Planning and Measuring Pays Off

Information Technology Systems and Services (ITSS), the department I lead, has been creating an annual Goals and Priorities plan for many years now, with the plans on the web back to 2000-01.  Moreover, we have been collecting process measures in each of our teams back to 1996.  This year, we saw a major payoff to all this work.  The UMD campus has launched a Program Prioritization Initiative, whereby every campus unit will submit information, including measures data.  This information will be scored by a committee and reviewed by our Chancellor's Cabinet.  Here is the goal of this initiative:

The goal of the Program Prioritization initiative is to manage and allocate our financial resources in ways that will best meet the needs of our students and our community.

 As our department has been working on our responses, we discovered how valuable our plan and measures are.  We were able to respond to the questions by showing our plans and supporting our points with measures data.

Now certainly we believed that these plans and measures were worthwhile during all of the years we have been doing them.  Planning documents set the goals for the department to meet each year.  Measures allowed us to see how our processes were working and to seek improvements where needed.  If we hadn't believed in their value, we would not have done all that work.

This year, however, it feels really great to see that work pay off as we work on our program prioritization response.  We sure hope we get some great scores.