Tag Archives: prioritization

Good email practices – lead by example

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Have you ever gone through hundreds of email post vacation trying to catch up and found too many branches on one subject making it difficult to quickly get the full picture on that issue? canstockphoto17451721 (1) email

Have you ever read through a long email trail when you are in a new organization and many different people are weighing in – you don’t know who they are or what they do because there are no signatures, just a first name?

Have you ever had that sense that too much project management is happening via email?

Have you ever tried to find an email but there is no subject or useful subject to search on?

Have you ever lost the thread because the email trail is now on an entirely different topic but still carries the original unrelated subject line?

Have you ever looked at an email trail and wondered why someone doesn’t just pick up the phone or do a quick huddle with the right people to resolve the issue?

If the answer to any of these questions are “yes”, you may share some of my frustrations with managing email.

So, what do we do? Complain or lead by example? Continue reading →

IT governance – basic but critical

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The first three months of my interim CIO engagement at University Hospitals has flown by. I’m fortunate to be working with a very talented IT team and we recognize there is always room for improvement. We canstockphoto22767750have already made some very positive changes and improvements. We are tightening up how we manage and monitor the production environment to reduce preventable incidents. We do a root cause analysis on every major incident and review them as a team at our bi-weekly leadership meeting, tracking all subsequent action items. We are making progress on numerous major priority projects and there have been several system upgrades and go lives during this period. We are doing detailed planning for our new hospital integration efforts. We are launching our visual management board and leadership huddle next week as part of our lean efforts. And we have re-established an executive level IT steering committee addressing the critical need for IT governance.

Our third IT steering committee will be Monday evening. Our CEO and other senior executives are engaged – exactly what we needed. They are developing a deeper understanding of our current work and the many new requests we have received since this year’s budget was approved. We have reviewed with Continue reading →