Michael DiPaolo's blog

We have a broken change management process, especially in the infrastructure areas.  I have ordered an immediate halt to all non-operational changes without the explicit approval of the executive team (that team includes John Hooper, Charlotte Russell, Dorothy Flores, Wil Clark and myself).

ITSS has in place an approved strategic plan.  That plan has a large number of initiatives, all designed to meet the plan objectives and ultimately move the ITSS strategy forward.  Each initiative has been assigned to an ITSS Director.  The initiatives have been scheduled over the next three years and mid-level tasks are being developed for each initiative.  These initiatives are really projects and will be executed as ITSS projects.  This type of engagement in a strategic plan is unknown to most of you. 

Moving forward, in addition to product managers and project managers, we will develop a Single Point of Contact (SPOC) for ITSS.  Right now, customers have told us that our communications with them and their ability to get help both need improvement.  We have 2 employee continuous improvement teams working on these customer satisfaction problems.  Their initial recommendation calls for a SPOC for assistance.  This will start to become a reality as we move to a new IT Service Management (ITSM) System that will handle requests and incidents for our custom

We are embarking into new territory with our IT Shared Services governance.  We have on staff three new Product Managers.  These individuals are assigned as the primary contact for all customer initiatives, customer relationship management and the management and chairpersonship of their governance Program Management Committees.

We are embarking on a new approach to managing projects in ITSS.  Starting this fall, projects (meaning major initiatives) will begin to be managed by our Strategic Services Division Project Managers.  We will initially have 3 project managers on staff and more if needed.  Why?  Because we are living in an era where tightly managing timelines, resources, deliverables, etc.

 All of our key leaders (37 in all) have completed the Manager/Director Boot Camp training.  We designed this training specifically for our leaders to make sure they understood their importance and the importance of living our values effectively.  Embedded in the training were the following general topics:  culture and change, accountability, building effective teams, engaging people, continuous improvement, resource allocation and building the culture.  A key thought running through all of the training is employee empowerment.  Empowerme

Dictionary.com defines Adaptability as: Able to adjust oneself readily to different conditions. Change is upon us. Serious change. We face the kind of change that the introduction of the Internet brought to traditional computing. The change that we face is moving more rapidly than ever before. I listened to a speaker this week who said that the time between signficiant changes to IT continues to get smaller and smaller and if we don't adapt quickly, we'll be left behind. Charles Darwin said “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.

I know that "urgent" and "time critical" have historically had relatively little meaning unless it was related to the beginning/ending of a semester or some similar date-definite event on a campus. Today, the term urgent means "get it done now not later". We have been told to "keep the pedal to the floorboard and not let up on the gas". I cannot stress enough the need for action. We cannot be bogged down in analysis paralysis or long-cycle decision making.