Communications toolkit workshop: A hands-on guide to creating meaningful messages that support your IT change

• UMich has distributed IT across the university
• Example project: wifi upgrades across all buildings/areas
  • comm toolkit included digital signs, table tents, flyers, and more, all in a central location (project website). All items are customizeable for the specific local audience
• Creating the toolkit
  • Start w/communication intake form- complete in conversation w/ the project manager
  • audience analysis (see pic): Involve as much of the project team as possible. Use post its to identify all audiences for comm and place them in the quadrants in the audience analysis graph
  • determine communication channels and identify frequency of communication for each audience
  • write the key messages
  • share the comm toolkit w/appropriate people- build partnerships with orgs across the university (the ppl who know what is going on in their local units, colleges, etc.) This helps the local stakeholders align messaging about the project with other ongoing or overlapping IT projects in their iarea
  • Share templates via shared box folder and project website
  • have a timeline for using the toolkit in association with the project

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“We’re moving your cheese”: Communicating IT Change

• Communication Strategy for move to Canvas-
  • Start with why the change is happening
  • be honest about impact, no sugarcoating
  • engage with audiences early
  • deal with the “telephone” effect by getting official messaging out early and aggressively
• Use of training workshops & communication info sessions
  • Low attendance/high efficacy
• Resource: UCI canvas site: sites.uci.edu/canvas

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Organizations that deliver strategic value

• Types of strategic value (see pic)
• Beyond business strategy, IT leaders should focus on effective organizational design
• 5 systems making up the organization
  • Culture
    • Focus on behaviors rather than principles for fast impact on improving culture
  • Structure
    • Org chart
  • Internal economy
  • Metrics and rewards
    • Metrics are important but can get in the way of change
  • Methods and tools
    • Competencies of each group
  • Aligning with the value chain (see pic)
    • “Sales” = brm
  • Budget
    • Think of your it org as a business within a business. Think of budget as money for a set of products and services you provide, not money to cover costs of running your org. Build in time necessary for prof dev, process improvement, proposals for innovation, and whatever is needed to sustain and grow that business
  • Developing an organizational strategy
    • Document vision for what your org looks like in 5-10 years
    • Identify gaps and diagnose root causes based on those caps
    • Prioritize order in which you will address those root causes
    • Publicize the plan internal/external
  • Resources: ndma.com

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IT’s Easy: Creating an Engaging IT Organization

Stephanie Obodda & Gillian Bell from Brown University @itatbrown

• Challenges faced when trying to focus on improving customer service
  • Bureaucracy: time tracking, project management, multiple committees and gateways, etc.
    • More flexibility for the team to use whatever tools/strategies are most lightweight/efficient for getting the work done
  • Location: dispersed locations for IT staff (located off campus)
  • Attitude: “We don’t support that”
    • Moving toward a “best effort” customer support model, even for things that aren’t technically supported
  • Perspective: Selecting tools and processes based on legacy systems/architecture or on org structure, but not on actual customer needs. Also issues with how customers could access various services…based on org structure rather than customer perspective
    • Moved to a support structure/site that wasn’t based on a predefined hierarchy that the customer had to filter through

• Ways they encouraged IT Staff to engage with the university
  • Encouraged staff to volunteer to provide IT help on campus, to spend time with students, etc. Embedded this in onboarding for new IT staff.
    • Orientation
    • Libraries
    • Move in week
    • Anywhere students are
    • IT staff were also able to work as advisors for students (e.g. To walk through the registration process, make course recommendations, etc.)
  • During all-staff meetings, walk through UX and customer experience exercises (e.g. Persona development activity)
    • Helped IT staff understand pain points, goals, etc for all types of users/customers across the university
  • Survey to IT staff: What do you think our top 3 values/goals are? – created word cloud representing responses and showed that customer service was a clearly defined goal in the dept.
• Example of value of this kind of engagement to the IT org: IT staff helped during move in week, found that they spent the majority of the time helping students set up wifi. We’re able to document this and share with leadership as a way to show that the process for setting up wifi should be easier. In the next 3 subsequent years, made it incrementally easier to set up wifi. In 3rd year, help desk tickets for help with wifi setup plummeted.
• Engaging the campus
  • WTF Brown website (what to fix): students can submit ideas for things they want/complaints anonymously, and then up vote each others submissions (not just IT issues). IT staff can respond directly to requests and can watch for trends to inform future changes
  • Getting IT orgs on campus posting on social media (especially Facebook/Instagram)
    • Note: It’s important to provide information about IT as a whole, regardless of who is providing a given service. E.g. Providing a list of upcoming technical trainings across campus, provided by multiple different units
  • Student intro video detailing main questions new students have about IT (how do I get help, how do I find my way around campus, where can I get wifi, etc.). IT department creates approx 1 video per month (under 2 minutes) on IT topics and then shares them via multiple social media channels.

• Outcomes
  • External survey showed very high satisfaction for customer service from IT (higher than any other dept on campus)

• Future steps
  • Tech summit: encourage faculty,staff, students to come and share how they are using various technologies
  • Bring additional UX and customer experience exercises into the IT organization

• Suggestions
  • Talk through your current status
  • Call your help desk
  • Insert yourself in the campus experience
  • Identify the core values of your department and reiterate them constantly
  • Talk to everyone on campus as much as possible

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Supercharging your technology literacy and training

• Communication and marketing around training:
  • Channels: email, website, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, printed, call center
  • For training events for students, involve students in the marketing
  • For big events, include follow-up/summative communications in the plan as well to highlight the successes of the event
  • Mail chimp: recommended tool to send email (marketing training, actual content about tech changes, etc) and see analytics on how many people have read the emails, peak times, click mapping, and other analytics

• Passport to technology event
  • One day event with multiple live training sessions
  • Faculty and staff are given a passport and get a stamp for every session they attend

• Tech in 20
  • 20 minute sessions on a specific topic.
  • Follow up with “technology Tuesdays” where people can get 1-1 help with different technologies throughout the day

• Use qualtrics survey to gauge audience interest in future topics (sent out after each session)
  • Creating and editing videos to teach was most desirable topic
  • Follow up surveys asking open ended question about what the audience wants to learn about a given topic

• Providing training with a small staff
  • Knowledge base
  • Lynda
  • Talking about training as “in-service” days instead of “training”