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Last week we celebrated our annual UChicago ITS Excellence Award winners with a small reception in Harper Court. With Lake Michigan as our backdrop, we took time out from all the work we have to recognize the individuals who, nominated by peers, continually show a willingness to go above and beyond.

It was a great event, punctuated by impromptu selfies, some great tweets, and lots of smiles. I have written about the process we used to arrive at our winners and wanted to follow that up with some additional thoughts. After the committee had met and selected the winners from the nominations I asked our team if we could produce a small video that tried to capture the spirit of that selection meeting. We asked members of the committee to reflect on the process and to try and express how fantastic it was to hear our colleagues praise and talk so positively about their peers. The video above was put together by some talented members of the team in less than 12 hours and was showed at the award ceremony.

We do things like the Excellence Awards because we genuinely want to work together in support of our great University. My only regret from the day was that more of our team couldn’t be there. I think everyone enjoyed the time and truly appreciated recognizing each other. We had a great time!

[/et_pb_text][et_pb_code admin_label=”Code”]<center><blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>People in C-suite jobs aren’t all bad. <a href=”https://twitter.com/colecamplese”>@colecamplese</a> you’re ok in my book! U + <a href=”https://twitter.com/UChicagoITS”>@UChicagoITS</a> = ? <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/pals?src=hash”>#pals</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/bffgoals?src=hash”>#bffgoals</a> <a href=”https://t.co/LWLfBHoZXO”>pic.twitter.com/LWLfBHoZXO</a></p>— Eric Frazier (@ettufrazier) <a href=”https://twitter.com/ettufrazier/status/760224174564601857″>August 1, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script></center>[/et_pb_code][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row admin_label=”Row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Twitter Text” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”]

Selfies, Tweets, and Retweets

One of the things I really liked about the event was that people stopped and took a picture with me after I handed them their award certificate. That was a fun surprise and ended up being a really nice way to pair each person with a tweet provided by the person who nominated them. We will be releasing the pictures along with the text of the tweet that accompany each winner over the next couple of weeks with the hashtag, “#ITSExcel” … thanks, Barry!

[/et_pb_text][et_pb_code admin_label=”Code”]<center><a class=”twitter-timeline” href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/ITSExcel” data-widget-id=”762317046382227456″>#ITSExcel Tweets</a> <script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+”://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);</script></center>[/et_pb_code][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Award Remarks Text” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”]

2016 Excellence Awards Remarks

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you all so much for coming today.

The IT Services Excellence Awards are an annual recognition program where recipients are selected by nominations. Awardees are team members that have had a broad impact on IT Services, on the University of Chicago, or nationally regardless of their position in the organization.

The nominees are staff that have the most visible and positive impact in the areas of technology, service, and management to our collective work.

This year is no different, all of the nominees exhibited excellence in their work and were recognized by their peers for doing so.

In the past, I was never a huge proponent of organizational award programs, largely because I never won one, but as I have grown in my career I now see the absolute need to systematically find ways to recognize and reward people that consistently go above and beyond.

The winning of an award is often viewed as a destination that one arrives at, but being a part of our process is what has left a lasting impression on me.

We are working in an environment where so many of us are being asked to do so much on any given day that it can become easy to not stop and take the time to recognize the work our colleagues do. Taking the time to appreciate effort and to nominate someone for that effort is a wonderful show of understanding. An understanding of how hard it is to make an impact. An understanding of how much it means to the rest of us. An understanding that we are part of a larger community that deserves extra effort. To me, that is the real reason recognition like the Excellence Awards is truly important.

I mentioned that the process has left a lasting impression on me, here’s why. It has shown me that while there are challenges within our organization, there are also groups of people who care deeply about what we are trying to do for our University. Regardless of engagement scores, watching the level of enthusiasm people brought to their nominations further reinforced to me what is at the foundation of IT Services – a commitment to serving this amazing Institution.

At the end of the day you all make me very proud to be a part of this team and I want to sincerely thank the recipients for their tremendous work and for being recognized by your colleagues. I also want to thank those who took the time to nominate and to passionately tell the selection committee why those nominees are worthy of these awards. You all lifted the spirits of the committee with your passion.

And finally, I want to thank and recognize the committee members as well for taking the time to help make today happen. Our 2016 Excellence Award winners are:

Alan Takaoka, Anna Van Dellen, Cameron Spencer, Cheryl Johnson, Daniel Yu, Debbie Bomba, Dylan Westring, Eric Frazier, Eric Harrell, Hector Martinez, Jason Edelstein, Jessica Sandy, Kathy Cosgrove, Katie Kranz, Laji Thomas, Linda Turner, Manuel Amparan, Marc Vincent, Mark Bieri , Matt Zurek, Mike Pry, Mike Strode, Moid Syed, Pat Hickey, Patty Kim-Celmer, Rafael Sanchez, Ramu Pedada, Roberto Vera, Rodney Henderson, Ryan Harden, Sandeep Guntaka, Sherif Hassabo, Shontay Grant-Pinder, Tina Flowers Morris, and Tony Juarez.

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This time last week I was finalizing my slides for the IT Services All Hands meeting. I was trying to figure out how to cram six months of observations and forward facing action into 60 minutes and still leave some time for Q&A. I was also wrestling with the level of transparency to provide into the (typically) more opaque stuff within an organization — things like budgets, constraints, staffing levels, and the stuff that usually stays in the back office. I’ve believed that for a very long time that open is truly like an opacity slider that moves from transparent to opaque and that there is a time and a place to be very thoughtful about how aggressively you move that slider.

I decided to move the slider as close to transparent as I could without creating any problems. In other words, I believe I shared the realities of the organization as I see them. And that is an important point to focus on, “as I see them.” What makes that important is that I am seeing ITS with very fresh eyes and from a different vantage point than the members of the team. I see my day to day struggles first hand, but most of the time, not theirs. I know the strain and stress many are under, but I feel it differently. I can show empathy, but there is the reality that I probably have a different view on things. Having these kinds of conversations pulls our perspectives closer together.

By being as honest and open as I could I was trying to create a shared sense of understanding of where we are as an organization. My feeling is if we all understand where we are we can better shape how we talk about our environment. Knowing that we are dealing with financial pressures helps us all better contextualize why it is not the right time to make that hire, make that investment, or take on that project. Knowing reality together allows us to see the organization through a similar set of lenses.

I also wanted to share just how transformative our work is to UChicago right now. Within the next five years we will have completely replaced our primary ERP environments, will have made massive improvements to our network infrastructure, and completely reinvented our service management and delivery approaches. And those aren’t pipe dream promises. We have already moved to WorkDay for HCM, are in the second phase of PeopleSoft Student, and working our way into a new Financial system. The network team is at the start of an incredible initiative to overhaul the campus network to make it faster, more reliable, and advance our stance in cyber research infrastructure. Tie that together with our complete reimplementation of ServiceNow and the ongoing work to redesign our customer service approaches and we are in the middle of something extraordinarily exciting.

A part of the conversation that went too quickly, but is of great importance is how we manage our teams and use our Values as part of the decision making process. I hope I was able to reinforce how our Values truly do matter and how we are living those at work every day. I shared a model for advancing staff empowerment that deserves a longer post in and of itself, but the slide that I used is below. My goals are to improve on boarding, reduce time to productivity, provide staff with a framework for success, greatly increase engagement, and radically reduce turnover. I believe all of those are tied together in a systematic process that starts even before a new staff member is hired. There will be much more coming in the next couple of months with regard to this work.

There was actually so much more that we covered. All in all, I really enjoyed the time we spent together. There were some really hard questions that I tried to answer. Some I was able to with depth, while there were others that we had to agree that there is more work to be done to get to an acceptable answer. I left feeling energized by the level of engagement and even more committed to delivering on the promises that I’m making to this team and that we are making to our University.

The after hours get together at the Pub wasn’t too shabby either.