Page 25 - Campus Technology, October/November 2018

IT TRENDS
Agile Wins at GWU
In April 2018, GWU’s BI team celebrated its 100th sprint, and the team members reflected on some things they have learned. “One is that working in agile has provided a broader sense of ownership and people get better at sharing their expertise with others,” said Jelena Roljevic, assistant vice president for business intelligence and Enterprise Information Services (EIS). “We no longer have folks who are strictly business analysts or visualization developers. People get cross-trained in this culture so it reduces that friction of people not letting others into their space.”
One key to success was adding a third requirement in deciding which projects to take on in an agile fashion. The first two are that projects are operationally important and that
“The key is applying the methodology to the right kind of projects, not just across the board. You have to have the right timing and the right work.”
— Christine Greeves, George Washington University
there is available data, Roljevic said. “The third leg has to be whether the organization is ready to engage. If any of those three criteria are not in place, we don’t engage.”
Christine Greeves, who has been director of information technology project and portfolio management at GWU for less than a year, explained why agile isn’t as widely adopted in higher education as in the corporate world. “We have a lot of legacy systems and fixed budgets, so we have to ease our way into it,” she said. “The key is applying the methodology to the right kind of projects, not just across the board. You have to have the right timing and the right work. For instance, if it is enroll- ment season, you don’t want to do agile work on the enrollment system. You look for opportunities and when you find the right projects you pounce on them.”4
2018
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