| | October 20159CIOReviewIT planning in a repeatable, rational, and collaborative manner. SCUP tells us not to plan in silos and then toss the latest draft of the plan from group to group. Plan together and be transparent. In our case, the Administrative IT Services (AITS) department developed strategic objectives that enable our creative and innovative faculty and students by freeing up more of their time.While it may be tempting to not have a governance framework, there must be something in place. If there is no process for people decide and prioritize collectively, it will lead to an "order taker" mindset where individual customers feel free to ask the IT department for any type of project because they do not have the awareness of the requests from others. Consequently, every customer group will believe that their priorities are the highest priorities because they did not actively participate in the process of looking across business units to prioritize what is most important for the university.A good portfolio and project management office knows what resources are available and when projects will start and finish. In our environment, the portfolio and project management office is well-suited to facilitate IT governance. Additionally, the group manages and schedules resources, monitors and controls the portfolio, develops the corporate project management center of excellence, and completes projects. A successful office should have all of these components, that is, a GPPM office: IT governance, portfolio and project management. This allows the same group of people to look from beginning to end of the project process. We expanded our GPPMO to include other components: business process improvement, records and information management, and customer relationship management. This lets us help our constituents analyze their processes before they decide they need to start a project. The records office helps constituents interpret federal, state and university policy, making it easier for individuals to store, manage, and dispose of the records generated during the course of business. Finally, the CRM office helps coordinate our social media, annual reports, and participation in events and meetings so that every member of the IT department has the ability to work with our customers. How well have we done? To date, our ROI is three to one, meaning that for every dollar spent on a project, we create three dollars in efficiency over a five-year period. There have been 513 projects reviewed, 445 approved, 65 rejected or withdrawn, 395 completed, and 53 in progress. The demand for our projects has increased 53 percent over the last five years, and there are about 87,000 hours of approved work in the pipeline.In area process improvement, we have made 84 recommendations with apotential savings of $8.1M and 7,800 hours annually and have directly engaged with 75 units on their own projects. We have trained over 800 people trained in lean and six sigma methodologies, partnered to create college-based BPI programs, engage shared service participants across the university, and mediate between groups to make forward progress.Even though we have a successful process, we are continually reviewing IT governance, so it aligns with the campus strategic plans and business needs. We made several changes to our process over time, including realigning project selection to strategic plans, improving communication outside of the process by adding a CRM group, delegating decision making for "small" projects to make the process more lightweight, and creating a cross-functional prioritization committee at a lower level in the organization because we found that the higher level employees did not have enough time to learn about the nuances of the each project to effectively prioritize them.There are many ways to set up an IT governance and project management framework. In our case, we maximize efficiency with asingle GPPMO, that guides the governance process, creates standards and requirements, manages our portfolio of work, reports on performance, focuses on integrated planning with IT and the customers, retains the capacity for large projects, and provides professional development opportunities for IT professionals through out the university.Michael Hites
< Page 8 | Page 10 >