Update from Stacey

I am pleased to announce that Amber Cellotti has been hired as Deputy Registrar and will lead our Office of the Registrar. She brings decades of experience to the role, starting her University career in the Graduate School (GSSP) to supporting the Office of the Registrar as a Coordinator and then Associate Director. She has served as Interim Deputy Registrar for the last several months and has helped the office through multiple transitions. I’m thrilled to welcome her to this new role!

With Amber in her new role, the Office of the Registrar management team is planning to post her former position. Regarding other positions, the search for a manager of the Student Data Analytics team is in its final round. We have many qualified candidates, and I hope to be announcing a new hire in the near future. We will have a couple of other postings soon, including Jenni Peterson’s former position leading the SR-IT business analysts and a position on the Student Data Analytics team. It’s been a busy time in ASR, and this is just a snippet of what’s going on. Thank you as always for the many ways you are supporting ASR and our University students.

Office of the Registrar

• OTR has been busy implementing an interim staffing structure to support continuity and promote professional development over the next year. The high level org chart is available on the ASR intranet, but below are some highlights. Please continue to use otr@umn.edu as the primary point of contact or for necessary student referrals. 
• Colleen Harms has been promoted to Interim Associate Director overseeing a combined unit of Service Operations and Records & Enrollment.
• Matt Duggan has been promoted to Interim Assistant Director overseeing the service operations team. 
• Theresa Nelson has been promoted to a management position overseeing the Graduate Education Records team.
• Josemy Morales has been promoted to Service Operations manager overseeing the OTR student workers. 
• In addition to adopting a new staffing structure and new allocations of work, OTR has also been busy with ongoing end of term processing including:
• 6970 undergraduate degrees posted system-wide for spring 2023
• 1552 graduate degrees posted system-wide for May 2023 (210 Twin Cities graduate term-based degrees)
• 813 professional degrees posted for spring 2023
• Over 9700 diplomas sent since May 1!
• The Destiny One Registration System (DORS) team will officially join OTR as of July 1. 
• The Duluth campus went live with GPAS which now closes out the GPAS implementation! 
• OTR staff have also been engaging in professional development. The APAS and TES teams (Stephanie Sutton, Amanda Grimm, Kathryn Kvam, Laura Butchko and Chris Smith) recently attended the CollegeSource conference in San Diego. James Harms and Amber Cellotti attended AACRAO Hill Day and the AACRAO Leadership Meeting in DC respectively. 
• We want to give the biggest kudos to all OTR staff for their ongoing support and flexibility during this interim period!

Updates from OTR and CC Alignment work

Last summer, a cross-functional team met to look at opportunities for alignment across Continuity and Compliance and the Office of the Registrar (OTR). Several changes were made as a result of that team’s work, including a change in reporting structure for the DegreeCat team (to ASR-IT) and the Degree Audit, TES, and Athletic Eligibility teams (to OTR). The Office of the Registrar has continued to work with the team’s findings and additional changes building off of the alignment team’s work include:

• The creation of a Service Operations unit managed by a new position, Assistant Director of Service Operations (posted in early June).
• Alignment of diploma operations, Records CRR functions, imaging, shared data, and mailroom operations under the Service Operations unit (Matt Duggan, Josemy Morales, and Trung Mac will report to this unit when the new manager is hired).
• This new position will also begin to manage OTR’s student athlete eligibility functions; however this will be a longer transition and team members currently responsible for this work will not change reporting lines. Our goal is to transition work and not people as we are able, with some duties being carried out by the new manager position.
• Effective June 6, Karsyn Zetah, Barb Yungers, and Colleen Harms report to Amber Cellotti under an aligned undergraduate and graduate records management unit.
• Effective July 1, Matt Duggan will take over supervision of the Records CRR team.

A sincere thanks to the OTR and C&C alignment group for their work last year and also to the entire OTR team for their continued support of the University community while these changes took shape.

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.

ASR Hierarchy Group: OTR & C&C

The team reviewing opportunities for organizational alignment between the Office of the Registrar (OTR) and Continuity & Compliance (C&C) had their kick-off on June 21 and hit the ground running, scheduling weekly meetings, identifying key questions for sponsors, reviewing position descriptions, discussing the current structures of OTR and C&C, and exploring different organizational models at other institutions. This team may engage other ASR colleagues as their work ramps up. For more information about the work this group is exploring and the team make-up, visit the N&N blog.

Overcoming the reluctance to ask for help

The pace of work in ASR can sometimes feel non-stop, making it difficult to ask for help. Wayne Baker, Ph.D. discusses this phenomenon in the article “How to Overcome Your Reluctance to Ask for Help at Work.” He shares that “70-90% of the help that is given in the workplace is in response to requests for help.” So if you’re not actively asking for help, then you are less likely to get the resources you may need.

Most individuals may face barriers asking for help, such as lacking psychological safety (“interpersonal risk taking”), not wanting to appear weak or incompetent, or assuming no one can help. Dr. Baker outlines one specific way to increase confidence in asking for help and that is through a thoughtful request. The components include figuring out your goal, making a SMART request (specific, meaningful, action-oriented, realistic, and timeliness), and asking the right people.

The mental wellness group recently discussed this article in a Q&A between members Melissa Gasper (OSF) and Amber Cellotti (OTR), which is available below.

Melissa: Many of the SMART criteria are things we have done in the past in both our personal and professional lives, which one would you want to improve on?

Amber: There’s two. Providing more meaning and timeliness. Context (i.e., meaning) around a request can help the other person suss out scope, where and how their skill set may play a role, and provide the opportunity to ask clarifying questions. Timeliness is key in giving those you’re asking the space to evaluate their own capacity and what time they can commit. The author shares that if a request is urgent, say so, but clear dates/deadlines are just as crucial. The combination of meaning and timeliness sets the stage for leveraging an importance/urgency matrix.

Melissa: Based on the business cycle at the University, when is the best time to make a SMART request?

Amber: Much of our work in ASR ebbs and flows based on our student’s life cycle (e.g., accepting financial aid, registering for classes, paying tuition, applying to graduate, etc.), so I think it’s important for us to be aware of peak times for our ASR units and colleagues, the ways in which we support students, and how our work is impacted based on those two things. So, there may never feel like a “best time” to make a SMART request, but if a request needs to be made during peak times, it’s appropriate to acknowledge the impact. On a personal front, it’s important to know and own your threshold and acknowledge when you need to reach out for help. Don’t wait until it hits the fan before taking action.

Melissa: Besides making your workload more manageable, what are some other advantages to seeking help?

Amber: On one hand, practice makes perfect. Putting intention behind action can be difficult, but practicing making SMART requests will make it easier with time. It’s never going to feel easy if you don’t start. The more we normalize the act of asking for help and being strategic in our approach, the more it is embedded within our culture. I’ve also found that reaching out for help, and being on the receiving end of being asked for help, is another way to make new connections and establish relationships not only in ASR, but across the University.