IT Leadership Team February meeting recap

    February 8, 2024

    The January IT Leadership Team meeting covered three main topics: IT portfolio management, NGN visibility, and Operations notification.

    IT portfolio management

    By providing insight into projects across IT, the Portfolio Management Office (PMO) helps leadership, service owners, and project managers manage complex efforts and allocate the right resources for maximum value to Yale. Their core objectives include:

    • Alignment to organizational strategy.
    • Balancing portfolio goals and risks against overall risks.
    • Partnering with project managers in delivery excellence.
    • Navigating complexity to enable successful outcomes.

    Kendra Frank, IT Director, Portfolio and Program Management, who manages the IT portfolio, introduced the stakeholders and sponsors, recognized the efforts of the project managers who contributed to the successful completion of various projects, and shared a high-level overview status update on various projects.

    FY24 has 58% of IT planned projects with the remainder of the projects spread out beyond June 2024.

    Completed projects targeted for an FY24 delivery include:

    • Datamart
    • Freezer Monitoring
    • Graduate Student Funding
    • IICAPS Replacement 2
    • NGN Closet Remediation

    Launched projects still requiring additional work to complete include:

    • OneFinance Dashboard Monitoring Phase 1 – Financial Compliance Dashboard
    • YaleSites Upgrade
    • Prof School Registration Project with 5 Releases in School of Public Health, School of Nursing - Instructor Permission Joint Degree, School of Divinity and School of the Environment
    • Soft launch of the Operations Notifications
    • Professional Learning Experience at Yale
    • Health on Track (formerly known as Campus Health Systems)

    The PMO’s planning efforts improved by introducing a spend plan signed off by the Senior Leadership Team earlier in the year, which helped account for budget variances.

    NGN (Next Generation Network) visibility

    Victor Soto, IT, Network Engineer, introduced leaders to some “powerful tools,” - Logic Monitor and Cisco Assurance - providing greater visibility into the network. Using these tools allows the team to remediate problems quicker and better identify user problems, leading to an improved user experience and network health. The new applications collect data from the system and produce easily digestible information so the team can quickly resolve issues and provide an improved user experience.

    With improved granular visibility into the legacy systems, the NGN team shared how they were afforded different views to see the scale of user impact and how they could better serve clients’ needs. Customized data, a tailored dashboard, advanced monitoring, and an automated ticket system are now feasible optimizations using the new API integration. With the potential for adoption across various units, leaders shared their enthusiasm for future use cases.

    Operations notifications

    The project team, represented by Director of Emergency Management George Hines and IT Manager Netal Petal, led a discussion of the Yale Status Board and shared images from the website to show the progression of the work and its functionality. The website is expected to aggregate all Yale alerts and display them in real-time. Unresolved Yale Alerts would automatically load and be shown as “active alerts.” Once resolved, the status would be updated on the website as “all clear.” With the large number of buildings on the campus, the project impact is university-wide.

    Project milestones and timelines (September 2023- March 2024) were presented; the integration with Everbridge and a soft launch of the website were completed last month. The second iteration of the dashboard planned for next month includes additional features such as full integration with buildings and services across the university. Important alerts, such as maintenance work, building closures, or emergency notifications, color-coded on the website could be communicated to inform the Yale community. Presenters urged leaders to engage with stakeholders and share their feedback.

    The next IT Leadership Team meeting is on Wednesday, February 28, from 9 - 10:30 a.m.