Taking a swag at Resource Management and announcing a couple positions.

Preamble...
Recently, we created the Delivery team within MSIS which is a combination of the Solutions Center, Data Management Services, M3 and Software Delivery as well as the individual roles of Dan Stuart and Brett Miller. My direction with this team formation is with the intention to work on establishing three practices that are lacking in our organization. I'll be working with the various roles within Delivery to make progress on establishing resource management, capacity management and talent management.These three practices are part of my deliverables for the coming 12 months, starting with resource management.  This post focuses solely on resource management, though I'll communicate more about capacity and talent management soon.

The team of Directors that report to me will focus on the matter of resource management within the Delivery Program. As a team these Directors are not intended to be a day-to-day decision making layer of management over the teams of our program. I would like to exercise caution and be purposeful when creating leadership and management functions in order to ensure they are measurable. I will be sharing these measures with the broader group as they are developed, though in the meantime I thought it a good idea to share some of the decisions that have been made to date by my team of direct reports.

Why bother?

First I suppose it would be worthwhile to define what I mean by resource management. There are a fair number of opinions and approaches for resource management . For me, what is most important right now is to look at Delivery operational budget and staff as our resources and as a team of Directors come together to discuss the highest and best use of those resources. This would be a shift from allowing each individual director being self-deterministic about how prior operational dollars and staff positions were accounted for. In the past we would simply refill positions when vacant whereas now we will discuss 'what is the best use of those resources?' rather than presume refilling is our best option.

This developing practice is best aligned with one of our MSIS Values on rigor but it also is in direct correlation to how I believe the Delivery program should align with the overall MSIS Strategy and our objective to be a more strategy driven organization. Documenting a strategy and then shifting resources and focus to execute that strategy is the only way to make demonstrable progress.

What has changed?
This team of the Directors that report to me has met three times now to discuss resource management.

The first meeting we got together to start discussing our team, how we intend to proceed, and we reviewed the current state of the MSIS budget.

The second meeting was our first true resource management discussion wherein Jim Behm convened us and presented his plan for rounding out the Software Delivery teams. In that meeting we had an excellent conversation about the vision for the software development teams and how we would practically like to approach the hiring and shaping of them. This provided a good opportunity not only for Jim to solidify his vision but also share it with the Directors so that we could provide additional input and support. Some of that conversation informed Jim's recent blog post on staffing strategy.

This week we met for our third meeting Mary Hill , Gary Nichols and John Herlocher brought us together and discussed : DMS positions, Service Desk agents and the open database administrator position. We approved a new role for DMS for a data architect as well as two replacement service desk agents as Greyson LaHousse and Adrian Flynn are leaving the organization in June to pursue their dreams in various degrees. They both depart in excellent standing and with my well wishes. The DBA position we decided to hold back for additional considerations.

Epilogue... 
This represents a distinct change in how we are approaching available resources. In essence we agreed to shift dollars that were priorly invested in a project manager position for DMS into a data architect position and we agreed that we need additional data and options for how we may invest the dollars that were priorly allocated to an open DBA position. We approved the Service Desk agent replacement positions, but with a good deal of discussion on the Desk's current performance and where we intend to focus more on in the near future. I find it more interesting is that we are doing this as a team as opposed to me working one on one with each Director which I believe makes the process more credible and informed.  This makes the Directors more accountable to each other and the MSIS strategy which is important for us to be successful in our charges.

So now you know a little more about what is going on behind closed doors when the Directors in Delivery meet. I wish I could tell you that it was more like an Ian Fleming novel, but it is really just the nitty-gritty of making incremental changes quietly so that we can support our School more effectively.

I look forward to any feedback or questions you may have.