Operations & Strategic Initiatives

Operations

• Annual review of our Williamson Hall building emergency plan and ASR’s Continuity of Operations plan is happening.
• The annual space survey was completed last week. Each year departments are asked to look at the space they are responsible for and ensure that everything is accounted for accurately. 

Projects

• Completed the New American Indian Scholars Program workflow in Jadu and it is ready for launch.
• The Projects team is providing project management coaching for lead staff working on the FAFSA Simplification project through the launch in spring 2024.
• We continue to partner with the ASR Application Development team to provide ongoing UX & Business Analysis to support their work intake and refinement.
• The Projects team has taken on the OIT PI Planning coordination efforts for ASR. We have been meeting with all ASR-IT and business unit teams to ensure our collaborative efforts with OIT are submitted to the appropriate OIT agile team for prioritization in the coming quarter. 

Training

• To coincide with the Coursedog launch, OSI Training created four new training courses that teach Coursedog authors and approvers across the University the basics of the new system.
• OSI Training is beginning to create an updated online FERPA training.

UX & Content Strategy

• The team has been supporting the FAFSA Simplification effort mandated by changes at the federal level. There are many changes related to terminology, so a thorough review of forms, emails, and web content is underway. The team is also helping ensure that students and families are aware of the changes and this year’s delayed availability of the FAFSA form. 
• Following a redesign of the DORS website, an awareness campaign was kicked off so that the campus community is aware of the benefits of using DORS. This effort is based on feedback from users saying they wished more people knew about DORS. 
• The 2022-2023 annual report process has kicked off. This is an update of a publication initiated for the previous academic year (linked on the ASR website homepage). An area of focus for this year’s project is documenting the sources of data we publish. 
• We’re also starting a content review of the One Stop website. This annual process ensures that all the content is accurate and trustworthy.

WorkflowGen retirement update

The work to retire ASR WorkflowGen (WFG) processes is well underway. ASR units have been hard at work planning, analyzing, and developing solutions for our WorkflowGen processes. ASR currently still supports 22 active processes in WFG, and we’ve already transitioned/retired 6 processes from our portfolio over the past several months. OIT has provided further details about the necessity for retirement of WorkflowGen from central IT support and planning, which is based on:

• The lack of IT specialists within business units to build and maintain the complex development of their WFG processes
• WFG’s reliance on older, unsupported .net technologies 
• The need for significant OIT technical resources due to WFG’s frequent performance failures 
• Data security constraints
• WFG being out of compliance with UMN Accessibility standards for WCAG 2.1 AA

ASR’s work to retire our WFG processes is critical to the success of the overall project, and we appreciate the time and effort that ASR staff is committing to this work. For details about ASR’s processes and progress, see our WorkflowGen Retirement Status Update.

Performance appraisals

OIT has migrated the Performance Appraisal form, and it is now available (earlier than Carin’s email indicated earlier this week). The evaluations will cover the 2021 calendar year. Supervisors will only be using overall rankings and not the individual competency ratings. If you have specific questions about the time frame or your goals from last year, talk with your supervisor.

The timeline for the performance appraisal is available below:

• Thursday, February 10 - Jadu form available for ASR staff.
• Friday, February 25 - Employees submit their form in Jadu.
• Friday, March 11 - Supervisors submit completed forms in Jadu.
• Monday, March 28 - Directors complete review on all appraisals for their unit.
• Friday, April 1 - Directors complete review for consistency across ASR.
• April 4-29 - Supervisors and employees meet to review the appraisal.

PI Planning and SAFe

Last month, we provided an overview of Program Increment (PI) Planning, a quarterly event that brings technology teams together, to plan work from January to April 2022. Stacey and Bernie Gulacheck kicked off the planning sessions with the Executive Briefing, which provides an overview of OIT’s strategic themes, alignment with MPact25, and great information on our important work in ASR and partnerships with OIT.

We are continuing to train leads and managers who work or collaborate closely with OIT teams and are starting to see OIT reach out for more participation from other units. For example, Andy Hill will be spending part of his time as the Product Owner supporting the Infrastructure and Production team starting this PI. OIT teams are presenting their PI Planning summaries over the course of the next two weeks, and in our February update, we’ll share these summaries. Please contact Jaime Wascalus (wascalus@umn.edu) if you have any questions.

PI Planning & SAFe

By now, many of you have probably heard about Program Increment Planning (PI Planning), which refers to the quarterly planning meeting that is at the heart of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) methodology. OIT is undergoing a transformation to implement SAFe across its portfolio, which involves meeting every three months to better understand the business priorities across the university. ASR is also planning in three-month increments so our OIT partners can understand ASR priorities and coordinate work across Agile teams for the next quarter. This work is being led by the ASR Operations Group with Kristy Davis and ASR’s leadership team. Currently, we are wrapping up ASR’s quarterly priorities in preparation for OIT’s upcoming PI Planning events the week of January 10.

We recently had managers and leads from ASR IT and OTR attend Leading SAFe training. While we are not in the process of fully transforming into the SAFe methodology, there are pieces, like PI Planning, that we will focus on adopting in 2022. Planning out our work for a quarter will allow our teams to understand the work done across ASR, see the capacity for new initiatives, and communicate impacts when new initiatives are presented to us. There will be more training opportunities in 2022 and collaboration across our teams to implement the most impactful facets of the SAFe methodology. Please contact Jaime Wascalus (wascalus@umn.edu) if you have any questions. We will continue to share updates in N&N.

VPN access changes

On January 4, OIT enabled a new full-tunnel pool (“AnyConnect-UofMvpnFull”), which replaced the previous pool. The new tunnel has greater security, capacity, and uses private IP space, which is more secure. Users are also now required to use Duo Two-Factor Authentication to access both the full and split-tunnel VPN networks.

As a reminder, you should only use VPN when resources cannot be accessed by any other means. Web-based UMN resources and services, such as MyU, Gmail, Canvas, G Suite, and Office 365, do not require VPN access. If you have any questions, please contact Technology Help.