UNC CAUSE 2016

I've been asked various questions about project management and our project management practices at UNC Pembroke's Division of Information of Technology (DoIT). Which templates do you use? Which tool do you use to manage your portfolio?

The truth is, we've been on this project management journey since 2014. We currently have 3 approved project templates our team actively uses, along with our Kanban board, required kickoff meetings and lessons learned. Our tool is a portfolio stored in a simple Google sheet. We veered away from the PMBOK slightly and allowed our team to implement project management while referencing the PMBOK and networking with our sister institutions as well as other professionals for guidance along the way. We have defined our own practices based on feedback and input from the project team members, our stakeholders and our customers. We decided before choosing a tool to not put the cart before the horse and instead lead the horse to the fountain of knowledge by listening, learning the culture, practices and processes. Once we confirmed our team was ready to move forward we added new concepts and tools to our project management toolbox.

I plan to share the details of our journey along the less traveled path we decided to take to get to where we are today. I plan to discuss our communication style (with our sponsors, team, leadership team and customers), our approval process, how we use our basic meetings and templates as tools (project request template, kickoff meetings, and lessons learned meetings), and our future with the concept of progressive elaboration in mind (making necessary changes when something isn't working as originally planned).

Paving our own road is what has worked for UNCP's DoIT team. Accepting we will never be a large institution that will be staffed with a fully operational PMO, but rather a balanced matrix organization, and accepting that we need to know our team, our team culture and our processes was key to our current success. Knowing all of these key items, has allowed us to move forward in developing a roadmap for project management at UNCP that aligns our portfolio with our strategic goals and puts us in a position to tell our story and to "change lives through education."

Is your training effective? Is it engaging? Do participants leave your workshops ready to tackle their responsibilities head on? If you answered "no" to any of these questions, then maybe it's time to revamp your teaching! In this interactive session, participants will build a foundational knowledge for making learning stick, increasing retention, and transforming info dumps into performance-based learning. We will explore cognitive strategies for teaching new content and how to best incorporate games and game-like activities into learning and assessment. Finally, we will share tips and best practices for developing and delivering effective and engaging learning sessions, that will enable learners to perform and not just regurgitate information.

So much to do and so little time to do it! How do we know we are working on the right things? What do our customers think of our services? What prevents staff from performing their best? Are our internal processes working? How do we compare to industry standards? This year UNC Chapel Hill Information Technology Services (ITS) has taken a step back to ask these important questions as part of the IT Excellence project. Susan Kellogg (Deputy CIO) and Candace Reynolds (project manager) will share how the IT Excellence project answered these questions by leveraging detailed discussions with IT directors across campus (customers) and ITS Staff in addition to partnering with a consulting firm for six objective assessments. This presentation will walk through this unique improvement project, whether those involved saw it as a successful project, outcomes and projects that resulted and lessons learned along the way. Join us for the conversation!

Over the past two years, UNC-Chapel Hill has been working on a new structure for IT Policies and building a new process for development of Policies, Standards, and Procedures. Developing close engagement with campus stakeholders has resulted in better documents. When a Policy can closely align its purpose with the way it will be used every day, and be written in an accessible and sensible way, compliance is easier. This presentation will describe the evolving process and Policy structure, and some of the lessons learned as we have developed it.

Western Carolina University will be hosting the Student Technology Conference in 2017. This session will be an opportunity to learn about the conference and how attending could benefit you. Plan to attend this short session if you are looking for professional development and networking opportunities for you and your IT team. 

How long have I been working on this project? Did it really take me all day to image these five computers? That meeting felt like it lasted all day!

We here at WCU in the ITDS division have been dedicating some of our time to finding out where our time is going. In May of 2015 our team tracked an average of 55% of our time at work, and with the tools we have implemented since, in May 2016 we tracked an average of 91% our time. The quick reporting tools we are using allows us to have real time feedback on where our time is going instead of having to comb through tickets at the end of the month or week. The reporting and data provided has given us a new foot hold in funding discussions and as well as helping us rework processes in daily work to eliminate previously unknown inefficiencies.

We love sharing knowledge and ideas with the world. It's just that sometimes our presentations are...well, terrible. PowerPoint slides crammed full of text, distorted or blurry images, and ideas that seem to wander without ever coming together. It doesn't have to be this way! In this session you'll learn an easy, effective method for designing presentations that incorporates ways people learn with multimedia. Each concept is takes advantage of research-based principles of learning (especially when multimedia is involved).

Having campus conversations are hard and time consuming! Including campus with direction, and involving people with big projects can be even more difficult. Yet, the time spent having crucial conversations and including people in the fold when we do big things is not only critical to our success, but oftentimes, so rewarding. This presentation will be about things we've done - some creative (outlandish?) things and some old school ways to include our campus with critical conversations and also big projects. We will highlight one big success story and show the audience that sometimes you have to get out of your comfort zone for your team, and for your campus. It sure made a difference for us - even if we will forever be known as He-Man and Skeletor!