Manager’s Report: Gearing Up for a Successful 2008

By Lois Marsh, SIG Co-Manager

It's been a busy summer for your SIG executive and volunteers as we prepared for a new fiscal year. We’ve done all our formal reporting to the STC board, wrapped up the annual budget, and started planning for next year’s STC conference.

We met by phone to talk over plans for each of the volunteer positions over the coming months, and Dawnell and I participated in monthly SIG Leadership conference calls. Here are some details of what we plan:

Listserv Update

List Serv Manager Eddy Frost is working with the STC office to plan for and implement a migration of our list serv system from Lyri-Sys to MailMan. He expects to complete this migration sometime this fall. The change should be transparent - existing subscribers need take no action.

Website Update

Thanks to Paul Claessen (yup, Dawnell’s husband) who’s helping us maintain the P&P website while webmaster Jeanna Hines takes a well-deserved breather! We’re working on developing easier ways to accomplish routine updates to our website, and will eventually recruit a new webmaster to take over the reins.

Information and Research

Maria Christophel discussed ongoing plans to create an index of all P&P related articles for the P&P Website.

2008 Conference Update

We have invited Raymond Urgo to develop a program targeting advanced level of P&P practice. P&P SIG is also planning a progression session jointly with Quality and Process Improvement (QPI) SIG. See Dawnell’s article for further details. Eddy Frost is hoping to present a session on managing a system of P&P on Microsoft SharePoint.

Administrative Details

2007-2008 SIG Yearly budget and quarterly reports are done. July's membership numbers appear to be a bit skewed. We are looking into those numbers.

Now it’s time to hear from you!

We are planning an open conference call for all SIG members on October 24th and hope many members from around the world will call in to guide us in selecting learning opportunities for our SIG.

Thanks to an increase in member dues flowing to us this year, we have some money available for learning and development projects. But where should we focus those efforts? See the Announcements page for full details on the open call.

Survey Time ...

In November, I will be conducting a survey of all P&P SIG members to learn:

How you are being affected by changing communications media like web 2.0

What tools you are using now, and expect to use in the future

What our industry representation is across the membership

Whether we want an elected executive

Other questions TBA

I’m looking forward to meeting many of you in the open conference call on October 24th. Talk to you then!