Marv Hawkins named SPD associate director

Marv Hawkins has spent nearly 35 years helping customers bridge the gulf between their dreams and their reality with technology.

With just shy of 11 years of experience at the University of Utah as an integration analyst and product manager in Administrative Computing Services and University Support Services, along with more than two decades of similar work at Salt Lake Community College, Hawkins was a natural fit to take the wheel as an associate director in Solution Planning and Design (SPD).

He is working with other associate directors to determine how to handle requests for University Support Services. The Solution Planning and Design team will handle requests that are not addressed by the help desk, knowledge articles or the service catalog. Hawkins will make sure an initial analysis happens for business case development.

If the scope of the request is large enough to warrant further approvals through the governance process, consultants will partner with the requester to provide governance with information to help make decisions.

“We’ll actually be the advocate for that business case or that customer through the governance process if it needs to go to governance,” he said. “But we’ll do a lot of advising to set customer expectations to match up the business and technology roadmaps.”

SPD director Paula Millington added that “the solution consultants and solution designers in the planning phase need to support the customer, but we hope the business cases and design packages for our ‘build’ and ‘run’ teams will really help add value to our solutions.”

“As we create the plan-build-run model, we’re finding that very few educational institutions use that model,” said Hawkins. “In industry that’s a pretty common thing and we think it will be valuable for UIT, but we can’t look to others to see how they have actually put it into practice. Industry seems to have a lot more resources to throw at planning, and it will be a challenge for us to start small and perfect our craft.”

Millington sees Hawkins offering valuable insight as that effort unfolds.

“He has a proven track record in scoping and managing projects, gathering requirements, working ticket backlogs down from hundreds to tens, calming worried stakeholders and being able to provide just enough input to get a solution to engineering. We won’t have the resources to create tomes of business cases or design documents, so judging when less will be just as effective is really important. Marv is masterful at that.”

Hawkins — who enjoys home improvement, cooking, and singing in his church praise group in his spare time — hopes to lay the groundwork for other UIT departments to embrace planning and design.

“We’re starting with USS, building a model focused on application planning and design. We want to learn from our experience in a way that would eventually allow us to plan for all UIT service units. So if there’s a Teaching and Learning Technologies issue we could put it through the same kind of process.”