Examining the ongoing challenges of delivering high-quality, value-added ERP services in Higher Education.


Wednesday, January 4, 2012

2012: A Preview + Resolutions

All signs point toward a crazy/incredible year.

At work we remain on track to complete upgrades to PeopleSoft 9.1 HCM in April and E-Business Suite 12.1 Financials in November. We are plumbing the depths of the new functionality in Oracle EPM 11.1.2 for planning and budgeting (in production since mid-November, but with a host of unknowns). Later this week I am supposed to gain admin privileges on an OBIEE 11g sandbox—there are only a thousand things I want to do with that shiny new toy. We have active projects in research admin, student financials, treasury, and more. And that’s only the stuff we know about; new requests are coming in so fast and furious that in the calm before the holidays I built a new application using Intuit QuickBase (starting from one of their many great template apps) to manage intake and prioritization; I expect to deploy it to my leadership team this week. And on Monday I will be putting QlikView 10 in action to analyze time-tracking and productions support metrics from last quarter. Yessir, it should be an exciting year.

My 2011 was a crowded with professional development and networking activities, in addition to the normal daily grind. I attended five national conferences (presenting at four of them) across the spectrum of higher education and IT. I finally ticked off the PMP box on my resume and started my ITSM/ITIL journey. 2012 should bring more of the same. I am already on the agenda for the HEUG Alliance in Nashville (March) and formulating proposals for EDUCAUSE Annual Conference (due by Feb 12!) and Open World. I am off to Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) training in two weeks. And just before the recess a copy of Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 landed on my desk. So if the projects don’t keep me busy… There is always something new to learn.

I established a host of resolutions for 2012, mostly of the personal-life and health varieties. I won’t bore you with them here, although I feel compelled to mention the robust Excel model I built to track my progress (and my wife’s): naturally, everything rolls neatly into a tri-color dashboard!

More pertinent to this space, I also defined a bunch of work-oriented resolutions. Here goes:

  • 1000 Tweets
  • 100 New Followers
  • Follow 100 New People/Companies
  • Post 26 Blogs to jasonshaffner.blogspot.com
  • Post 100 Blogs to internal department blog
  • 2+ Conference Presentations
  • 1+ New IT/PM Certification
  • Update our departmental Confluence Wiki at least once every business day

See you again soon; I have at least 25 more blogs in 2012!

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