How can we create IT projects across organizational groups that present a cohesive "One Stanford" view to our clients? What are the challenges and opportunities?
Biggest Challenge per Matt: Business models. It's hard to do business across organizations and the financial administration requirements make it almost prohibitive.
Can we find a way to create a pool of money/resources at a higher level to streamline this process?
Marlen points out that ITS helped GSB transition to Google without pay, because of an existing interest. What made that possible? Mostly just the huge degree of self-interest.
Most everyone wants to collaborate, but there's rarely the time/bandwidth to do it.
There may be a lot of opportunities out there, but we don't necessarily share enough information to know what's there.
Elisha offers the Google 10% model for cross-functional project involvement.
Matt brings up a new performance pilot project, one part of which is collaboration.
Some subsidization might be necessary to make these projects happen.
How do we raise awareness of the opportunities?
* Central project office to help coordinate knowledge of efforts taking place across the University?
* AS Projects / Confluence?
* Scotty: "Observable Work" idea. The idea being that you have a project dashboard with links to details about project status, issues, work. This provides transparency and potential for collaboration from any source.
What are the incentives? Can we find a way to reward the collaborative behavior? Could subsidies be reserved for such things?
Could SGG use collaboration as one of the metrics for evaluating projects for approval?
Can we have this happen at a higher/broader scope?
Visibility of project planning seen as key.
Also the use of time - people should be encouraged and incentivized for collaboration.
Peer review of projects of a certain scale, with public comment.
Question: who are the peers?
How do we get the ideas to bubble up from the sources of best feedback, not necessarily management types? Do we use an idea-rating system as the Salesforce demo? There is a precedent from Etch's request for input on efficiencies, which turned into actual directions.
Are all projects suitable for public visibility? Some groups may have good reasons not to publicize until there's something ready to show.
So, how do we MAKE projects more visible? There is a list of projects, but it doesn't really include the details.
Could we take as an example some project that comes out of the Unconference discussions and find a project team (cross-functional) that will be able to complete it as an example of the benefit of collaborative process?
How about a centralized site with each group's road map, visible and searchable? That would at least allow people to identify areas of duplicate effort and investment.
In response to the question around whether some projects might do better NOT disclosed to public view, Matt provides an example from the HSDO where they went to the group most likely to object to their project (AS), and had excellent results from the collaboration.
Visibility can open up your project to more collaborators, offers of resources/testers, and different types of collaborators than you would be able to source internally.
Having a wide set of collaborators lets you pick the right sort of people to include at particular phases of project development.
There's a worry that including too many collaborators could bog down projects by introducing too many stakeholders to the project specification part of the process.
There's a particular cultural challenge that may take some significant time to adapt. Introduce a little collaboration at a time.
What channels currently exist for publicizing projects?
AS Confluence
Libraries Confluence
GSB Confluence
Drupal site
You don't really need to have all the data in the publication site, but there needs to be a central place to at least link to the information.
Issue: "AS Projects" and "AS Confluence" and other sites all have a single department in the name.
- AS has tried to get the name "Projects" and was rejected, so it became "AS Projects"
Would it be more effective to simply create a mechanism for groups to publicize their efforts to peers to gather feedback and identify duplicate efforts? Maybe the Expert Partners list? Some people prefer the idea of having a central source of information about efforts, because it's easy for emails to be lost in the shuffle.
Whatever source of information is created needs to be open to everyone, needs to have a contact name associated with each project, and needs to be quick and simple. Not necessarily complete in its details. Additionally, it doesn't need to just be new projects - historical projects as well can be very educational. The contact information is also very important - profiles by user to indicate areas of expertise and familiarity.
