Good morning!
First, so sorry that we haven’t provided an update or follow-up to our October post. We are back in our offices and it has taken some time to get settled, replace office furniture, etc., but we’re on the right track.
Updates on Our Services
We are working through a lot of the questions about our group and the services we continue to offer to campus. To recap the October post, we’ve lost a position and are now considering where we can cut our workload. Websites at NC State are complicated; untangling our various services and trying to figure out how to identify and support the greatest needs has been a challenge. For now, we are not accepting new work, nor starting any major new projects.
While we’re still waiting on some decisions from management about what our priorities should be long-term, we recognize people need help. I can confirm that we will continue to at least offer maintenance and support of those who are current clients for the next fiscal year, 2020-2021. If there is urgent new work, or if you need help with the migration to blocks, please reach out to us and we’ll make every effort to fit you in, and offer whatever help we can.
Updates on Our Staff
Brian has a baby! Elliot DeConinck was born on December 18th. Huge congratulations to Brian and his wife; they’re hanging in there and getting tons of sleep. Starting Monday, March 30th, Brian will be out of the office for 4 weeks to take his paternity leave.
In other news, Jen is pregnant with her second child, due April 18th. For those of you doing the math, yes, this does mean that we’re overlapping time out of the office so we will really be short-staffed for most of April. But wait, there’s more!
In order to help us out we’ve been able to hire an extra team member at 30 hours a week. Robin McKinney joined us the last week of February — welcome Robin! We’re frantically showing her the ropes to get her up to speed before April. We’re also hoping to bring in a few more interns to help address campus and routine client requests.
Finally, Jen has recently accepted a new position. She’s not going too far, moving to another unit within OIT (Technology Support Services) to serve as the new ServiceNow Service Manager. Her effective start date is April 1 (seriously). Yes, she’ll be having a baby two weeks later, but this does mean she’ll be unavailable starting a bit earlier. And yes, OIT will be rehiring this position so hopefully this will be a fairly short-term staffing shortage.
Office Hours
In absence of two of our full-time staff for most of the month of April we’ll be cancelling our Office Hours for campus starting April 3rd. We won’t have enough staff to confidently be able to cover all our incoming requests, plus walk-in traffic. If you do need to meet with us please reach out via email: oitdesign@ncsu.edu. We’re happy to schedule some time for a Google Hangout, or a face-to-face meeting if it’s needed. Office hours should resume at some point so stay tuned for updates to that calendar.
Thanks to all of you for your patience as we continue to work through our shifting services and staff.
We are behind on some of our tickets and projects but we’re still working on things and should be in touch at some point. Please do reach out if it’s been awhile and you urgently need an update; even if we’re not done, we’ll check-in and let you know where we are.
Happy spring!
* Not Brian’s actual baby.