Projects, Community, & Administration

Made of up three primary groups, the Projects, Community, & Administration (PCA) department oversees the day-to-day finance, HR, and administrative needs of IS&T, internal and external communication and also tracks, organizes, and facilitates project management planning and project life cycles. All responsibilities of the groups of the Projects, Communication & Administration department help IS&T perform as an efficient service provider for the BU community.

The Project Management Office (PMO) Responsibilities

• Annual Planning and Budgeting – Manage IS&T’s annual process for planning large IS&T projects in support of BU’s Strategy and BU’s Technology Plan. Working closely with the six IS&T governance committees, we prioritize the most important areas to invest resources and funding each year, and propose these projects to the University Budget Committee.
• Portfolio Management – Work closely with clients, the PMO manages program area project portfolios to establish priorities with clients for new projects and plan resources accordingly. We also report on the status of current active projects and maintain program area roadmaps.
• Project Management – Manage the execution of major IS&T projects using our Project Lifecycle Process, which is based on best practices such as Prince2, ITIL, and TOGAF. Our project managers and business analysts work across IS&T and with clients to execute projects in line with project sponsor expectations.

The Finance and Administration Team Responsibilities

• Finance – Work closely with the Budget Office and IS&T managers to plan, analyze, and maintain our budgets. We support managers in developing proposals for investment in projects or other initiatives with sound financial analysis, and manage and track the financial transactions for those initiatives.
• Human Resources – Act as liason’s to BU’s HR department and ensure that IS&T managers and employees understand HR policies and procedures. We manage the Performance Evaluation and Merit Increase processes within IS&T. We assist managers in hiring, leaves of absence, terminations, and promotions.
• Administration – Support the day to day operations of IS&T’s offices by providing general administrative services such as purchase order processing, managing office supplies, conference room reservations, and onboarding and offboarding procedures for IS&T employees.
• Contracts – Manage contracts for IS&T’s vendors, tracking costs and expenses against existing agreements, tracking the timing for renewals, and assisting in negotiating better terms from vendors.

The Communication, Knowledge, and Community Team Responsibilities

• Communication & Documentation – Author, edit, and coordinate communications and documentation both internal to IS&T (ex. IS&T newsletter) and to the wider community (ex. Tech Times newsletter, TechWeb).  We consult with subject matter experts to craft communications that appropriately convey the concept in a manner that is easy to understand and digest.
• Training – Consult, coordinate, and perform training both online and in-person both internally and externally.  We work with external vendors to augment training options available.
• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility – Works with DEI professionals across BU to further efforts outlined in the Technology Plan.
• Service Catalog – Guided by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), we ensure that our service catalog is an up-to-date and complete representation of the services provided by IS&T.
• Knowledge Management – We seek to capture, structure, and reuse knowledge in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our support organization.  We assist with maintaining knowledge in a number of places including TechWeb, ServiceNow, and SharePoint.