September Minutes

ITAC MEETING MINUTES
September 18, 2008

Attendees: Niamh Darcy, Darryl McGraw, Gloria McNeill, Reginald Brown, Robert Michaud

Wake County: Sean Fiene, Lib Wanner
Due to work schedules, Sondra Chaffee, Shannon Tufts, Frieda Artis, Vass Johnson & John Killebrew could not attend the meeting.

The meeting began at 9:05 am.

Lib Wanner welcomed everyone to the meeting, introduced Sean Fiene as the new Business Office Assistant and stated that the agenda for today’s meeting is a review of the Summer highlights in IS, Potential Meeting Topics for October 2008 – May 2009, and discussion of the IS Department Project Portfolio and Tracking System as well as other topics for discussion.

Summer Highlights from the IS Department
Lib Wanner discussed highlights of the summer months that included two awards received by the IS department. The first award, a ranking of #8 in the Digital Counties Survey for counties with a population of 500,000+ for the effective use of technology in the County was presented to the Wake County IS Department and the second award is a ranking of #3 in the Best of the Web County Portals category. This is a ranking of all counties in the country as to the overall design, effectiveness and presentation of their website. ITAC members congratulated Lib and the IS Department on these accomplishments.

Review of Potential Meeting Topics for October 2008 – May 2009
Lib Wanner delivered a brief overview of the topics to be covered each month from October 2008 through May 2009 and asked for input on the topics by the committee. Lib specifically asked if the topics are of value to the ITAC membership to discuss with her and if there were other topics they would like to discuss in addition to or instead of those proposed. The consensus of the committee was that the topics as proposed are beneficial to the committee and will provide insight for all members involved.

Overview of the IS Project Portfolio & Tracking System
A PowerPoint presentation of the IS Project Portfolio & Tracking System was delivered by Lib Wanner. ITAC members had copies of the presentation and related materials emailed to them in advance of the meeting and followed along as Lib made her presentation. Lib discussed the context for the new system which included how to prioritize the heavy workload the IS Department has to ensure staff members are focused on the most important work of the organization. Lib indicated that the Project Portfolio and Tracking System was created by Dan Edwards, IT Manager for Strategic Planning and the IS Management Team to address this situation. Lib also said another purpose for creating the system was to serve as a communication tool for both the IS staff and the rest of the organization to allow them to easily see the projects being worked on and their priority levels.

Lib then explained the plan of the IS department to prepare and organizational work plan by July 1st with team and individual work plans aligned with the organizational plan. Lib indicated that the organizational work plan would show management what teams and individual team members would be concentrating their time on during the fiscal year. Lib said that they had not met their goal of having this completed by July 1st, but had made good progress on refining the tool over the summer and the new goal was to have the individual work plans completed by the end of September.

Lib then outlined the questions the department asked itself to achieve a solution to the workload situation. In summary the answer was to have a better method of tracking time involved in each project by each team and/or member and to ensure the staff was working on projects with the highest priorities. Lib briefly reviewed past efforts made to capture work effort and prioritize time and indicated that these methods simply did not work. Lib asked the committee members if they had similar experiences and several members indicated that they had. Lib then reviewed the Microsoft Excel based project portfolio and tracking system in detail with the group and showed how various filters allowed for customized views of the information. Several ITAC members indicated that they, too, used the simple spreadsheet format to do project and resource tracking. Robert Michaud stated that his group also uses a similar spreadsheet that also tracks the resource levels used in projects. For example a team member would establish on a scale on level of involvement giving management the ability to see if additional resources are required. Lib mentioned that the IS department is looking into adding this information to their Project Portfolio and Tracking system. A recommendation was added Robert Michaud to also switch from the tracking system scale of involvement by members from 1-5 to 1-8 as in how many hours of each day devoted to the project. Lib asked for additional feedback on the design and possible improvements to be made to the spreadsheet. .

Niamh Darcy stated that in her group individual members are required to track and forecast their time in projects. Individual member tracking puts more responsibility on staff members to be accurate with their hours worked on projects. Lib then thanked the group for their input.

Other Topics for Discussion
Lib Wanner asked the group if they were pleased with the timing of meeting materials being delivered via e-mail. All members agreed time was sufficient in preparation of meeting.