“After the transition to remote operations, we asked people how we did, and all they remembered was that we handed out laptops. It was so underwhelming.”
CIO, Private University
As IT leaders continue to navigate operations amidst COVID-19, they must regularly reflect purposefully on the efficacy of their immediate response – what did we do well? Where could we have reacted more quickly or more efficiently? Answering these questions requires objectively reflecting as an organization and documenting key lessons learned.
IT leaders must also then make the case for continued investment by explaining how the IT organization enabled the institution to quickly move online and has continued to support remote or hybrid operations—how many faculty and staff trainings did IT facilitate? How many security incidents did IT prevent? This means highlighting both the work completed during the pandemic (e.g., laptops loaned) and the less glamorous pre-COVID-19 work implemented across the past several years that set the institution up for success (e.g., MFA implementation).
Institutions are still trying to fully grasp how COVID-19 has and will continue to impact business operations. In this context, we advise IT leaders revisit this assessment toolkit with their leadership team on a bi-monthly basis. This approach promotes an agile and iterative mindset needed to sustain and optimize operations amidst continued disruption.
IT Pandemic Operations Assessment
Use the worksheets in this section to review the IT organization’s response to the challenges of remote and hybrid operations amidst a pandemic. The worksheets divide IT’s response into nine categories, each containing between three and 10 items. Items are rated both from a past perspective, to determine how well IT accomplished necessary goals during the most recent period of operations, and from a future perspective, to identify actions that ensure services remain viable.
The review can be done by a single leader, but we advise making it an IT leadership team exercise, supplemented if desired by major stakeholders or IT governance participants. Use the results to surface differing perceptions as well as to identify action items.
After completing the Post-Response Review Worksheet, use your response and sustainability subtotals for each category into the Score Tally Sheet. Identify items scored 1 (major upgrade needed) for Response and/or Sustainability for each category in the column on the right.
Building on the insights generate by the first two tools, use the prompts in the Discussion Guide and Action Plan to plan for the future. The discussion questions are broken into two categories: Operations Assessment Debrief and Sustainability of Pandemic Operations.
IT Value Assessment
Upon assessing operations, IT organizations must turn to documenting their work and explaining their contribution. As universities look to cut budgets, IT will likely face an uphill challenge in demonstrating their value to campus leaders and maintaining current funding levels. IT organizations should therefore ask: “What aspects of the COVID-19 response and transition most effectively communicate IT’s value to campus? How did our previous work position us for success?”
In this tool, document metrics that compare IT operations during ‘normal’ and pandemic times.
IT leaders recognize that IT’s ability to support remote and hybrid operations benefited from projects and initiatives completed pre-COVID-19. However, it’s critical that IT organizations effectively share that message with university leadership to demonstrate value.
Brainstorm which pre-COVID-19 IT projects strengthened institutional response, including completed projects and in-flight implementations that were expedited to accommodate COVID-19 operations. The following list of IT projects and initiatives are aligned with specific metric areas proposed in the previous tool.
Use this guide to guide to compile IT metrics on services and projects to craft a compelling narrative about IT’s contributions to operational and academic continuity during the pandemic. Begin with an area of strategic concern, then list the strategic objectives of the institution or major stakeholder unit during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a team, then examine the ways that IT has contributed to that objective either through more recent projects or pre-COVID-19 initiatives and pair relevant metrics to demonstrate IT’s value.
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