 20, Student Services = 9, Education = 4, Finance = 3, Human Resources = 3, BCIT Executive = 3, BCIT Student Association = 1

We continue to refine the Duty Analyst role as well as our IT Governance and Project Management approaches.  I am excited to see what we can do in 2010 to continue to deliver value.  We will be upgrading our ERP this year and taking a focused approach leveraging the Duty Analyst will make all the difference.