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This year’s Black History Month theme is Black Health and Wellness: As we head into the third year of a pandemic that has disproportionately affected communities of color, it’s important to think about the ways in which Black Minnesotans have disparate outcomes in the areas of health and wellness, and how we can address those issues in our own work. Some examples: Black women are three times as likely as white women to die from complications of pregnancy (CDC: Pregnancy-Related Deaths, 2011-2015), and black children are twice as likely to die before their first birthday as white children (CDC: Infant Mortality). As health regulators, we can help address these disparities by learning more about the history and struggles of the Black community, and thinking of ways to center health equity in our work. The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) explains more about this year’s theme and resources for learning more on their website, and we encourage you to check it out.
Upcoming Redesign Conversations: Data and Project Governance: Erik Holmberg will be presenting at our next Redesign Conversation on February 15. He’ll be talking about his role as HRD’s data analyst, what kinds of data we have, and how HRD uses data to manage and improve our work. On March 1, Blaine Taylor will be talking about the project governance process that HRD has been using to track and complete projects. You can learn more about the project governance group’s accomplishments over the past year in the 2021 in Review section below.
Celebrate Black History Month with EJBC: The Equity and Justice Black Caucus Employee Resource Group is hosting their 3rd annual Black History Month Celebration and will have sessions every day from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. All State Employees are welcome to attend, learn, and ask questions; sessions are not recorded. For more information, you can check out the full agenda of events or subscribe to the EJBC newsletter.
Goodbye, #MDH_CM-AllCMEmployees and Health.HWS mailbox! HRD has a lot of old mailboxes and mailing lists floating around, and lately we’ve been doing a little cleanup behind the scenes to see if we can make things a little easier to manage. As of this week, both the old #MDH_CM-AllCMEmployees mailing list and the Health.HWS mailbox have been deleted. Housing with Services was repealed with the launch of Assisted Living Licensure last August; the #MDH_HRD-All-HRD-Employees replaced the old Compliance Management (CM) list back in 2020. We’re working on a list of all of our mailboxes and mailing lists on SharePoint (HRD Mailboxes) and we’d love if you’d help us add to it. If you’re in charge of a mailbox or mailing list, please take a look and see if you can fill in any of the gaps!
Have you filled out Telework Agreement and Acknowledgement Forms? If you are teleworking, or you supervise people who are teleworkers, please make sure you have filled out the Telework Agreement Form Tracker on SharePoint and uploaded their Telework Acknowledgement Form uploaded. The Work Life Transition is working on space planning, and they need to know who will be working in the office so they can plan accordingly.
The HRD Employee Appreciation Day planning team wants to thank everyone who joined us last Friday for John Kriesel’s presentation and our other activities. We had some great discussions about the future of HRD and how we can move forward as a team.
We’re hoping to make employee appreciation events a regular thing, so if you have any feedback or ideas for future sessions, please send an email to Health.HRDCommunications@state.mn.us or leave a note in the HRD Feedback Box and we’ll make sure it gets to the right people. Brandi D. and Mary H. have already sent in their ideas, and you can join the cool kids’ club too!
You can find the recording of the presentation in the Stream tab of our HRD Team if you’d like to review it.
We have two positions available this week, and more are on the way! We hope to have some nurse evaluator positions posted soon.
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Health Care Policy and Delivery Systems Division Director, Job ID: 51884: This position is responsible for oversight of personnel, budget, policy, and administrative direction of a division of approximately 300 employees. The position will set the direction for the division and ensure that its work is consistent with the mission, vision and goals of the Health Department. Closes February 14, 2022.
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Health Program Representative, Job ID: 50264: This position will provide ongoing workload distribution and monitoring for all Federal and State evaluations and investigations within the Health Regulation Division. The incumbent will provide communication and ongoing maintenance of workload schedules to maintain an equitable workload for all evaluators. Closes February 17, 2022.
If you would like to apply, please follow the steps below:
- Sign into Employee Self Service
- On My Homepage, click on Careers and enter the Job Opening ID in the Search Jobs box and click >> (Search).
- Click on the Job Title to view the job posting.
- Click Apply For This Job in the top right hand corner.
Use this link to share the posting with external applicants:
This week, we want to celebrate 3 HRD staff who have officially completed the training required to become a SharePoint Site Manager: Jenn Bahr, Jessica Chenze, and James White. Now they have special powers and can start building all kinds of cool things for their teams!
SharePoint Site Managers have extra permissions that allow them to create and edit lists, libraries, pages, and other tools within SharePoint. Prior to the redesign, Site Managers were usually a program’s admin staff, but as we move into a different structure it makes more sense to have Site Managers in a variety of places within our organization.
If you or someone on your team are interested in becoming a Site Manager, it’s pretty easy to do! You can complete the majority of the training on LinkedIn Learning, and then do a session with HRD’s SharePoint Owner (Siobhain) that covers HRD and MDH specifics and best practices. Because it’s on LinkedIn Learning, you can do it at your own pace, and review things that you would like a refresher on at any time.
The HRD SharePoint Learning Path is available for anyone to view, even if you’re just interested in learning more about the basics. (If you don’t have a LinkedIn Learning account, don’t worry – we’re working on getting them for everyone in the division).
This week Minnesota State Demographer Susan Brower presented to the Minnesota House of Representatives Human Services and Finances Committee about Minnesota’s aging population and disability communities.
The older adult population in Minnesota is growing rapidly and projected to reach 1 million within the next year, expected to continue growing through the mid-2040s. This brings with it challenges of recruiting enough health care workers to be able to care for aging populations – in the second quarter of 2021 alone, there were over 17,000 job openings within the state for health care workers.
The State Demographer also shared several important statistics about Minnesotans with disabilities. 11% of Minnesotans live with a disability, and adults 75 and older are 4 times more likely to have a disability. The growth of both the older adult population and disability community means that we will see increased stress on health care systems and support/care staffing.
You can view her full presentation on the Minnesota House of Representatives website and we’ve shared the slides in the HRD Documents library on SharePoint in case you’d like to review them.
February feels a little late to publish a “year in review” issue, but when we asked people to tell us about HRD’s accomplishments in 2021, we got a lot of great stories! We’ll be sharing them over the next few weeks so you can learn of them, and maybe use them as inspiration for thinking about what you and your team would like to accomplish this year!
HRD took a giant step forward in 2021 on its program governance journey with the implementation of a formal business governance model to drive stronger ownership and management of business projects.
This has proven hugely beneficial to the division by providing visibility, accountability, and rigor for projects large and small. And, as anticipated, HRD has learned some valuable lessons along the way that will only help improve the management and outcomes of business projects going forward. Based on lessons learned, some governance refinements will be rolled out in January.
Here’s a quick snapshot of governance successes, lessons learned and project statistics. Please reach out to Blaine Taylor with any questions.
Governance Successes
- Projects are getting executed and completed in a timelier fashion
- Addition of a few basic status and project tools are resulting in more consistent project processes being followed. For example, more thorough testing prior to deployment
- Increased project rigor and accountability
- Some improved visibility of projects, although further improvements are possible
- With more staff involved in projects we have seen development of project management skills
- Business understanding and ownership of projects is improving
- MNIT partnership coordination has improved
- With all large projects discussing status in the same meeting there has been significantly improved cross project team awareness and project dependency identification
- Improved visibility to where and how HRD work activities intersect across areas and to the potential impacts and benefits the projects bring. For example, PC is illuminating the handoffs between areas and process inefficiencies; BATLS was augmented to include a read-only version for the Call Center to manage public calls, allowing credentialing staff to focus on application processing
- Various projects have sparked new ideas around efficiencies and have encouraged process improvement planning; for example, BATLS architecture is under consideration for NAR
Governance Lessons Learned
- Engagement of key business resources early and throughout the project is critical to eliminate surprises and reduce rework
- Communication to impacted users of new or modified systems is vital so they are not caught off guard and to improve adoption
- Project management processes may create some incremental work along the way but they help surface issues sooner so they can be dealt with more quickly reducing overall work effort
- Thorough and organized project documentation is still a gap and can improve greatly
- Training users in advance of system launches allows for a smoother experience
- SOP documentation has proven to be a big help in training, refreshing, and communicating user roles and responsibilities but is inconsistent and remains a gap
- Ensuring skill, time, and ownership requirements throughout the project lifecycle are communicated at the beginning of a project make planning much easier for all project participants
2021 Project Statistics:
- Projects active: ~15
- Projects, project phases or project releases completed: ~20
- Projects started: ~6
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