FY23 goals unveiled and other updates shared at September IT LT meeting

Highlights from the IT Leadership Team meeting hosted on September 7 included:

IT Job Family Redesign pilot

Blanche Temple updated the group on the status of the Pilot, including:

• A meeting with the University Labor Relations team will be held in September to begin planning for ITS job Redesign for IT technical job profiles
• A Senior Leadership Team (SLT) review of reconsideration requests will occur on September 13
• Training and information sessions on ITS compensation practices, how to work with market data/benchmarks, Workday changes, and job postings will be held in October

Balanced Scorecard Goals – FY23

Mark Manton shared information on the FY23 Balanced Scorecard, including desired outcomes, goals, measures, sponsors, and more. John Barden thanked leaders for drafting these goals in July and the IT Senior Leadership Team and IT Leadership Council for refining them after that strategy session. John added that some initial items the group proposed were moved to FY24 in cases where dependencies needed resolution within FY23. The desired outcomes and goals include:

• Enhance financial accountability
  • Understand Service Costing effort across IT. Begin to explore implications and opportunities for distributed units.
• Well understood services
  • Develop a framework for a customer-focused representation of IT Services at Yale.
  • Revisit Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to improve the clarity of expectations considering practices of the operation. Establish mechanisms for continuous assessment.
• Align with institutional goals
  • Define governance requirements for each service and refine structure to support more inclusive decision authority. IT Operations Governance functions - address integrated support collaboration across IT units.
  • Assess opportunities to use data to improve the pace, support decision-making, and improve outcomes.
• Establish a culture of continuous improvement, enabling evaluation, and streamlining of processes
  • Establish practices and management training to support more innovation, empowerment, and a more risk-tolerant culture while assuring we retain the resilience gains of the last five years.
• Improve the effectiveness of communications methods, both internal and external to IT
  • Conduct an integrated IT Plan Review for FY24 proposed projects and operations. IT needs to expose the work to ensure priorities are shared and understood.
• Enhance learning and growth practices
  • Extend IT Job Family redesign to distributed IT professionals (Pilot).
• Enhance employee engagement
  • Develop a university-wide IT team mentoring program (Pilot), emphasizing cross-divisional relationships.
  • Improve communications methods to help staff feel connected to Yale and the overall mission of the institutional and our community (Medicine, Environment, events).
• Job Family Redesign – Phase II

John Barden asked leaders for feedback on the Balanced Scorecard, and Rick Kremer added, “it’s exciting to look at our goals in this way…I’m looking forward to looking beyond internal IT to implement some of these things—it’s really kind of cool to see”. Leonard Welch shared that “it’s forcing us to think beyond traditional ITS”.

These goals will also be reviewed in more depth, with all IT staff, at the upcoming Town Hall on September 21.

Ask John

After going through the strategic plan, I understand that we need to take more risks and give ourselves room to fail. What can you say about that?

First, we need to identify the differences between low and high-risk behavior. In the context of moving quickly, we’re going to make mistakes. We need to let these low-risk mistakes roll off our backs and let our teams know that they are not only ok but are also expected. However, we can’t backslide is in areas where we need to improve engineering standards, for example. We need to model this notion of acceptable and unacceptable risk, tolerance for mistakes, and stepbacks. We need to embrace each challenge as an opportunity to make improvements.

I know we’ll soon be looking at work arrangements and seating. Can you share your thoughts on that upcoming discussion?

I don’t see evidence that folks are here as much as we thought they might be. I encourage managers to think about how their team’s time in the office relates to our team’s ability to maintain effectiveness. We’ve invited Facilities colleagues to participate in upcoming workspace conversations. I don’t expect a full-scale redesign of the space in the next six months, but we need to rethink the space to be more flexible, collaborative, and accommodating to broader institutional needs.

Can we learn more about Zoom room options and locations?

Ryan Schlagheck shared the following: Three or four Zoom room locations are outfitted at 25 Science Park, and we’ve invited different vendors to share their best recommendations for hybrid meeting solutions. These systems were tested with IT Partners and other tenants—we will use their input to determine next steps.

The next IT Leadership Team meeting will occur on Wednesday, October 26, 2022.