Changes to IT project & procurement processes
by Peter Mosinskis, Director of IT Strategy in business practices, process, procurement, projects
I'm excited to announce some significant changes that the Division of Technology & Communication is implementing for the processes surrounding IT project & procurement management.
Our division is initiating these changes because our current processes aren't sustainable, mostly because we don't have strategic alignment at the campus level for our largest, most complex project & procurement requests. This means that as an organization, T&C is getting bogged down by uncoordinated requests from campus organizations for same small, finite set of information technology resources. These resources are being affected by inefficiencies, waste, conflict and delays related to constantly shifting priorities, so we are taking steps to improve the way we manage these processes.
Stephen Covey provided a great analogy about prioritization called "The Big Rocks of Life" which is illustrated here. This principle underlies the goal of our changes: to focus on the high-value, high-impact activities that must be done first.
We met on Thursday, March 3 with project requestors, sponsors and stakeholders to discuss these changes. You can watch a video presentation about the forthcoming changes, or plan to attend an upcoming information sessions (dates TBD).
At the meeting, we shared a one-pager (in PDF format) summarizing these changes with the attendees.
Stephen Covey provided a great analogy about prioritization called "The Big Rocks of Life" which is illustrated here. This principle underlies the goal of our changes: to focus on the high-value, high-impact activities that must be done first.
We met on Thursday, March 3 with project requestors, sponsors and stakeholders to discuss these changes. You can watch a video presentation about the forthcoming changes, or plan to attend an upcoming information sessions (dates TBD).
At the meeting, we shared a one-pager (in PDF format) summarizing these changes with the attendees.
We also launched an updated T&C procurement web site, which describes a 7-step process to successfully complete procurement of IT-related products and services.
Finally, today we published an updated business practice on IT project and procurement governance, which goes into a lot of detail about how our new project & procurement request process is supposed to work.
This is a big change, and we don't expect the first iteration to work perfectly. In fact, we expect there to be some problems that we have to work around.
On behalf of Michael Berman and all of the staff in the Division of Technology & Communication, I appreciate your patience, feedback and ongoing support as we transition to this new process, and thank you for being our valued partners in creating an exceptional University. If you have any questions, or can think of any ways in which we can improve the speed, quality or efficiency of this process, please contact me at peter.mosinskis@csuci.edu.
