IT Strategy & Services

Human-centered Service Design is at the heart of what we do, and we always have researchers in mind when we design and build experiences for them.  Service Design practices help us focus not only on the researcher, but also the service provider experience. Sometimes, we can create the most value for Stanford by focusing on what staff need as well.

Every member of the ITSS team is an agile practitioner. Beyond our scrum credentials, we seek to embrace the core agile principle of “Inspect & Adapt” and always bring that to our projects. We always consider whether the highest value deliverables are the same as when we started the project (hint: often not!) We think in user stories, are driven by team commitment, and always strive to deliver value for Stanford. Every sprint.

See principle #1 above.  Building things is hard and expensive. When we go all in and build something from scratch with open source software, we need to be sure that we are building something that matters to researchers, and to the University.  There is a reason why we bring a “product” mentality to our web projects: product ownership includes being the keeper of the vision, a laser focus on our users’ needs, and trust & continuity.

Open source, open access, open science. In ITSS, we tend to wear our hearts (and our code) on our sleeves. Release early, release often. Share widely. Play nice with others. There is more than one way to give back to the community, and we are always looking for ways to do that.

Why solve a small problem when we can take a step, see the bigger problem, and go after that?! Bring us your windmills, we have a perfectly good open source lance right over here… where did I put that? There is a creative, generative tension between this principle and #2 above. Scrum teaches us to break down epics into small, digestible pieces, and to not overcommit the team so that we can credibly achieve what we say we will.  We balance our pragmatic project management techniques with a dreamer’s willingness to consider the bigger picture.  

This is how we make diversity and inclusion more than a platitude. In ITSS, we know that our differences make us stronger, and more interesting. Appreciating differences is too low a bar, we need to embrace them.  Everyone should feel like they can be their true, authentic selves at work. If they don’t, they won’t tell you (!) so you have to work proactively to make an environment where this can be true.