The benefits of Agile, new Procurement portal, and more at IT Leadership Team meeting

October 14, 2021

The IT Leadership Team met on September 29 and discussed the following topics.

Procurement Intake Portal

Ed Frey announced that a new Procurement Intake Portal launched on Tuesday, September 28. The Portal acts as Procurement’s “version of ServiceNow—a vehicle to request all services.” It is an easy, intuitive, one-page form that directs community members to the right Procurement services and support.

The new portal was implemented to formalize, standardize, streamline and simplify Procurement Services. All data collected through this process will help Procurement better understand their work and make adjustments that benefit their customers.

Ed encouraged IT leaders to share this information with their teams. Visit the Procurement webpage and/or contact the Purchasing Help Desk at purchasing.helpdesk@yale.edu for additional guidance, as needed.

FY23 Annual Planning

Lisa Sawin kicked things off by sharing the importance of thinking of our work from a broad, Operations-wide perspective. Increasingly, Operations leadership is working to break down silos and align efforts across units. To that end, the team has identified three strategic initiatives (financial compliance and internal controls, recruiting, and training), and crafted the Operations Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) plan with additional areas of focus including procurement (broadening how we recruit and select suppliers) and metrics and reporting. Work is underway to put some shape on these initiatives so that resources can be aligned to the work. The technology components of these initiatives will form the basis of FY23 ITS portfolio funding requests.

Apriel Biggs shared, from an ITS lens, what is in store for FY23 annual planning, including: 

  • Creating an initial list of priorities, gathered through Long Range Planning (LRP) exercises
  • Capturing budget requests that represent operational priorities for the University, which should include:
    • Details of operating tail for effort impacting future year budgets 
    • The impact on dependent and downstream teams (both inside and outside)
  • Concluding the process (aka “pencil’s down”) for Iteration 1 on November 2

Key dates on the timeline for Iteration 1 include:

  • September 23: Business cases available for population
  • October 25: Special gating meeting
  • November 2: Pencil’s down

The special gating meeting will provide an opportunity to work with domain partners (e.g. UX and accessibility, QA/Testing, Procurement, etc.) to understand how estimates will ultimately inform business cases. Service owners are also invited, to ensure that dependencies or capacity challenges are considered The ultimate goal is for submissions to be as robust and accurate as possible, and delivered in a one-slide format, by October 20, at 5 pm.

For additional information, check the ITS Leadership Team channel on Teams.

An Update on Implementing Agile

Tim Hinckley was interested in improving the team’s ability to organize, prioritize, and track the work that flows into the Student Systems team. He initiated a pilot to move to an Agile methodology which included manager training, hiring an outside Agile coach, team education, and more formal adoption of Jira.

While exploring this change, John Ferraiuolo and his teammates appreciated being involved in making decisions about the implementation. Knowing that they needed a solution for high-interrupt work, the team agreed to use Kanban instead of sprints with scrum. John’s team determined the Kanban board’s status columns, definitions of done, and meeting cadence. Meetings include two 10 minute collaboration meetings per week to discuss ticket priorities and team member focus, and a one-hour retrospective meeting every three weeks for continuous improvement.

From a team member’s perspective, Dan Hofstatter said he was initially “a little worried about unexpected support issues that interrupt the project work.” However, he’s found that, by using Kanban, he could put his emergencies and project work all on the same board. He now feels that this approach provides visibility into the team’s work, helps everyone understand the constraints of competing priorities, and places more emphasis on the team’s work rather than his work. He really appreciates this methodology because it focuses on “getting to done.”

Frank Matthew agreed that this pilot was a success and intends to share the benefits of their learnings more broadly across ITS.

New NetID Security Campaign starting this fall

Jeremy Rosenberg joined to remind leaders about an upcoming Security Checkup, launching in November. To ensure that we upgrade our Net ID management, a New Security Checkup tool will include checking: password strength, recovery email address, and email security.

  • The first step is password strength and requires individuals to change their password and/or validate that their password meets new complexity rules established in September 2020. 
  • The second step is recovery email–security questions are no longer best practice. The new practice is to send an email with a token to your non-Yale email address. This task ensures that you update or verify the address on file before it is needed.
  • The final step is email security and refers to individuals who are still using basic authentication (Basic Auth), which sends a username and password when you check your email. Most people bypass DUO in this process, which is problematic. For those who are still using it, this step allows users to disable the feature at a time that works for them, rather than being forced to do so by Microsoft at a future date.

As part of the mid-November rollout, Jeremy’s team will communicate with departments about the onboarding change, work with the Help Desk on new identity vetting protocols, and launch a large-scale communications campaign (in the new year).

Oct 4th Return to Campus Plan

Mark Manton is preparing a single document to help everyone understand the different protocols in place, such as masking, Daily Health Check, staying home if you feel ill, and more.

One IT at Yale