Thoughts from the LOPSA President – 2014-Aug

Only a few hours ago, the LOPSA Board adjourned their annual face-to-face meeting. The LOPSA bylaws state that we must hold our annual directors meeting within 90 days of the elections, and this is where the newly elected board members take their seats. Since this is typically the only time in the year that the entire Board meets in person, it is our major planning and strategy meeting for the year.

While I cannot go into specifics on the exact content of the meeting until the minutes are approved and published, I can tell you that this was one of the most productive meetings I have attended in my five years on the Board! We have three energetic new officers and an entire Board that seems engaged and ready to make things happen. The majority of the meeting was spent in a strategic planning session where we reviewed the mission, discussed our values as an organization and how they apply to the mission, used those values to determine both a long-term strategy and short-term goals and then used those to define the projects that the Board will be championing in the upcoming year. We will be going into more detail on these in the coming months as we develop plans for each of these projects and refine the list of goals. You can expect an overview of the full project plans and a deeper dive into the longer term goals at the annual community meeting in Seattle at LISA ’14.

One thing that has been a goal for as long as I can remember is to transition from a working Board into a managing Board. This would allow the Board to focus on goals and planning for the organization rather than attempting to mange the day-to-day operations of it. In order to do this, we need to be able to staff volunteer teams and committees with people who are willing to help LOPSA advance it’s mission. The Mentorship Program is a perfect example of this. It it an entirely volunteer managed and run program with only a single liaison to the Board. It is arguably our single most successful program in the history of LOPSA.

This is where you come in. As we publish our projects for the upcoming year, please let us know at board@lopsa.org if you are interested in helping bring any of them to completion. The projects we are undertaking in the coming year will lay the groundwork for our long-term goals, and we cannot accomplish them without your help!

I have one other request of you our members. I need you to support the Board and the project teams to encourage us to live up to our commitments. If you see us starting to fall behind once we have presented our projects and schedules, please feel free to contact me directly at president@lopsa.org. My primary goal for the coming year is to make sure we deliver everything we say we will, or have a damn good reason why we can’t. I am going to be pushing both the Board members and the committees to develop realistic project plans and to follow up on our goals. Sure, I’m a realist and I know that things will happen that will prevent us from doing everything we thing we can as quickly as we plan to. But if we ever expect LOPSA to be a successful voice for the system administrator community, we need to show that we can deliver on our promises and we can grow this organization to be all that the founders believed it could be!