After the entire team worked to complete the SIS 9.2 Upgrade, the Registrar’s Office began a journey in fiscal year 2020 (FY20) to create a project portfolio from the ground up. Due to various competing project and task priorities and a commitment to deliver to the campus community, they brought in a project portfolio manager, Katie Free, to design and establish flexible methods of collaboration and resource utilization. What resulted are inclusive project portfolio, task, and project budget management processes reflective of the shared governance strategies of UW–Madison.
Tasks: Task management, for singular and more immediate work, is accomplished through a weekly task scrum, where leadership, application development, and technical services team members discuss work-in-progress and plan priorities for the upcoming week. They use Jira, a project and issue tracking software, to visualize, organize, and track work, and the development team uses it to understand and plan capacity.
Project Portfolio: Project Portfolio Management is a set of cyclical processes for larger and more complex work key to the mission of the Office of the Registrar (RO). It not only helps to complete projects of various sizes through strategic project management, but it also provides a framework for intake, prioritization, evaluation, team member assignment, capacity planning, and budgeting for projects, programs, and products. The process is not static; there are yearly planning efforts, as well as monthly cycles of reevaluation and adjustments.
FY20
6 Complete, 3 In Progress Projects | 10 Product/Service Enhancements | 355 Jira TasksWith the implementation of these new processes in fiscal year 2020 (FY20), the office was able to complete a total of six projects, 11 product/service improvements, and 355 Jira tasks. Compared to the last four years, the team completed an average of 36% more RO-specific tasks (ROTS) in Jira during FY20! They also ran 22 upcoming initiatives through the process for planning. Based on these successes, the team plans to use the processes for FY21.
FY21
18 Planned Projects | 15 Planned Product/Service Enhancements | Lots of Jira Tasks!Leading up to July, Katie worked with the team members in the RO to gather priorities, estimate timelines and cost, and submit those to the Division of Enrollment Management leadership for funding. Katie and John Ford, the Director of Student Enterprise Applications, discussed plans with the Madison Budget Office and the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) CFO to secure funding allocations before receiving final approvals within RO Leadership.For each initiative, the office is currently finalizing team members, including working with DoIT for necessary staffing. They expect to have over 80 individual contributors to project and product/service initiatives in the portfolio during the year! Project kickoffs for the year and determining central communication strategies are next. If you want to learn more about these processes or the plans for FY21, contact Katie Free.