From Melody's Desk

Good morning!

Spring is fully in gear (even the April showers are lingering into May) and Final Exercises are upon us. As the academic year comes to an end, I encourage everyone to check out the UVA Year in Review as well as the features on several 2016 graduates.

Respect@: Thank you for your efforts to make sure you have attended a Respect@UVA session – reaching every person in UVAFinance is directly in line with our core value to have Valued, High-Performing Teams. By the June 8^th session, we expect to have 100% participation! I appreciate your commitment to this goal. Next up in promoting a healthy and respectful workplace, this fall we will offer sessions on Multicultural Fluency – Patty Marbury, Les Haughton, and Ashley Feero are working with the John Alexander, Tabitha Enoch, Diane Ober, and the Center for Leadership Excellence to develop a session specifically for UVAFinance. More on that soon!

Recognize Colleagues: Don’t forget that you can nominate colleagues as Respectful Workplace Champions with an email to respect@virginia.edu. Organizational Excellence’s Spotlight on Excellence is another great opportunity to recognize your colleagues – both individuals and teams can be nominated for this recognition.

Spring Fling / Organizational Excellence Showcase: What a great turn-out for the Spring Fling and OE Showcase last week! Stacey Rittenhouse, Lynne Schwar, Mike Hayton, Lisa Shuler, Mike Beverage, Travis Spence, Chris Brazelton, and Chris Swenson all helped to turn the outdoor fling into an indoor event. Thanks to UVA Catering Company for the excellenct food. It was also great to see the interest in the OE Showcase exhibitors – hopefully you learned something new about all the many improvement initiatives ongoing. If you didn’t get a chance to pick up a new post card featuring our vision, mission, and core values, I will be dropping off extras in each office.

Strategic Planning Committees: In the next blog, there will be an update on the work for the committees formed following our appreciative inquiry work this winter. I did want to pass along the names of the selected leader for each committee, as well as an email address to reach the group.

Committee	Lead/s	Email
Employee Engagement	Patty Marbury (FOC), Elizabeth Carey (HR)	finance_engagement@virginia.edu
Service Excellence	Julie Bird (MRP), Jennifer Bari (SFS)	uvafinance_sec@virginia.edu
Collaboration	Ana Lynch (VPF)	Aml8q@virginia.edu
Steering	Disha Venkatesan (VPF)	finance_steering@virginia.edu

Employee Connection: A quick reminder that if you ever have trouble scheduling a timely doctor’s appointment for you or a family member, you should contact the UVA Care Connection which provides access to expedited appointments for many services, plus scheduling through a single point of contact. UVA Care Connection strives to schedule primary care visits within 2 business days; specialty care visits within 5 business days; and radiology visits within 3 business days.

I will close with a link to a recent NBC29 feature on our PSDS vendor training, featuring John McHugh and Les Haughton. Check it out!

UVAFinance Vision: the valued and trusted financial partner that the University community turns to first.

Impeccable source of information * Service excellence * Innovative action * Collaborative partner * Valued, high-performing teams

FOC: Current Initiatives

Finance Outreach and Compliance is working on a variety of initiatives in the coming months, including supporting the update of various finance policies and procedures. We’re excited to partner with OSP to develop training materials to support new functionality in ResearchUVA and with Procurement on the expense management tool. We’ll also be exploring the possibility of offering a loaner device program for University personnel traveling internationally and adding new tools and information to the export controls website. Other objectives are developing a financial compliance monitoring plan for FY17, including documenting financial processes and associated key controls. We’re also looking to add a Communications Manager to our team to develop and implement communication plans supporting UVAFinance projects and initiatives.

MRP: Three New Team Members

Matt Douglas (right) is the first half of MRP’s Training Development team. As part of MRP’s Change Management team, Matt will design UBI training, deliver it to users, and support the UBI community across Grounds. He joined the UVA family after working at Liberty University Online, working as a training manager. Matt is something of a handyman, and enjoys building and fixing things in his basement workshop. While in college in California, Matt played in Ringo & The Tryhards—a regional “psychobilly” band. He and his wife Jen are expecting twins in October.

Linda Leshowitz (center) is the second half of MRP’s Training Development team. Like Matt, Linda will also design UBI training—and she will draw from nearly 20 years of experience working in education consulting for McKesson. Linda enjoys singing, listening to music, and dancing—and even performed at Carnegie Hall in New York City. She and her husband Tim live in Charlottesville with their three cats. Question to Linda: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Linda Leshowitz: “Practice.”

Brandon Wyckoff (left) is MRP’s newest ETL Developer. Brandon is new to UVA (and to Charlottesville), after spending his whole life in the Virginia Beach area. Brandon most-recently worked for PRA Group, gaining broad Informatica experience—which is very valuable to the MRP team. He and his wife Kelley have a daughter (9) and son (4). Brandon is an avid surfer, and on weekends he can be spotted hanging ten in the slop off the 1st Street Jetty in Virginia Beach.