To complete projects on time and on budget, consider a central PMO. Structured project management is essential for the timely and on-budget completion of high-cost, high-profile projects that involve many stakeholders.
Without dedicated individuals focused on successful implementation and integration of systems during technology projects in particular, institutions may squander months of planning and thousands of dollars due to poor execution. While there are benefits to distributed project management, various indicators can signal the need for a move to centralized oversight. Beware the Next Big Thing. Where do new management practices come from?
A few emerge fully formed from the minds of academics and consultants, but the vast majority come from corporate executives experimenting with new ideas in their own organizations. A case in point is the online retailer Zappos, which is replacing its traditional hierarchy with a self-organizing “operating system” known as holacracy. Zappos’s experiment is getting a lot of attention. Like many management innovations before it, holacracy has an exciting zeitgeist appeal.
At least a few executives in other firms are no doubt asking themselves, given today’s pressure to innovate and the changing nature of the workforce, is this the management idea of the moment? For decades, executives have been asking similar questions whenever management innovations burst onto the scene.
Building Productive and Collaborative Relationships at the Speed of Trust. Key Takeaways To facilitate IT project success in the challenging higher education environment, trust and collaboration among IT staffers and various campus groups are essential.
To improve trust and collaboration, the IT staff at Cornell University's Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management consciously set out to create highly productive relationships with the school's departments, faculty, and students. The team's experiences and lessons learned can guide both brief and long-term collaborations, as well as daily interactions among IT staffers and customers across an institution. How-to-Change-a-Habit.jpg (1357×1500) Web Resources To Improve Productivity. Why the University of Montana chose Box to replace dumb file storage. When you get right down to it, most file storage is dumb, whether on a hard drive or a network drive: Put a file in, take a file out.
If you have access to the file, hooray! If you don't, boo. That's pretty much the entire feature set. Useful. Vital, even. Contrast this with modern cloud storage options from Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and Microsoft OneDrive: You can put a file in automatically, and if you make a change to it, there's a version history. Which brings us to the University of Montana, which solved its own dumb file storage problem by going to Box for its 18,000 students, faculty, and staff.
For the better part of the last decade, the University of Montana has maintained an on-premise block storage system that relied on IT to provision storage for users and departments. "We don't always know what's going on, departmentally," says University of Montana CIO Matt Riley. "There was enough traffic through Dropbox and maybe Google Drive that we didn't have to monitor," Riley says. The Most Important Interview Question of All Time - Part 1.
Job-seekers: How to Answer “The Most Important Interview Question of All Time” – Part 3. IT Mission, Vision and Values Statements. CIO — It’s taken at face value that mission-vision-values statements are worth doing.
But talk to the rank-and-file and you’ll find that this artful prose and the beautiful posters that carry it have little impact on organizational performance. They may even have engendered a degree of cynicism. “Is that all our leaders did in that retreat? They’re so out of touch. I bet they were playing golf rather than solving our problems.” Why do mission-vision-values statements typically fail to do much good? Mission The typical mission statement: “To be a world-class supplier of IT products and services that help our clients make gobs of money.” What kind of reactions from staff might leaders be hoping for? In fact, the typical mission statement does little more than state the obvious: We’re in the IT business. Effective mission statements define the business of each small group within the organization.
Group-level mission statements (I call them “domains”) have some side benefits as well. Www.best-management-practice.com/gempdf/ITIL_The_Basics.pdf. Challenge and Change (EDUCAUSE Review. George L.
Mehaffy is Vice President for Academic Leadership and Change at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). Early one morning in April 1860, a rider carrying a precious cargo of mail spurred his horse and galloped out of the stables at St. Joseph, Missouri. He would ride for about 100 miles, changing horses every 10 miles, before relinquishing the mail sack to the next rider. That ride began the famous Pony Express, which carried mail from Missouri to Sacramento, California.
Strategy.