An Efficient Means for IT Planning – Aims College

Andria Brabo – andria.brabo@aims.edu, Dr Gary Bardsley gary.bardsley@aims.edu

• used project portfolio planning process – using Word Docs and a Wiki to coordinate projects across a small IT shop of 26 people.

Challenges

• lack of communication
• staff turnover
• project managers making promises without checking with implementers
• cross platform – Mac vs PC

Approach

• create a PPP document that articulates the dependencies and deliverables required from each area to make the project a success
• looks to me like a blend of project plan and project charter
• the PPP held the teams accountable
• if the project requires more than one dept then you need to create a PPP

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.

I am writing about a topic that came up this week when working with my colleagues at the University of Alaska Office of IT. A common challenge all IT Service teams face delivering projects when there are huge operational demands.  Here is the approach we took to address this critical and ongoing challenge in my Business Application Services team in IT Services, BCIT.

In Sept 2007, I took over as the Manager, Business Application Services at BCIT. For the first 4 months, I took a  meet, listen and ask approach. I held one-on-one interviews with each of my team members (23 systems analysts in 3 teams).  I setup regular meetings with all our key client stakeholders (Registrar’s Office, Finance, HR, Financial Aid, Student Services, Facilities, Alumni and others) around BCIT. I needed to hear from my team and our clients about the challenges they faced and their perceptions of our effectiveness in meeting commitments.

In all the meetings and interviews, I heard a common theme from…

• My team: “We have too much to do and can not keep up with the demand from our clients.”
• Our clients: “Your team is working hard but we have important projects that are not getting done on time.”
• Me: We also had a growing list of application project requests and struggled to keep our key technologies current. 

What struck me was the my team was having a significant challenge separating operational work like break fix, small enhancements and regular changes related to business cycles like applying new tax rates from underway project work and deliverables.  Operations always trumped project work and the result was delayed or late projects and worse unhappy clients. 

We are commited to ensure our core services (operations) are delivered based on our commitments in our IT Services Core Service Catalogue.  How could be ensure that we met our service levels in operations and put a focus on delivering on our project commitments?? 

Separate operations work from project work was the answer.

An opportunity presented itself in January 2008, a systems analyst in our developer team stepped up and took on a new role … the Duty Analyst.  The role of the Duty Analyst was to handle all the operational work for a time period freeing up the rest of the developer team to focus on project work relatively uniterrupted.  The introduction of the Duty Analyst has made significant improvements on the effectiveness of our developer team.  Read more...