Promoting psychological safety and more discussed at the IT Leadership Team meeting

The IT Leadership Team met on March 30 to discuss the following projects and highlights:

Balanced Scorecard Item – Employee Engagement Framework

What is psychological safety? Dr. Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School professor coined the term as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.” According to Randy Rode (and fellow team colleagues, Shawn Clark and Maria Belli), creating an environment of phycological safety at Yale IT has the potential to build trust with employees, reduce errors, enhance performance, increase retention, and more. For this reason, the planning team, in consultation with CCI and others, has developed an Employee Engagement Framework to support IT staff. 

The Framework offers a series of small daily steps (requiring only 5 minutes a day over 4 weeks), to explore the issues and techniques that promote a culture of psychological safety within your work teams and colleagues. The pilot is now accessible via IT Academy and LinkedIn Learning and will become an official part of the IT Academy course catalog by Q4 in FY22.

Randy credited Hadar Call, Amy Keach, Taber Lightfoot, and April Tiddei for their initial research, including conducting peer reviews, evaluating Workplace Survey data, and more, which supported this second phase of the work to develop an Employee Engagement Framework. Shawn Clark also acknowledged that the psychological safety aspect of this Balanced Scorecard goal is “one leg of the three-legged stool,” with Performance Feedback and the ITS M&P Job Family Redesign Project supporting other aspects of the overall goal.

e-Commerce Payment Acceptance at Yale (ePAY) Project

Chelsey Toong shared an update on the Yale ePAY (e-Commerce payment accepted at Yale) project, focused on standardizing credit card payment acceptance, processing, and reporting while meeting PCI Compliance standards. 

Accomplishments thus far include completing foundational work, such as integrating with Workday, and conducting a pilot with volunteer clients. Additionally, a new ePAY website, developed in collaboration with Internal Communications, recently launched and provides self-serve resources such as interactive training, and more.

Looking ahead, the team will be implementing new features such as safer ways to provide credit cards over the phone, available initially for YNHHS, YM, and the YU Epic Project with a rollout to call centers and broader-campus locations shortly thereafter.

University Research Cores Management Software Project Overview

Research cores across the university operate as University Service Providers (USPs), supporting internal and external researchers by providing access to research equipment, services, and expertise. Up to this point, the university has not offered a standard core management software solution to support these activities and the associated administrative tasks. To solve for this, Naomi Raviv is leading the implementation of a standard software package—Stratocore PPMS Software—that will have a significant positive impact on USP administrative effort, audit compliance, strategic planning and core user experience.

In July 2021, a committee was formed to prioritize core management software features for Core staff, business office staff, and users. An evaluation of commercially available software was completed, resulting in the selection of Stratocore’s PPMS software. Testing concluded that this was the best tool to utilize, and implementation planning is currently underway.

The first wave of implementation is expected to be completed in June/July 2022, with subsequent waves expected to continue through December 2022. The forthcoming service offering will be provided at no cost.

NGN update

Tim Sheets reported that NGN is continuing to make progress including the recent completion of 51 buildings in FY22, with the total of 55 buildings and over 200 closets.

Looking ahead, a number of enhancements will be implemented and the NGN team will be engaging sponsors, customers, and OCM specialists, and identifying Standard Policies, operating procedures, and process management.

The group is also exploring opportunities for improvement such as parsing their business questionnaire, establishing a discovery timeline, publishing a refined building migration tracker, reprioritizing activities, and more.

Ask John Anything

Any updates on the budget meeting?

We followed the framework that we used before, but what was new this year was the alignment of the Operations team. Rather than presenting in a separate time-slot, Jack set overall perspective on the growth of operating costs for the institution vs. the overall cost for the institution and doing it that way set the expectation for how all functions are maturing. He has been working on creating more shared goals across Operations and this really reflects the progress we’re making. By far the biggest change is receiving more support for renewing and replacing core assets. Your good work in managing the organization has earned trust among ITS and this has resulted in positive budget conversations.

Is a revised strategic plan completed?

A lot of thinking has been put into this, but we have not finalized our plan.

How are we learning from the pandemic, in terms of managing campus population health?

Stephanie Spangler and I are co-sponsoring a Campus Population Health workgroup to identify resources needed to sustain and support Yale with the administration of campus population health needs.

Are we any closer to finalizing entitlements?

My suspicion that things will settle out slowly and carefully. ITS is much closer to finalizing its recommendations than the remainder of the university, but there is no additional clarity on parking and equipment and other topics as of this time.

The next IT Leadership Team meeting will take place on April 27, 2022.