Doing the Right Things Right

Janis is an award-winning journalist and editor who has covered many industries beyond project management, including health care, financial services, higher education and retail sales.

  ProjectsAtWork  

University of Nebraska's IT department adopted a project portfolio management system to ensure it works on the projects that matter most. Now it's seeing signs of progress.

Universities are in the business of providing enlightenment to students, but that doesn't necessarily mean the business practices of institutions are equally enlightened. Or so  University of Nebraska chief information officer Walter Weir found when he arrived on the job in 1995.

The Lincoln, Neb.-based IT department was a tangle of projects with competing priorities and a web of resources both used wisely and wasted. Plus, little was being done to reconcile the requests of varied customers, including academic departments, administrative offices, researchers and data managers.

"The whole thing had me in a funk and a quandary," Weir remembers.

Weir wasn't the only unsettled one. "There was a tremendous amount of frustration in our user community," he says. "They felt we were not providing the services and tools they needed in the time they needed them."

The problems stemmed from glaring gaps in the information necessary to run the department and its projects effectively, Weir says. The IT organization lacked answers to basic questions, such as what projects it was doing, who was working on them, how much did they cost and was the chosen…

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