Gaining agility and resilience: a personal lens

By Ingrid Hernandez Remedios

Solutions Architect, University of Ottawa

People walking on campus.
As an employee of Information Technology who has been at uOttawa for five years already (and counting!), I have sometimes felt like we were taking the sidewalk when it came to agility and collaboration in our teams.

Each team was going about it in its own way, and it was sometimes a challenge to follow and keep track of all the moving pieces on joint initiatives. Six months into the pandemic, we find ourselves in a much different situation.

Ingrid Hernandez Remedios.

We feel the energy, we hear the people talking about synergy … everyone has embarked full-heartedly into this journey and there is no looking back. We are effectively collaborating via MS Teams, laughing at a camera, sharing work items in Jira and Confluence, quickly changing our culture, and gaining much-needed resilience and agility.

If there is a positive outcome from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that it has been our highway to collaborate more and grow as a more cohesive IT team and University, as outlined in our core values in the Digital Campus Transformation Plan.