Manager responsibilities, recent milestones, and more at Leadership Team Meeting

At the IT Leadership Team meeting, on July 28, the following highlights were shared:

Manager’s Role in Meeting Yale’s Health and Safety Requirements

Mark Manton shared that managers are responsible for supporting their employee’s compliance with Yale’s Vaccination Program. Comprehensive information about the manager’s role was recently shared in an announcement from Jack Callahan and John Whelan on August 10.

Kathleen Omollo added that a newly added Routine Testing Report for Supervisors will help managers review which of their employees (if any) require release time for routine testing. Additionally, the report identifies those who have not completed their first routine test or are overdue for their routine testing.

John Barden emphasized that employees who are not compliant with Yale’s vaccination program requirements will face disciplinary action. Additional information that may be helpful to managers can be found on the It’s Your Yale Workplace Guidance page.

Defining Community Applications at Yale

After pondering “what is Community Applications about?” the team’s Director, Renato Cayuela, concluded that they needed more of an identity. After hosting team discussions, they focused on three common themes, including: innovation, agility, and flexibility. Next, they developed a vision statement, “Our vision is to serve the Yale community by creating differentiators and enterprise solutions using innovative, agile, and flexible approaches, to enable academic, administrative, cultural, heritage, foundational, and research initiatives.” Finally, they identified common goals, tied to IT’s strategic anchors:

• One IT at Yale
  • Improve project intake process
  • Create value and collaborate beyond our primary areas of responsibility
• Service Quality
  • Better understand our service offering
  • Understand capacity
• Workplace of Choice
  • Grow our people through mentoring, coaching, and paying attention to opportunities
  • Promote work/life balance

Renato and his team conducted these team-building exercises with a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis. He found that this experience with his team “helped them feel supported, heard, and focused on how to address any gaps.” Renato encourages other leaders to follow suit, to build morale and identify a path forward for their teams. Wrapping up the process, Renato will develop SMART goals to put these findings into action.

Lessons Learned and Future Uses of DUO Everywhere

Jeremy Rosenberg and his team knew they would face challenges while implementing DUO Everywhere, Yale’s secure, multi-factor solution connecting users to Microsoft 365. Over 45k people—with different schedules and roles–would be impacted, and they’d have to face “yet another lock on the door to protect their data…during a global pandemic.” However, Jeremy’s team was determined to facilitate a smooth transition and they established guiding principles to maintain a high level of service quality including:

• Targeting zero support calls, because if the process requires a support call the process needs to be optimized.
• Giving users the tools and knowledge to help themselves, including an opt-in tool to choose when they activated their DUO account.
• Using a “goldilocks communication approach” by providing just-the-right-amount of information to be supportive while also not blind-sighting or confusing the community.

This strategy worked well, with opt-in starting for ITS in April 2020 and progressing to the broader community through February 2021. They measured their success by tracking the level of disruption, such as Help Desk calls, which were fewer than the prior year (including those related to DUO).
Moving forward, the same group of people who moved to DUO Everywhere will need to conduct a “security checkup.” Future communications on the checkup will drive the community to a single tool with the following actions required:

• Create a more complex password
• Validate recovery email address
• Disable basic authentication for email

John Barden applauded the seamlessness of the DUO Everywhere implementation, “it was a non-event, and as a result of being patient we accomplished something really strategic.” Luis Ribeiro added that he felt “it was a lesson for every service owner—the more people you involve early, the better.” Sandra echoed Luis’ comments and shared that she “really appreciated the planning and customer perspective we took when we rolled this initiative out.”

Ask John Anything

How will Yale/Yale IT be welcoming our staff back to campus?

IT will be offering welcome back breakfasts each week. Additionally, when employees return they will receive a Yale gift, delivered to their offices.

How do we assist new staff with access control?

Visit the ID Center website for additional information, including assistance with access control by emailing 432.open@yale.edu.