Pros
One of the best reasons for working at DUHS is the interesting nature of the work. There are many challenging projects that require you to stretch your skills and develop new ones. You also get a sense that what you do, although at times indirect, is contributing to the well being of other people. Another good reason is that the benefits are decent here. Some are outstanding, such as the retirement benefit, others mediocre or middling like health care. So on balance, they are decent. Working close to a beautiful and famous university campus makes for a pleasant atmosphere and the university offers some good cultural amenities. Oh and then there is the basketball team.
Cons
The biggest downside primarily is the the lack of good competent leadership. A close second is poor communicationswhich is related to the lack of good leadership. In my particular area, the communications from senior leadership and between groups is not good. There is not clear communication about how processes and procedures work to accomplish your work and meet your goals. Each team and even members within the team are much too isolated from each other. There is difficulty in knowing how what others are doing may impact your projects and you may impact them. This makes progress on projects less efficient and often frustrating. This is really a leadership question. Our leadership from most senior to the middle ranks needs to cultivate an atmosphere where communications take priority. This lack of communications also affects the level of service that we give our customers (and each other) and creates a poor perception (well founded) of the services that we offer throughout the rest of the organization. The mechanisms in place for communicating up to senior management are broken and when attempting to address these broken mechanisms, there is little support or actual attempt to do anything about it. This creates the feeling that what you are trying to address is unimportant to senior management. That they just don't care enough to fix these avenues of communication that they themselves put in place. Also decisions are made by managers senior and middle, yet the reasoning behind the decisions is never communicated. This creates bad morale on the part of us workers who actually have to do the work. We are not automatons. We are intelligent people who need to be respected for the hard work and skills we attempt to bring to our jobs. Senior management does not make the effort in communicating and attempting to build a buy in to the project. It just comes from the top on down and we have to make it happen. Why? We just don't know, let alone whether this is a good decision or not. Once again this makes you feel like you are unimportant, invisible and senior management just doesn't care. Secondly, we are out of balance between delivering new products and features and improving and strengthening our existing our offerings and infrastructure. This creates a great deal of stress for us workers who have to balance trying to keep current systems going and pushing new systems out. This generates bad customer service. Sure, the new features are good but if you can't even log into the application to make use of them they serve no one. And they leave the users of our system with frustration and the feeling that we are an incompetent department. This does not make me proud to work here. Lastly, for now at any rate, there is this unstated expectation on the part of the organization and senior management that we have to put extraordinary hours in to do our work. There is no compensation for the hours you spend outside of the normal workday to support the systems we have and to accomplish what we have been tasked to do. This is intolerable and exploitive.
