Keristiena Dodge Earns Board of Regents KUDOS Award

The Board of Regents is pleased to present a KUDOS award to Keristiena Dodge, Project Specialist in Academic Affairs office at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Keristiena has been instrumental in the successful launch of UNePlan at UNO as well as leading UNO’s efforts in documenting its community engagement activities and partnerships.  Her work with implementing UNePlan, a web-based strategic planning/performance management tools that allows units to track and align strategic initiatives with UNO’s strategic plan, is especially noteworthy.

From the first mention of UNePlan at UNO in summer 2017, Keristiena began a deep dive into UNePlan as a system and how it can support and enhance strategic planning.  Keristiena has worked closely with UNePlan’s technology lead—providing feedback and testing changes and improvements. She developed the initial documentation explaining UNePlan to UNO units and worked 1-1 with individuals and small groups across campus to assist with their initial implementations, updates, end-of-year close-outs and preparation for the next year.  Working closely with Jill Russell, Assistant to the Sr. VC for Accreditation, she has prepared quarterly, end-of-year, and special reports including developing innovative new reports to view UNO’s UNePlan’s initiatives.  

Keristiena is truly UNO’s go-to person for UNePlan conceptual and technical questions.  She has an excellent understanding of how UNePlan advances and documents UNO’s strategic planning efforts and support for institutional accreditation.  Implementing any new system across a campus is challenging.  Keristiena, with her deep knowledge as well as her outstanding communication and collaboration skills, has been critical in UNO’s implementation and on-going developing of UNePlan.  

In addition to her work with UNePlan and Strategic Planning, Keristiena is a lead on an innovative project developing a system for documenting community partnerships.   As part of this project, she has been the subject matter expert for three graduate computer science capstone courses. The students in these courses have created an exciting new tool and they credit much of their success to Keristiena’s role as their “client.” She also works with faculty and administrators across the campus in the development of proposals for new academic programs.  In every area in which she works, faculty and staff recognize her expertise as well as her positive, collaborative, and supportive attitude.