FHS IT staff members win Team Achievement Award

FHS staff members Darrin Grund (Manager of IT Services) and Jasper Stoodley (Systems Analyst) were part of the SFU Mail project team who were presented with a SFU Staff Achievement Award last month.

“Demonstrating exemplary collaboration and cooperation between teams to improve processes at the university,” the SFU Mail Team were winners of the Team Achievement Award as they migrated over 50,000 university staff, faculty, retiree, and student email accounts to SFU Mail in 2018. This was a very large team effort involving staff from various SFU IT units and IT technical support staff in faculties and departments at the university, all of whom worked in a collaborative manner to ensure this project succeeded.

Early in the planning and assessment phase of the SFU Mail project, the planning team engaged with IT staff in each faculty, identifying feature requirements and potential transition issues. Any date conflicts were identified and addressed well before the final implementation plan, allowing for minimal disruption to workflow when the accounts were migrated.

In the testing phase, SFU IT services staff collaborated with a broad group of technical personnel, including Darrin and Jasper, to pilot the new application. This provided valuable exposure to the new mail system well before the implementation, which proactively addressed issues before the application was deployed.

IT Services staff also encouraged real time communications during the pilot phase by offering IT Services chat services via Slack to all testers. This provided a platform where questions and issues were being addressed in real time, including during evenings and weekends. This communication tool was invaluable during the implementation phase as all technical support groups across the University were working together on issues as they arose.

Overall, the SFU Mail team demonstrated how a project with a broad impact can succeed with collaboration and engagement with the university community. This success has led to increased teamwork between all IT support units on campus and has provided common communication tools (like Slack) that all support groups can use. Congratulations to Darrin, Jasper and the rest of the project team on this achievement!