• Picking up my aforementioned internal tensions between the gift of time and the fact that there never feels like there is enough time, I thought I would share this lovely essay by Maria Popova in her Brain Pickings newsletter about a book called Be Still, Life by Ohara Hale. The key contemplation is “how to live with presence in a culture of busyness” and seems to resonate well at this juncture in the spring/summer semester. I hope it brings a smile and a nod for some of you, as it did for me.
• The Project Management Framework sub committee, led by Carmalita, held its successful Open House sessions last week. I want to thank Carmalita, all of the members of PMCC, Babu, and the other contributors to the open house sessions for creating this opportunity. Thank you also to those of you within UTS who attended to learn more about the Project Management Framework, its templates and uses, and the PM Community of Practice. An informative series of sessions. This is an important competency for all of us with so many Projects in play at one time. Thank you all for moving this forward.
• The IT Executive committee met on Monday afternoon and three initiatives are moving forward with the committee’s support – you can find updates in Confluence but a brief recap:
  1. A Mobile Application initiative that will provide McMaster with insights into the needs and potential direction for a Mobile App.
  2. A short term Grad Admissions project to improve some of the processes and system components related to the grad admissions activities in SGS and in the faculties
  3. A wireless site survey for the campus – referred to as the Wireless Phase 3 project – the proposal has support from IT Executive although it requires some revisions and clarifications to finalize the details. Once finalized, we will move ahead with a campus wide site survey so we can evaluate and plan for campus wide wireless network enhancements.
• I attended the Strategic Leaders Program delivered by HR at OJN on Tuesday afternoon. I had been invited to be a Case Clinic Facilitator – posing a challenge to a working group of attendees for consideration and feedback towards a solution or direction. My topic was the campus engagement process for the McMaster IT Strategic Plan. I received excellent feedback from the 5 individuals who were in my case clinic group. Participants in the program come from across campus and Asma and Gerry are participating from UTS.
• I attended the Cubane Uniforum kickoff presentation on Wednesday. The session provided participants with an overview of the process, including some demos of the input process and gave people a chance to ask questions. We are beginning the new round of surveys this month and will finish up mid summer. I want to thank all of you for your participation should you be asked to support your Managers as they fulfill their surveys – and special thanks to Joanie who has been completing all of the lead up efforts to get our data ready to go as part of the pre-survey activities.
• I held a McMaster IT Strategic Plan Steering Committee meeting on Thursday. We revealed and fine tuned our IT vision – which we will be presenting at this week’s IT Community engagement sessions (have you signed up?!) and we worked on other input activities to help us build the strategic framework. It was another invigorating session and I am very grateful for the time and commitment of the Steering Committee: Susan Denburg, Jerry Hurley, Sue Becker, Michael Curwin, Andrea Thyrett-Kidd, Selene Dominguez, Jodie Lobana, Kevin Beatty, Dee Henne, along with my project team: Tanya Reid, Amanda Baldwin and Meghan Kirwin. This has been such a rewarding process so far and I am really excited to work with the IT community this week and next as we expand our input processes to include your great ideas. A reminder that I provide McMaster IT Strategic Planning updates on my website.
• I attended a workshop for eCampusOntario in Toronto on Friday morning, along with three university CIOs, and four College CIOs. This was an opportunity for David Porter, the CEO of eCampusOntario, and his team to tell us about current activities and to gather our input towards a new framework they are developing for evaluating and implementing new educational technologies and shared services in partnership with the Ontario government. It was an engaging workshop with a lot of cross sector discovery and sharing with all of the CIOs present. eCampusOntario recently met with AVPs Teaching and Learning also. They will use input from both sessions, and other discussions, to develop a survey that they will be distributing to our campuses sometime later this month to gain a deeper understanding of needs and focus areas to help fuel their activities. More to come on this front. If you have time you can take a look at the slide deck that was used to guide our conversation to get a deeper understanding of what eCampusOntario is exploring.

What I read last week

What I am up to this week