Learn more about the great individuals within Arts ISIT and the wide range of services we support.
Details
Name
Indira Gerards
Job title
Manager, Service Portfolio and Continuous Improvement
Pronouns
She, Her, Hers
Team
Service Strategy and Design
Interview
What year did you begin to work at Arts ISIT?
2023
Describe what you do at Arts ISIT
As the Service Portfolio and Continual Improvement Manager, I work on strategically aligning our services to our user’s evolving needs. Looking after the service portfolio entails the service lifecycle from defining, analyzing, and reviewing services to retiring discontinued ones. Collaborating with our teams, I collect input for new opportunities to improve our users’ experiences with our services.
We continuously develop the services and tools we offer and how we deliver them. These enhancements can be based on requests from our Arts audience, but also from opportunities and ideas that come from internal feedback.
What is the best thing about the work you do at Arts ISIT?
Arts ISIT is a unit filled with dedicated people who care about bringing as much value as possible to the unit and the faculty and staff we support.
What’s great in my role is I get to listen to their experiences and gather data to understand how I can help improve processes to make it easier for my colleagues to deliver their services. I enjoy working behind the scenes to ensure people on the front stage can do their thing. I love how my work here allows me to do that!
What are your areas of expertise?
My expertise is coordinating and managing processes, policies, and projects, particularly in the university context. I also have a background in web design, which comes in quite handy here!
Which services does your work relate to?
My portfolio touches on all services provided by Arts ISIT.
Please list some related projects/tools/resources you work on
Based on feedback from our community about opportunities to connect and explore our range of services, we organized the inaugural Arts ISIT Welcome Back Conference back in August. It was an excellent opportunity to connect with our community and exchange experiences around technology and pedagogy in the classroom. It helped me learn more about how our audience uses tools and technology.
I’m involved in implementing our internal process plan, an internal project within Arts ISIT aimed at understanding and streamlining our collaboration and information-sharing processes. At the Welcome Back Conference, our team shared some of the outputs of this project to share our experiences and help other departments get insights into how you can also use UBC’s productivity tools to improve collaboration and efficiency.
I am also involved in continually improving our services. Every two weeks, we review, prioritize, and work on enhancements to our tools, such as Arts CMS, Arts Digital Collections (ADC) and Arts Internal Resources (AIR).
Can you share some of your personal interests or hobbies?
I grew up with lots of music around me—my brother playing the piano, my mom’s karaoke parties (which I didn’t always appreciate), the CDs my uncle gave me whenever something new came out, and the old 200+ vinyl collection I got from my dad. I started popping into record shops a few years ago to add my own favourites to the vinyl collection.
Apart from that, I grab every chance I get to go to a live music show. I love a good pop sensation as much as a small jazz or piano concert. If you’re reading this and want to share some of your music passion, please find me on Microsoft Teams and tell me about the song you’ve had in your head lately.
