Soon after he had assumed the Interim CTO position of this Southern Californian district, the ViKiwi consultant was receiving a continual stream of emails and phone calls from disgruntled teachers and principals describing their terrible experiences dealing with the Technology Services Department. Whenever he mentioned the negative feedback to his staff, he was told about the lack of resources and how the schools made unreasonable demands.
The Interim CTO realized adding staff in a tight budget environment was unrealistic, but in any case, he also was not satisfied that lack of resources was the issue. To get to the root causes of problems, he gathered all available quantitative and qualitative data, and shared those data with the entire staff. He created a collaborative, safe environment that encouraged every staff member to share redesign ideas and work as a team. This was quite novel to the staff who were used to a top down, command and control management environment.
Without increasing staff, and without implementing any new technology, the Interim CTO led the department to reduce the backlog of open tickets from 340 to 157 in two months. At subsequent district meetings, principals expressed the feeling that a chronic source of frustration had finally turned the corner.
