Project Champion

The project champion is a senior leader who strongly supports the project. This person is either a senior executive within your organization, or someone from the outside who has a vested interest in the success of the project. While project champion is not involved in the day to day activities of the project; this person is available, and relied upon for support and guidance throughout the project.   The project champion can also be used as an influential source during difficult aspects of a project.  I’d like to hear about your experiences related to this topic!

 

Managing Growth & Delivery of Services

Is your organization implementing an internal cloud as a strategic move towards managing growth and delivering services to meet the demands of the business? According to Tommy Peterson of EDTech Magazine June/July 2011, Franklin University updated their IT Infrastructure to manage its growth, and implement an internal cloud. Perhaps virtualization is the first step towards streamlining resources, and moving towards developing a service model to meet today’s business demands while preparing for the future? Franklin University began with virtualization as the central of the new cloud model. With federal and state budget cuts, declining endowments, universities, hospitals and other industries are finding new ways of delivering technology to improve business, increase profits and maximize service cost effectively. This shift is requiring creative and forward thinking to the delivery of IT services to an organization. This approach is looking at IT as a business.  More about Franklin University’s approach to managing growth and enduring ROI:  http://www.edtechmag.com/higher/june-july-2011/room-to-grow-in-the-cloud.html

 

Change Management – Ensuring Success

Implementing an ERP system is a tool and process for improving operational efficiency. Stakeholders must identify critical business and process weaknesses at the beginning of the implementation to fully utilize the benefits. Change management is a structured approach to manage the change process, and established to build an understanding all the way through the business so that the business is well prepared to accept the change and how the change may affect the business.

 

Building a Project Team

Selecting the most capable people  for a project team is essential to the success of a project.  The first step in building an effective project team is developing a master plan and outlining the objectives.  Next is drafting a schedule, developing a budget, and communicating the roles of the team members.  All is accomplished while keeping the priorities of the stakeholders and project sponsors in mind.

 

How to achieve efficiency in Tech Support

 Run IT as a business, it’s plain and simple.  An enterprise today needs to be able to streamline  and maximize resources enabling IT to support a wide range of common applications and technologies for the user community.  This is one reason why developing a technical support environment that drives greater efficiency and aligns to the business enhances customer satisfaction.

 

Implementing Business Intelligence (BI)

An essential part of a successful BI strategy involves implementing BI standards.  BI is a business tool, and the business should be leading this initiative, and partnering with IT.   Key to this is the CIO having a seat at the table with executive management when developing a BI strategy.  Before implementing a BI strategy, organizations first need to determine how important BI is to the decision-making process and in executing their business strategy.

 

ERP Implementation Considerations

Implementing an ERP causes massive change that needs to be managed carefully to garner the benefits of an enterprise solution.  Critical issues should be carefully considered to ensure successful implementation, such as commitment from top leadership, reengineering of the existing processes, and integration of the new ERP with other systems, and the selection consultants, training of staff on the new system.  All play a major part in the success of an ERP implementation.  Once an ERP system is implemented, going back is extremely difficult.  

Implementing an ERP system requires strategic thinking, precision planning, and consultations with departments and divisions/campuses/schools, as an ERP system integrates all aspects of a business, across the entire enterprise.   Institutions need to take into consideration certain critical issues and risks before implementing an ERP system, as these factors will ensure a smooth transition and rollout, so full benefits of the new system are realized.  

Please share your thoughts and experiences to this topic!

 

Change Management Best Practices

Best Practice for Change Management includes policy & procedures, standards for integration and communication to IT and the business management functions.  To encourage continual process improvement and enterprise wide adoption, the IT department needs the flexibility to establish a change threshold that makes sense for the organization and its respective systems. How has your organization implemented a Change Management System?

 

Hard Economic Times – Infrastructure

This is an ideal time for university IT leaders to evaluate infrastructure, standardize and reduce expenses by replacing old hardware and becoming more effective in the delivery of services.   Lowering the operational and upgrade costs aligned to business will make more of the IT budget available for truly strategic initiatives.  Technology standardization—the practice of choosing to standardize the brand and/or type of equipment—results in returns for administrators, not just in terms of financial costs and more manageable vendor contracts but also in operational efficiency.  What is your experience, additional insights?

 

Hard Economic Times – IT Services

This is a great time for IT leaders at universities to proactively manage services for business, look at opportunities to streamline everyday operations, evaluate opportunities for process improvement, infrastructure and reallocate resources to bring value to the organization.  Any additional insights?