Schedule

Starting with a Rose-Bud-Thorn activity last spring, over the last year, our campus has created an engaging goal planning project. This project includes everyone in IT working together on teams to achieve strategic goals that will move the department forward. This project was designed to promote communication and collaboration while giving everyone shared ownership in defining and achieving the goal. For this presentation, we will describe the process and then discuss outcomes and lessons learned.

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—

Phrases never uttered at a modern UC campus:

• “Sure, we have enough room for all our staff.”
• “We actually have too many conference rooms.”
• “We want to do less collaboration. So, we’re going to keep people spread out and siloed.”

One UC tech department finally said, “Enough is enough!” and decided to do something about it. The result: A complete gutting of the office suite, a year-long relocation, and the resulting modern, open office environment. Walls replaced—

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—

Do you have trouble connecting with your clients and customers? Perhaps you are challenged working with your boss or colleagues or would like to increase your confidence to advance your career. This workshop will teach you the 5 points in the Self-coaching model; a framework to classify and categorize all situations. This is a technique used to monitor personal effectiveness by uncovering a higher self-awareness. Use the self-coaching model to monitoring undesired outcomes. Participants will learn how to effectively self-coach, create an individual growth plan—

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—

There is no recording for this session. The presenters have opted to provide the slides for attendees. These can be downloaded below in the Session Files section - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

Setting a workplace goal is easy but accomplishing that goal can be incredibly hard. Personal blockers such as negative talk, fear, procrastination and perfectionism can sink one's efforts before they start. Conversely, a focused effort, support, and sponsors can help one achieve even the most—

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—

Whether you have team members who are off-site employees or you’re working on a project that involves cross-campus collaboration, remote work comes with its fair share of challenges and considerations. If remote work isn’t ingrained into your department’s culture, problems won’t be far behind. Projects can be delayed because dispersed teams aren’t used to communicating with out-of-office colleagues. Discontent may simmer if in-office workers don’t feel comfortable contacting off-site ones. Your stakeholders might feel that your team—

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—

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—

Whether you want to learn a new skill, increase your chances for landing a new job, or just want to collaborate with other like-minded individuals on projects, networking is an essential tool.

In this session, the speaker will share how the use of effective networking brought their department new clients.

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—

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—

Join us to learn how we are developing student worker pipelines to illuminate talent that compete well in open recruitments and can transition quickly and seamlessly after graduation.  Securing graduating resources early in their career path offers the opportunity to support, train, and mentor blossoming talent into senior, supervisory, and management roles, encouraging staff development and retention, and reducing recruitment time and costs.  Additionally, this practice creates development and leadership opportunities for existing staff. We would like—

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—

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—

We often joke that we need to "manage our manager." What do IT staff really want? How do we create an environment where people feel that their skills are appreciated and utilized? How does that affect retention? I'd like to analyze some issues that cause conflict in the IT world. Then, we will discuss some strategies for making more accurate project estimates and balancing work and tasks, and what changes we can make.

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—

At the request of the presenter, the session recording will not be posted. Please reach out to the presenter with any questions. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

Successful individuals are enhanced by ongoing professional and leadership development. Douse some fuel with enriched mentoring aligned to individual career interest then you shall see your gems taking their true form.   Join us and learn how our IT/CS Development and Mentorship Program (DMP) has grown from infancy four years ago—

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—

With the goal of starting COPs at all UC campuses, this workshop will show you how to leverage resources to build a broad and diverse network of practitioners in:

• Organizational Change Management 

• Continuous Improvement based on Lean Six Sigma

• Project Management 

Our Business Excellence Community of Practice (BECoP) is a consortium of these local communities of practice that has been growing and thriving and has lessons, tips and tools to share. This community serves as a tool for—

I will talk about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and wilderness backpacking in general. I will bring my backpack and unpack it to show the gear I use/used and answer any questions about hiking the PCT, especially from the perspective of being a solo woman hiker.

People in tech should step away from tech now and then and being alone in the woods is one way to refresh oneself as well as trigger personal growth. Solo hiking—

We hear the importance of having inclusive, collaborative teams, but often lack effective tools and practices needed to support this change.  To truly leverage diversity within teams, they need to actively foster open communication and dialogue, prioritizing different perspectives as input into decisions.

Drawing from our experience implementing Agile methodologies and inclusive meeting practices within our IT department, we will walk through several techniques used at the group, divisional, and departmental level that help individuals be heard,—