Schedule

UC IT leaders have joined with EDUCAUSE to commit to greater equity and inclusion in shaping the next generation of technology professionals and leaders. This conversation between UC’s Systemwide CIO and Vice Provost for Diversity and Engagement will help IT professionals understand why diverse and inclusive workplace environments are essential for more effective and creative teams of IT professionals. Participants will learn about real-life scenarios and the resources available to help create diverse and inclusive environments.  Participants will have opportunities—

Fostering digital Inclusion and Accessibility is an ethical and legal responsibility of all IT professionals. To assist with this goal, the Office of the President funded Siteimprove as an accessibility scanning tool and training resource across UC. While introducing this tool at our campus UCSF, we began leading a culture change and developed some recipes for accessibility success.

A good set of recipes help when planning a large event. We started with an appetizer for an initial warm—

At the request of the presenter, this session was not recorded. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

Get the inside story of how and why the IT Project Management and Reporting Guidelines were created! Hear from the trenches: those that actively manage projects with a one-time project cost of $5 million or more. The panel will share how these systemwide guidelines have been applied to qualifying IT projects, the benefits and challenges of adhering to the guidelines, and—

Just because you build it does not mean that they will come… a gentle reference to "Field of Dreams," but a reality. How you define, develop, deploy, organize, and communicate your IT offering (application, service, software) directly impacts your audience. 

Silo Much?
Most IT properties reflect the structure and focus of their parent organization. But if no one uses your product, or they can't find your product, or they're frustrated by your product… then you either have—

It has been a full year since this speaker presented on her documented harassment and retaliation experiences in IT and across multiple investigative entities at UC. This presentation focuses on addressing these questions: 

1. How have IT and the University responded to date and are these responses meaningful?
2. Is IT a measurably safer and more inclusive place for women now than before the articles (see below)?
3. Have campus investigative offices modified their policies and processes?   
4. Is zero tolerance—

Our IT workforce has increasingly diversified, in demographics as well as thought.  Therefore it is critical to adapt, ensuring that we create and foster inclusive environments, structured to maximize opportunities to share knowledge and collaborate.  Roles that were never previously categorized as IT, many of which live in Analytics departments or on Informatics teams, are now directly contributing more than ever to the larger IT strategy.  In order to allow these new players to breakdown silos and—

Like a river with a flood, or a forest with a fire, sometimes you need to destroy something to renew it. Our IT Governance Committee on Technology & Architecture had become stagnant, and participation waned. Our new steering committee chair asked each committee to review its charge and focus, to ensure we were maximizing our impact. We disbanded the committee and brought together business and technical leaders to create something from the ashes. We set out to—

Mentoring, either as a mentor or as a mentee, is all about ideas: learning about new ways of approaching problems and being open to new ideas and ways of thinking. Mentoring programs are one of the best ways to build sustainable IT workforce. 

The WHPC Mentoring Program is a mostly online, robust mentoring program connecting women from around the world with mentorship and support that will help them to achieve their full potential as HPC professionals. This program provides—

Have you ever been involved in a conversation or interaction where someone says or does something that demonstrates a lack of respect or inclusion based on a personal attribute such as gender, race, ethnicity, age, etc. and everyone freezes, no one knows what to say or do?    This session will present some anonymous real life examples and allow participants to practice techniques and responses to non-inclusive behavior as a recipient or supporter/ally. Our presentation will arm participants with ready responses in common—

At the request of the presenter, this session was not recorded. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

EDUCAUSE recently asked higher ed CIOs to sign a statement that recognizes the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. A number of UC location CIOs signed, pledging to take concrete actions both in their own organizations and as part of the larger higher ed community to foster diverse and inclusive environments. Come hear from several of our own—

Calling all novice and experienced non-certified project managers! Becoming a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) can be a wise career decision, but is it right for you?

Whether you’re dabbling with the idea or already in the midst of exam prep, attend this panel discussion to learn more about why you should—or shouldn’t!—get certified. This multi-location panel will have a lively discussion around their journeys to certification, including:

1. benefits (opens doors, hireability, standardized language)
2. challenges in getting—

At the request of the presenter, this session was not recorded. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee
 

By mid-2016, UCSB had worked for 4 years to implement UCPath.  Although 13 staff were allocated to the program, none of the 126 business process designs or 50 interfaces were complete, and over 85 departments still used paper timecards.  After changing how we managed the program, UCSB drastically accelerated its deployment schedule and completed deployment in September 2018. 

In this—

There is only audio for this presentation so, with permission from the presenter, we have provided the slide deck and any supplemental materials in the Session Files section below. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

We have achieved over $7 million in IT savings and cost avoidance during each of the past three years, with no impact on service or the delivery of solutions, by encouraging all IT leaders to be excellent business people as well as excellent—

Brief: This workshop will describe steps to stand-up a centralized Project Management Office in an IS environment.  The first half of the workshop will discuss one campus’s 12-month start-up journey, including the Project Management Maturity Model framework, STARS assessment, SWOT analysis, Visioning, Planning, Staff Development, Performance Improvement, and Execution... along with the “magic” key ingredients for success. The second half of the workshop will lead individuals through a STARS profile, mini-maturity audit and readiness checklist.

Materials: An—

Think about your cube-mate or office-mate.  Do you know what motivates them to get up and come to work?  Do you know what keeps them up at night? What do they dream about changing on your campus and in your city?  

Relationships drive us.  Stories power those relationships.  Engagement at work will thrive and grow when people know each other - not just their names, but their passions, hopes, and fears.  Learn how to have a—

This session was not recorded, at the request of the presenter - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

These days, working in IT means everything from coding to budgeting to marketing. IT organizations require diversity to thrive and to manage the emerging complexities that define IT work. Yet legacy norms and expectations may prevail and constrain who gets to contribute – whether that means getting a special project, feeling included, having a voice, or just landing the job. In—

Managing large projects and all the tasks and resources that go along with them may seem daunting or overwhelming. But what if you could simplify the project management process but get even more successful results? What if you could put aside complex concepts like “Dependency Mapping”, “Resource Leveling”, and “Work Breakdown Structures” in lieu of a straightforward customer-focused process? 

The ITS-PRO ontology stands for Project Management, Reporting, and Optimization and is based on breaking down—

Whether designing an app interface or a business process, the same philosophical principles drive both Lean Six Sigma and lean software design and development. By combining the two and understanding that they are complementary and mutually reinforcing, we can leverage our product lifecycle to achieve both process improvement and core UX goals. In this talk, we’ll dive into each stage of the Lean Six Sigma methodology, and how it applies to UX design with real-world examples and—

There is currently an effort to increase the ranks of trans and gender-nonconforming workers in the technology industry nationwide. In the UC we are expanding and diversifying our culture through Transgender Health Benefits, Nondiscrimination Policies, and the inclusion of all-gender restrooms. The UC also acknowledges that we have much to do to create a safer and inclusive campus climate for trans and gender-nonconforming people. In this talk we will learn about the history of trans people in—

Ugly, large-scale, complex business and technical processes often have two fates: 1) multiple failed attempts at revision and/or implementation, or 2) slow, prolonged death because no one dares to tackle a revision. Neither serves the users or technical teams and both are incredibly painful for campuses. In this talk you will learn tools and tips about linking process improvement projects to break down complex processes into smaller, workable projects. A pilot project for process improvement in class and space scheduling will be—

Imagine your department or workflow is slowed down by functional silos, multiple hand-offs, unacceptable delays and backlogs. Or that you are working on a process that is mission critical to the success of your department but needs continuous manual tinkering.

Now let’s raise the stakes: You’re in the midst of multiple ERP projects, and you don’t want to carry bad processes into new systems. 

Enter the Lean Bench, a “go team” of process improvement experts made up of—

UC has a systemwide contract for the Siteimprove web accessibility review tools, which are available to everyone at UC. Learn how you can use them to make sure your websites are accessible to people with disabilities. The tools regularly scan your public websites to check for and show you how to fix any accessibility issues with the web pages and PDF documents. The Siteimprove tools also support standards for quality assurance (spelling, broken links), SEO, and p—

IT project stakeholders such as administrators and faculty often want detailed, specific estimates about project cost before they agree to sponsor a project. Unfortunately, as any IT project manager knows, project plans are often full of educated guesses and complete unknowns, which makes any estimate highly uncertain. This session will introduce attendees to strategies for making and discussing IT project estimates that more effectively communicate that uncertainty to stakeholders. We will discuss French and Raven’s power theory,—

This past year at UC Santa Cruz, we changed our development methodology from Waterfall to Agile. This presentation shares some observations, experiences, and lessons our web application development team learned within the first 6 months of switching.

We'll discuss:

• Why we switched to Agile.
• How our new development team is structured.
• Things we changed over the first 6 months.
• Some of the lessons we learned.
• Take-aways from the developer perspective.
• And, in hindsight, whether we think it—

At the request of the presenters, this session was not recorded. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

IT professionals face unbounded demand, constantly shifting technologies, and limited resources. As a result, our approaches to problem-solving require grit and perseverance and can too quickly exhaust us if we lack a framework and shared mindtools to manage our own and our teams’ expectations, not to mention those of our campus stakeholders.  In this session, two CIOs describe their theory and—

You may have heard about Process Palooza -- a one-of-a-kind extravaganza focusing on business process improvement that has taken on a life of its own, snowballing into a university-wide embrace of continuous improvement and business excellence. At the heart of Process Palooza is a high-stakes, fast-paced competition dubbed The Great LSS Race! LSS stands for Lean Six Sigma, a process improvement methodology built on reducing waste and improving efficiency. The competition puts teams’ LSS skills—

Automated tools can do a lot to help you with website accessibility. But to really achieve accessibility, you also need to understand and incorporate key accessibility concepts into your website and web app design. Join this session to learn more advanced skills to make your websites and web apps accessible. Topics covered will include best practices for website design, how to pick platforms and frameworks, when to use ARIA, and how to use all your development tools—

As the lines between software, hardware and cloud products become increasingly blurred, more IT products are acquired as services provisioned in partnership with external suppliers.  Additionally, every institution business process owner, whether or not part of the IT organization, needs IT solutions (increasingly SaaS) to achieve their business outcomes.  These changes move the institutional role more from building and running IT, to managing a complex set of interrelated services and supplier relationships.  The rights and responsibilities of—

Cognitive diversity is the recognition that people differ in their perspectives and how they process information. A greater diversity of thought allows teams to tackle uncertain, complex situations with far greater success than less diverse teams. In fact, Harvard Business Review has identified cognitive diversity as a key predictor of team performance and success.

This session will begin with a definition of cognitive diversity, with an emphasis on its value to the organization. Second, the session will—

UCXX IT PPMO struggled to keep up with demand for new JIRA projects and Confluence spaces. Result was frustrated teams and Cloud instances popping up around campus.

UCXX and IBM have teamed up to see how using Smart Chat technology and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can make the experience of requesting new Jira Project and Confluence Spaces go from "Why is it taking so long to get my stuff created" to "Are you serious, that is wicked—

Governance plays a critical role in vetting, approving, and prioritizing IT requests.  Common pitfalls in the life cycle of a service request typically result from inaccurate assumptions that all requests ought to be completed, and/or that all requests are of equal importance.  Often, such assumptions lead IT teams to allocate resources and expertise to requests that are high effort/low impact.  Likewise, this cultural phenomenon leads to a false sense of user-empowerment when it comes to the requesting—

It’s not just about standing up IT services anymore!  Project success is also about the quality of the underlying business processes and their adoption that leads to successful outcomes…or not. We all know how important business processes are to operating seamlessly and efficiently. And we know how challenging it is to create, optimize and maintain those processes. Learn how one campus is leveraging a state of the art Business Process Mapping (BPM) tool to address these challenges—

There is only audio for this presentation so, with permission from the presenter, we have provided the slide deck and any supplemental materials in the Session Files section below. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

After being inspired by the Women in Technology track at UCCSC 2018 we were looking for a way to support women in the IT world at our campus but didn’t know where to start. We were five women from various departments with a—