From Melody's Desk: October 24, 2018

October 24, 2018

Dear Colleagues,

The October 12 kick-off event for Finance Strategic Transformation (FST) left me feeling truly grateful for all the people who have agreed to be a part of our upcoming workshops or to serve a role on the FST Checkpoint Team, the Advisory Group, and the Steering Committee.

You can view a  video of the kickoff as well as the
presentation slides on our online community:
ubicommunity.virginia.edu 

We will not be able to make this a successful project without the thoughtful, collaborative, and active engagement of these team members. Now, as we embark on this journey together, is a good time to think about how we will interact with our stakeholders and how they will interact with us.

Our Pledge to the FST Stakeholders:

• UVAFinance seeks to be the valued and trusted financial partner that the University community turns to first. FST is an important step in delivering this vision by working with you to develop critical skills, improve service, re-imagine business processes, and deploy technology.
• We will communicate frequently, clearly, and directly through a variety of methods: FST meetings, Business Officer Council and Fiscal Administrator meetings, the online FST community, and the UVAFinance blog. Invite us to come into your team meeting and we will work out a time to join your team for a conversation about FST.
• We will involve and support our stakeholders as we design for the future. We will seek your frequent engagement but will also be conscious of competing deadlines and major events in order to avoid direct conflicts. We will engage with the University Project Portfolio to determine where we can make schedule adjustments to ease demands on time and energy.
• We will maintain strong governance and accountability to you and the senior leaders of the University.
• We will challenge the status quo, seeking best practices from the UVA community, the Deloitte professionals, and through our professional associations and peer institutions.
• We will assess the potential for consistent functionality and harmonized business practices.
• We will apply enterprise thinking that assesses the needs of the University as a whole but will respect and recognize local requirements.
• We will align with institutional data strategy standards and governance, to help ensure the data integrity, accessibility, and definition that are needed in a modern workplace.

Our Ask of FST Stakeholders:

• We ask that committee members and workshop invitees commit to attending and actively engaging in order to make sure that we hear broadly from the UVA community. We ask that you be familiar with available resources in the FST online community and website so that you can re-direct your colleagues to resources. If you cannot answer a question asked locally in your school or unit, ask these questions on the community (someone else probably has the same question) or forward these questions to the FST team.
• We ask that you help us know when we have asked too much, but balance this with the understanding that we are just as frequently asked why we can’t deliver new services and tools more quickly. There is a healthy tension between the desire to quickly improve service and technology and the concern that too much is happening.
• We ask that you be vocal and frequent in expressing support and advocating for the project. If you feel you cannot support and advocate for the project, talk to us directly about this.
• We ask that you have and that you encourage your colleagues to have patience in the process and to know that we are striving to support and enable the University to be the best it can be. We won’t have all the answers immediately, we may take detours, we may pause or reverse course. But we should keep you informed and you should hold us accountable for that.
• We ask that you help us to eliminate rumors and squash back channel whispering. If there is an unanswered question or a concern, ask it directly. If we don’t have an answer, trust that we are working on a solution.
• We ask for grace and understanding that we will not be perfect, we may forget a communication, we may not be consistent in an answer. Mistakes will be made, but they will not be intentional and we will learn from them.
• We ask for compromise and collaboration. We will not be able to make everyone 100% happy, but we will listen… and if we make a decision that is completely counter to your request, there is a reason. Ask us what that reason is and understand that we have to meet the requirements of a diverse audience.

Again, I thank you for joining us on this journey! I look forward to working with each of you.