Meet Your Colleagues: UIT Project Management Office

If you’ve ever benefited from a new University of Utah building coming online, an IT system going live, or a major software upgrade launching on time and on budget, you likely have UIT’s Project Management Office (PMO) to thank.

Led by Director John Penrose, the PMO is currently juggling about 40 projects — everything from new residence halls to phone system overhauls to a pilot program testing digital door locks. 

The office’s seven team members represent a wide range of professional backgrounds, expertise, and years served.

PMO team members include:

• Earl Lewis, who has worked in UIT for 23 years — long enough that, as he put it, “I was probably the first unofficial project manager in UIT” before there was a PMO at all (he joined the team when the office was formed in 2016).
• Piotr Pawlikowski, who primarily works on financial sector projects, joined the team nine years ago.
• David Craig, who came aboard six years ago after working on phone systems and call center technology for the Utah Poison Control Center, where he helped to deploy the system that University of Utah Health uses for appointment/reminder text messages.
• Penrose, who previously served for 17 years as chief information officer of ARUP Laboratories, where he established that organization’s IT PMO, took over leadership of UIT’s PMO five years ago.
• Benjamin Bushell, an IT project manager for two years, has a network engineering background and worked six years as an electrician building data centers on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley.
• David Fellingham, who started in April, came from the banking world and software project management, preceded by 10 years of active duty with the Utah Army National Guard.
• Scott Hampton is the PMO’s newest addition, joining in June. He has more than 15 years of project management experience “in various industries — medical, financial, construction, new public development, and electrical.”

Together, they manage dozens of complex initiatives that support students, faculty, staff, and the university’s long-term strategic goals. 

“It's really a UIT team effort taking on everything we do, keeping it all on track, and consistently hitting milestones," Penrose said.

Generally, an IT project manager oversees a project’s full life cycle, from initiation and planning through implementation and closeout. Work can include developing project charters and plans, coordinating resources, managing project scope and timelines, tracking progress, facilitating meetings, and ensuring stakeholders stay informed throughout the process.

How projects land on their desks varies.

“Our biggest intake is through UIT management,” Penrose explained, “which could mean that the chief information officer or any of the directors, associate directors, and managers decide that an effort has officially become a project and needs a dedicated project manager.”  

Occasionally, requests come from elsewhere on campus. From there, Penrose assigns the work based on workloads and specialty. Most project managers have developed certain focus areas (network-related work often goes to Lewis, for instance), though the team stays flexible depending on who’s available.

Not every project arrives fully formed. Sometimes deliverables and tasks are clearly defined from the start; other times, Penrose said, “we have to walk through the definition process with stakeholders,” nailing things down while the project gets underway.

Because so much of the job is coordinating people rather than just tracking tasks, the team puts a lot of thought into what keeps stakeholders engaged through a project’s life cycle.  

“You have to talk about things that are relevant to people,” Lewis said. “Everybody involved in the project has activities they’re responsible for, so it’s important to ask the right questions at the right times.”

Meetings should focus only on what’s relevant to the people in attendance, and when there’s nothing to discuss, the meeting ends.

“Don’t needlessly talk if there’s nothing to talk about,” Fellingham said. “If there are tasks people can follow up on outside of the meeting, follow up outside of the meeting.”

Successful project management requires keeping stakeholders engaged. For Fellingham, a connoisseur of dad jokes, that can mean a little levity. He opened a recent Centrex migration weekly meeting with this knee-slapper: “When I had my job interview here, John asked me, ‘How do you perform under pressure?’ I told him, ‘I don’t really perform “Under Pressure,” though I do a pretty mean version of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”’” Ba-dum tss.  

For its system of record, the team uses ServiceNow — the service management platform behind a project management dashboard available to authorized users (login required) and includes projects outside of the PMO’s scope. They also rely on Microsoft Teams to record meetings, which they often summarize using Microsoft Copilot’s AI transcription tools. Project management templates are also available through its website.

Several of the PMO’s current projects will have a visible impact across the university. 

One of the most significant is UIT’s support of the new Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine building, which is welcoming faculty, staff, and students ahead of fall semester. 

“Every time a new building goes live, it impacts so many people and so many groups,” Craig said. “The School of Medicine move is a big change for the university, and there are some incredible things going on there.” 

The eight-story, 211,457-square-foot building, which replaces the 1960s-era medical school building, features high-tech labs, tailored classrooms, an advanced simulation center, and collaborative spaces to serve more than 500 students.  

Another initiative with Facilities and Auxiliary Services, currently in its proof-of-concept phase, explores digital door locks for  student housing. If successful, Fellingham said the project could expand across campus, allowing students to access buildings using digital credentials rather than physical keys. 

As for who sets the deadlines, the team says it’s rarely just one source. Ideally, timelines emerge from discussions the project manager leads with stakeholders, but sometimes the calendar is set for them by contract end dates, building completions, compliance requirements, or outside mandates.  

While budgets can occasionally require an approval process to secure additional funding, the team says running out of money mid-project isn't something they see often — “university buildings, in particular, tend to be appropriately funded,” Craig said. 

Asked what he likes most about the work, Pawlikowski pointed to something built into the definition of a project itself — it’s supposed to end.

“It’s really nice to focus on something for a while and then move to something completely different,” he said.

Penrose agrees.

“It’s nice to be able to see the finish line,” he said. “And if we can’t find or see that finish line, then we know we have to make adjustments.” 

That focus on outcomes, combined with strong partnerships across the university, allows the PMO to help transform ideas into services, systems, and facilities that support the U of U community each and every day.

 

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