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Technology Services

Feedback Responses

Posted on 04/14/2017

October 2016 – March 2017

COMMENT: There are many services that could use improvements and are unlikely to get attention anytime soon, i.e. Active Directory has been broken for a decade, Eduroam is not a WiFi solution, Etc. I think it would be a great idea to ask for suggestions from TS employees on a monthly 'Improvement Project' where one idea is chosen and then management get behind it to get it resolved. We have services that literally go for years in a barely functional state and the staff know that nothing is going to be done about them as history has proven it. We are now at the point where people just stop asking and as a result the problem largely falls under the radar and is forgotten that it is a problem. Let bring some new life in to TS by fixing what is wrong. Let do 12 projects in 2017, one per month, all submitted and voted on by the TS Staff.

RESPONSE: Thank you very much for your enthusiasm and challenge to make Technology Services and Fresno State a better place for students, faculty, and staff. I explored this idea with the leadership team and a number of others in our organization. I think this is a wonderful idea, to explore projects that will make Fresno State a better place, one idea at a time, ideas in which our staff take initiative, take ownership, and take pride in moving forward. If you would like to help lead an idea, will you please come speak with me directly about this, and we can discuss together how I can support you and your idea.

COMMENT: I appreciate the updates during the all hands meeting. It would be awesome to reduce the wait time for the Technology Service Desk. Regarding the Project management office and Hub for Innovation it would be great use of resources if they would use Cherwell and Confluence. It might not be their first choice but I think that it would impact the rest of Technology Services staff less. Do they have access to the list of all technology purchases that go through Procurement and Foundation? I think that would help them out. / Our computing footprint has grown dramatically on our campus but the onsite support has not. Our customers are having to wait longer for their requests to be completed. It takes longer for us to get out and fix the labs for our students and the staff that support our students. It seems that we have less help for onsite support than we did during the great recession. Many of us are working through breaks and lunches to help out our customers. Can you please justify all these new positions, which seem to be still getting defined? / Many of us see the value of this feedback page. It is helpful to see the responses. Several people have indicated that they miss how our previous head of our department would walk through our areas at least once a week just to see how we were doing. / Overall I think that our department is moving in a positive direction, thank you for your help in this process. /

RESPONSE: I appreciate your words of appreciation and your feedback. These are very good thoughts and good questions, and I am trying to provide information through email, forum meetings, and all hands meetings that answers some of these questions about the Innovation team, the PMO team, the Architect team, and the combined ITAG team. In a very quick response, these teams are here to help provide technical leadership and advocacy for all of TS, which is something I see as very important to bring our Technology team to the next level of support and sustainability, as we think about Technology at Fresno State in 2020. We are already hearing very positive feedback and good results from our campus constituents from the work of these teams. With any big change, and in this case to our organization, there will be a period of uncertainty and a time of less productivity, and these are all needed to grow and move forward stronger than before. A word on the Technology Service Desk; under Mike Pronovost’s leadership, the response time and satisfaction rate of the Technology Service Desk has improved greatly. I will share more details about this at our next all-hands meeting. I am also asking our leadership team to move on an assessment the best ticketing/tracking/asset system for our team, currently Cherwell for most, accompanied by the appropriate support, processes, and practices to make our next system a successful one. Lastly, thank you for sharing your desire to have more “face time” with me. I realize I have not taken the time to do this as much as I want, and I have a note to myself to make it more of a priority in 2017. Thank you for your encouragement and support.

COMMENT: The re-organization has left me wondering how our CIO and managers pick people for new positions and not others. Seems unfair and not transparent at all. Disappointed in communication, selection and vetting manner there may be too much changes. too many different options, that can cause confusion and lead to mismanagement. There are many great ideas, but maybe unfeasible to reach them. There are some good improvements in the direction of TS moving forward, and the announcements regarding those programs. However there is still some room to grow in the way ongoing changes are communicated internally, and to the campus community.

RESPONSE: I appreciate your comments, and I apologize if some approaches and decisions I have made have disappointed you. I welcome more specific feedback, so that I can understand better, and I would like to invite you to discuss with me further. I do want to share that all of our full-time positions have gone through the usual HR search processes, which include search committees and their recommendations that significantly impact the final candidates referred to the hiring manager. The leadership team does choose some student employees and all emergency hires specifically, but those are short-term positions. Interim appointments eventually go through full recruitments. I would be happy to discuss this in further detail with you in person.

COMMENT: I like the direction and vision for TS. The strategic plan makes a lot of sense and the actions that are slated to take place will fill a big gap. I think that leadership needs to be more "assertive" in standing behind the transition and implementing the changes. They also need to have more assertive conversations with slow adopters. Technology Services is evolving, and that is a very good thing. Not much has changed over the last several years, and I am happy to see that new leadership and new recruits are helping the organization modernize and streamline. Special thanks to the ITAG team for working hard on that process. Projects are a major pain point, and there is much room for improvement. Mainly, it is great to see positive change coming about within TS, and there is a bright future ahead! It seems like the changes have helped make TS run more smoothly. TS announcements seem to have increased in frequency and details. I think anything we do to try to make things better can only help. Keep up the great work!

RESPONSE: Thank you very much for your support and encouragement. Change and transition is challenging, and I appreciate all of us who understand that these are necessary growing pains that we must go through to get to a better place. I appreciate the urge to have us move forward more intentionally or aggressively.

COMMENT: Being new to technology, I think leadership has gone far above and beyond to keep us updated on the changes and I feel that efforts have been made to make the staff feel included in the process. I feel the culture is customer service driven. We may not be there as a whole but the ideas and strides are getting us there. This meeting was okay, but I think the content in this case would have been better handled in an email rather than a full department wide meeting. There was not a lot of interaction required by the meeting structure. The slack information could have been better handled in with an optional training session or two (which I would recommend scheduling regardless).

RESPONSE: Thank you very much for the helpful feedback. I have been exploring various formats for our all-hands meeting, and I will consider your feedback and others’ as I create the agenda for the May 2017 all-hands meeting. I do enjoy the interactive times that we have in our all-hands meeting. On the topic of Slack, we are most definitely planning some informational and training sessions.

COMMENT: No bad thoughts or feelings, and plenty of good ones. I do have some concern that the Project Management Office pipeline will become a black hole for ideas in practice, in spite of best intentions. I hope that doesn't happen. I would like to see transparency on ideas submitted to the pipeline, the time a submission spends in each stage of the pipeline, and on the rational for go/no-go recommendations and decisions. Ideally there will be an open resource that can be accessed for this sort of historical information. The internal communications team presentation was interesting. I think we already have a culture and practice of OK-to-good communication between persons. I can't think of an individual I may need access to that I couldn't phone, email, or stop by and visit in person. That said, officially standardizing on Slack and getting to a 100% adoption rate would be an improvement. The few remaining holdouts make it a less useful tool than it could be. There could be more transparency surrounding projects and workloads. That is a different communication problem space, and one that the communications team did not appear to have considered part of their purview. I appreciate existing efforts in this area (Orlando's emails, cookies with CIO, the all hands meetings, and my manager's monthly meetings). The project management office may be able to provide more transparency on this level, if doing so is or becomes part of their mandate. My ideal would be to see at least the high-level teams and positions create resources (websites, wikis, repositories, or similar) explaining who is involved, what they are working on, what are their timelines, why they made certain decisions, and how to provide input or support (if external input or support is desired).

RESPONSE: Wow! Thank you very much for taking the time to provide such thoughtful feedback. The Project Management Office is continuing to explore best practices that will benefit the Technology team and Fresno State the best. I agree that a transparent way of communicating projects, whether accepted, rejected, or completed, will be helpful for the entire campus. With the scoring rubric and the project intake workflow, my expectation is that we will document our decisions and then discuss with each project owner or requester. I hope you will continue to help me and the Project Management Office work on refining our workflows and processes.

Re: Better Communication - Yes, I think most of us have good habits with communication. What I hope to do is take us to the next level of having good or great communication. We have received some very good feedback that our campus community really appreciates the type and content of our communication that goes out to students, faculty, and staff.

Re: Transparency around projects and workloads. The Project Management Office will really help us in making these aspects of projects, workloads, priorities, and timelines much, much more clear. This will be extremely helpful as I have conversations with our campus leadership and within our technology governance committee discussions. Please look forward to updates from our Project Management Office later this year.

Re: Project Management Office transparency - You are definitely catching on to the vision I hope we can make happen. I hope our ITAG, Architect, PMO, and Innovation teams will document their mission/vision statements, work plans, decisions, future work, and current work. This will be extremely helpful for succession planning, stretch opportunities for others who may want to spend time developing toward one of these roles, and general communication within Technology and with the campus.

COMMENT: Thanks for giving us brief explanation on the changes and what the different groups do.

RESPONSE: Thank you for taking the time to provide the feedback.