Speakers: Dennis Wurster Brian Meehan
Level: Intermediate, Lecture
Excerpt: Did you ever wonder what’s holding your department back from being highly effective? Join us as we seven categories of ‘success factors’ for your department. These aren’t ‘must haves’ to be successful, but they are things that many successful departments do. This session will give you the framework to evaluate your department’s capabilities, and set a direction to improve them where needed.
Description: Did you ever wonder what’s holding your department back from being highly effective? Does your team prioritize requests, or do they respond to the “latest and loudest” ones first? Even if you have a few ideas for improving your operations, it can be hard to know where to start! Based on “The Operations Report Card” by Thomas Limoncelli and Peter Grace, this presentation covers issues in seven different categories: Public-Facing Practices, Modern Team Practices, Operational Practices, Automation Practices, Fleet Management Processes, Disaster Preparation Practices, and Security Practices. We’ll discuss how you can evaluate your department against this checklist of capabilities to identify areas for improvement.
About the speakers
Dennis Wurster – Computer Services Engineer – Eastman School of Music (Twitter: @wildeep)
Dennis Wurster prides himself as a user-advocate, and constantly works to untangle complexity and establish efficiency. By day, he is a Computer Systems Engineer at the Eastman School of Music. By night, he consults with small businesses in his hometown of Rochester, New York. Dennis has been published in TidBITS, the Mac Administrator’s Journal, and MacAuthority. He has presented at MacAdmin and the User Group Leadership Conference.
Brian Meehan – Director of Information Technology – Allendale Columbia School (Twitter: @binarydaze)
Rescued from the world of IT consulting in 2011, Brian currently evangelizes technology and education for the staff, faculty, students and parents of this N-12 school in Western NY. And when he’s not doing that, he might be playing guitar, cycling or flying kites. But probably not sleeping. Brian was also formerly a firefighter and EMT, and enjoys the similarities between troubleshooting humans and troubleshooting IT systems.