ITServices

Some Ways to Make WebEx Meetings a Little Better

/ Cole Camplese / 8 Comments

As WebEx adoption grows on campus, we now have over 5,200 users, I am spending more time using the technology to get groups from across campus together. Without using the technology we have at our fingertips, we spend way too much time getting from our “edge of campus” locations to more convenient meeting spaces at the center. Using WebEx well can save the University money in the form of less wasted time moving around … clearly that enhances productivity. The down side of using WebEx or a similar technology to conduct meetings is that we don’t always do it really well. I was thinking about that issue the other day as I listened to people talk over each other, come into a WebEx meeting room late and interrupt, and fumble with technology. The technology can support very effective meetings, but we need to use it better. I thought it might be worth throwing out some ideas on how to make the meetings more effective. Some of this isn’t rocket science, but good to think about. I’m curious if others have thoughts.

If you are the host or a participant of a WebEx or virtual meeting, think about doing these things to make the meeting more effective:

  • Email an agenda in advance of the meeting. It is always a good idea to send an agenda in advance, but particularly important to send one for a virtual meeting. Do everyone a favor and email one as well as attach it to the calendar invite as many people don’t see attachments when we accept calendar invites on mobile devices.
  • Start the WebEx on time and before you start ensure that the physical room has any necessary conference phone, projectors, and equipment before the start of the meeting.
  • Let the meeting attendees know which WebEx functions you intend to use. Audio only, screen sharing, video. It is a bummer to decide to do a meeting while in the car only to find out that screensharing will be a big part of the meeting.
  • If you have a large number of attendees, conduct a roll call at the start. This is most effectively done with the host reading out the list of attendees and asking if they are on the call.I don’t know about you, but I find it very ineffective on a large meeting to ask everyone on the phone to randomly announce themselves.
  • If key participants are missing at the start of a meeting, ask the group what they wish to do. In other words, wait for them, proceed without them, or reschedule the meeting.
  • Again, just good meeting practice, but particularly important with WebEx meetings, at the end of the meeting, summarize what was discussed, what was decided and what are the next steps. As a host you can work with the people on the call to decide who will send out a meeting summary.
  • Have one conversation at a time to respect the team members on the phone. Actively stop side conversations. It’s very difficult to be on the phone and hear multiple conversations going on in the meeting room.
  • If additional participants join a meeting in progress, it is generally not necessary to immediately stop the proceedings to ask who joined and recap for them. I typically wait for a logical break, then ask who joined and recap as appropriate.

I think the most important thing you can do is work to make sure you join on time and mute your microphone when you aren’t talking. You milage may vary with these ideas … anyone have other things they do to make virtual meetings less frustrating?

ITS Strong

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

I’ve been at UChicgao for long enough now to really know about our organization. I often tell people one of the perks of being in the CIO chair is the opportunity to learn the organization in a very complete way. Having to help the leaders across ITS solve problems has made me learn the complete functioning of the team and it has given me a very good idea of who we are as an organization. I’m sure most of us can talk about what our make-up is — we know we are 265 or so people who work together. But I wonder if we actually know and understand that we are also much stronger together?

Yesterday I was at a session at the EDUCAUSE Connect Chicago event where the presenter was talking about how he had implemented a skill inventory for his organization. What was interesting to me is that he went further and added the idea of an “internet inventory” so people could indicate how interested they were in various skills. It produced some interesting results and lots of good follow up conversation. When I asked how big his group was he told me it was under 25, so naturally my next questions was how does it scale to something like ITS’s size?

I asked that not to make sure he knew our organization is bigger than his, it is because one of the things I see everyday in ITS is that we so often don’t take advantage of the intellectual strength we have as a collective. What I mean is that I see parts of our organization struggle deeply with solving a problem or delivering a creative solution because they think they are going it alone and they don’t know there are people in other parts of ITS who have the answers to their own questions. We have to stop that and learn about our collective strength, not just our individual skills. We need to lean on that.

Related to the skill and interest assessment question is that in an organization the size of ITS I do not believe members of our team really know about other parts of the org. For example, I could easily see someone rate themselves very highly as a developer, but have little interest in applying it in the context they are currently in and getting down and frustrated not knowing they can apply that same skill in a totally different part of the organization. You need to take the time to know what we do from one side of the house to the other and understand that there are novel contexts to do your work. If you don’t know what someone in ASTS does, take a minute and find out. One, you may realize you want to do work in an area that focuses on something different. And, two, you might find the person who will help solve that next problem you are going to encounter.

I feel like ITS is at its strongest when we learn enough about each other that we are willing to lean in together. And leaning in together often means leaning on someone to get to where we need to be.

Being a Customer Service Company

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

I drive. A lot. I commute in the wonderful Chicago traffic five days a week, twice a day, covering about 45 total miles. Depending on the time of day I can make it in to work in 40 minutes if I am lucky, but it is closer to an hour going home if I leave at a respectable time. That has proven to be the single biggest change for me personally in making the move to UChicago. What it really means is that I have to fill up that time with some degree of productive activity.

On many days I schedule phone calls that let me extend the day while in the car, but other times I listen to podcasts.I have a ton of subscriptions that I listen to using Overcast on my iPhone. Quite a few are by Gimlet Media. They exploded onto the scene with a very unique show called, “Startup” that originally chronicled the creation of the company itself. Since then they’ve released a ton of exceptional shows that get me through the week.

my podcasts

But, there is one podcast that I love to listen to as soon as a new episode is available, “How I Built This” from NPR. It is a radio-style show where it is a well produced interview with founders of companies about how they built their companies. There are excellent ones about Airbnb, Instagram, Samuel Adams, and more. But the best one I have listened to was this morning with the founder of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. I am not going to describe it as it is an absolute must listen, so please do that … I stopped short of sending out a mandate to listen as it is that good.

It resonated with me for so many reasons, but the thing I took from it that I want us to own is when Tony says something to the effect of, “Zappos isn’t a shoe company, it is a customer service company. We want to be known as not selling shoes, but selling great customer service.” Right there it is for what we’ve been talking about — us all owning great customer service. Yes, we are an operations organization, but we are also a customer service organization. I think if you put those two things next to each on a balanced score card, I believe being a customer service company comes first.

Customer Service Mentality

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

Just prior to the end of the year, I wrote an email to share some thoughts with you regarding customer service and its primary role in our work. I want to follow up with more on that message and also to provide information on an executive director search and additional changes and next steps.

I began the note sent at the end of November with the following:

Service to and for our customers—whether faculty, students, staff, alumni, or any guest of the University or member of the broader community—is paramount. It is, in my estimation, the single most important focus underlying all of our work.

It has been encouraging to receive replies and feedback indicating this message resonates with many of you. Emphasizing customer service and reinforcing a “customer first” organizational mindset isn’t something that is good simply to say, I believe it is the right thing to do and also something we must do.

We must make it easier, not harder, for our customers to connect with technology; leverage technology to advance their work and their research and academic pursuits; and feel especially positive — delighted — about their experiences using technology and in working with those of us in IT who support that technology.

To move us toward achieving this goal, a customer service review was conducted at the beginning of December. A small team of higher education colleagues came to campus to assess IT Services’ customer service organization and overall approach to customer service. The team provided recommendations regarding the ways in which we can better support and serve our customers.

Figuring out what is next.

Some of us have started to work through the recommendations from the customer service review. In the coming weeks we will begin discussing the recommendations more fully with the ITS Senior Leadership Group (SLG) and the staff in our Solutions and Service Management (SSM) organization, as well as with others throughout ITS.

To summarize just a couple of the recommendations broadly applicable across ITS:

  • All areas of ITS and all ITS staff need to own “great customer service,” not only the SSM organization.
  • Service owners throughout ITS need to have documented service level agreements and must strive to always meet those agreements.

One highlight of the customer service review focused on the TechBar, which was viewed as a center of excellent customer service within ITS. Because there is a natural connection between the work of TechBar and the SSM organization — and to better leverage the best aspects of TechBar throughout the SSM organization — TechBar will be moved out of Academic and Scholarly Technology Services and returned to SSM. While this realignment won’t immediately change the operations of the TechBar, it will provide more opportunities for future expansion and diffusion of the TechBar model.

Within the next two weeks, a national search will begin for a new executive director for Solutions and Service Management. This executive director will report to me and directly oversee the customer service organization within ITS, as well as lead efforts to transform the overall customer service approach across ITS.

Until the new executive director for SSM is hired, we will continue to work with our existing team to provide leadership for SSM. Staff are being asked to identify and, where appropriate, execute on any opportunities to immediately begin to improve our customer service approach.

A few other customer service-focused efforts currently in flight include:

  • A series of Lynda.com courses on customer service are being reviewed and will be added to playlists made available to all ITS staff. Once available, I will ask you to complete those courses as part of our collective professional development and consider how you can incorporate the lessons into your work.
  • By the end of January, a plan will be drafted to establish a roadmap that will evolve the service desk, housed within SSM, to be able to provide tier one support for the services offered by ITS.
  • In February, Apple has invited me to bring a small group of UChicago staff members to attend a special training opportunity at their Michigan Avenue store. There, representatives from Apple will walk us through their approach to customer service and discuss ways we can improve our approach.

As I reiterated in my November note and as I’ve said many times before, our aim is and should always be to delight our customers. We have a good start, a great team, and the beginnings of a plan to be even better.

Please do not to hesitate to reach out to me with any questions or feedback. As always, I appreciate your engagement on these important topics.

Cubs Day

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

Earlier this week I was lucky enough to attend a Cubs home game against the Brewers. What made it extra special was that it was an outing with a bunch of people from the UChicago ITS team. A colleague of mine had purchased a block of nose bleed seats that were to be used as part of a CIC meeting. Too bad for him that the original game got rained out so we were “stuck” with a group of tickets. We decided we would raffle them off to people in ITS.

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What I was struck by, other than the beauty of Wrigley and the Cubs outstanding play, was just how much fun we all had. It was nice getting to sit together as a group and laugh and talk for a few hours. In a lot of ways it was like an extended Coffee with Cole. I got to know some of our staff better than I would have otherwise and made some really meaningful connections. I honestly think those who could make it were extremely appreciative. It has me thinking that we should do this as an entire group next year if we can pull it off.

2016 Excellence Awards

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

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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!

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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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Recognizing Ourselves

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

A few weeks ago I was part of a team that got to review the ITS Excellence Award nominations. There were about eight of us in a room reviewing dozens of submissions from our peers across the organization. Probably one of the most postiive meetings with my team I’ve been a part of since being here.


The notion of recognizing our own work is one that pays deep dividends in the long run. The fact that members of the team take the time to reflect on the work of one of their colleagues and fill out a nomination speaks volumes to the kind of team we have here in IT Services. It means people care about each other and have the capacity to recognize their work. I like that.

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On more than one occasion those of us in the room mentioned how great it could be if the people we were reviewing could hear the amazing things not only the nominating person wrote, but the overwhelmingly positive remarks that often flew around the room from the committee. When it was all said and done, we walked out of the room feeling really great about our team, our work, and what we were accomplishing. Together.

IT Services All Hands Reflection

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

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.

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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.

Empowerment Process

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.