October 2011

I have now completed my second month at Alberta Health Services. Like at any job, there are highs and lows for the amount of work flowing in and this month has been the slow part. I think part of the reason for this is that the PGO and other areas in IT have gone through a transition in the way they categorize their initiatives. This then lead to us not updating and releasing the Executive Dashboard this month (which is a large part of my job) and has kept the bosses high up in the organization very busy.  The PIRC meetings have been cancelled for several weeks in a row now and the prep work and documentation afterwards would have kept me very busy.  But I am sure it will pick up and in the mean time I have been travelling back and forth a couple times between the Airport and Southport Tower.  The first time was when my manager came into town and worked with me for three days.  Originally we were going to have a jam packed week with the PIRC meeting and another meeting with the head of the PGO to go over the future of the department. Unfortunately both of those got cancelled but I still got to go to Southport and meet with some other really important people in IT (including the head of the PGO). Last week I got the opportunity to work at Southport again.  I set up the lunch and learn session there that was actually being held in Edmonton but was video conferencing in at a meeting room in Southport for the AHS employees there. I learnt how to set up the equipment for that type of meeting and met with more AHS employees and other co-op students working from that location.

This month I have also participated in 4 Sharepoint training sessions.  Sharepoint is our new repository for all our files and is an excellent streamlined process that allows the AHS employees to share their project documentation. It hasn’t completely replaced the Initiative Repository yet but we are still working on setting up the PGO Sharepoint site.

The next couple weeks will be filled with meetings with a vendor who is introducing a new project portfolio management software, CA Clarity PPM, into the IT and Program Governance Office Departments. This tool will be for the overall scope of the portfolio, project management and reporting within AHS. This project will be defining the data, processes and management of dashboards. This basically means that we will be streamlining our processes and have shorter deployment times.

I look forward to see what comes next in the change management process with the elimination of TIPS to the implementation of Clarity!