[5] in I/T Delivery
Delivery Team Leader's meeting 10/11/96
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert V. Ferrara)
Mon Dec 30 08:45:31 1996
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 1996 08:48:33 -0500
To: delivery-mtg@menelaus.mit.edu
From: rferrara@MIT.EDU (Robert V. Ferrara)
>Date: Fri, 11 Oct 96 11:33:58 EDT
>From: wdc@MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey On the Road)
>To: saurons@MIT.EDU
>Subject: Delivery Team Leader's meeting 10/11/96
>Cc: delivery@MIT.EDU
>
>Bill showed up for a 9:30 meeting.
>
>----
>
>Discussed our input to the 5 year plan.
> The 5 year plan has a strategic component in which we speak
> in high-level, long term, strategic terms.
> It also has a tactical component in which we focus on the
> specific things to do over the next 18 months.
>
>Brainstormed strategic and tactical isues.
>
>----
>
>Lorraine wants to meet with team leaders individually to find out about
>needs for next year's budget.
> Software? Student Utilization? Hardware?
> Big Items
> Unusual Items
> etc.
>
>YO! Team Athena: If anyone has an idea for something we should fund,
>see Mike or Bill.
>
>----
>
>Update on the Comptetency Model
>
> Erin expects that by the end of today
>
> http://web.mit.edu/is/competency
>
>will contain the HayMcBer report.
>It will also contain "cg-notes" which is a feed of the discussion about
>the Model.
>
>What is this Competency Model to be used for?
>
> First: "Development/Training/Mentoring" -- helping us understand
> how our skills match our work, and helping people
> evolve.
>
> First also: "Selection" -- how we hire people with the skills
> we have determined we need.
>
> Next: "Performance" -- measuring how our skills match/don't
> match what we do. This will involve changes to NEXT
> YEAR's peformance review process. Changing this year's
> without our having finished our review of the Model
> would be unfair.
>
> Much Later: "Compensation" -- how pay is set based on levels
> of skill. Notice that Performance and Compensation
> are split out as separate parts.
>
> Other: "Planning" and "IS Work". Knowing, in some sense, what
> people have what skills enables us to understand
> ourselves as a pool of resources that can feed into
> planning and scheduling of work.
>
>The particular people responsible for doing the various analyses, such
>as performance reviews, discussing of training or mentoring
>opportunities/issues is not yet established. The work is going to end
>up divided in a pragmatic way between team leaders, process directors,
>and others.
>
>Team Athena: You are encouraged to visit Erin with your questions and
>ideas.
>
>----
>
>Roundtable:
>
>Jana reports that there are a couple people coming free from the
>completion of the Physical Plant project. Their skill set is C, Ingres,
>and VMS programming.
>
>Jana: TQF (The Query Facility): Migrated PowerBuilder application from
>v4 to v5. It seems to work. Now Going to try to get it running on the
>Mac (for which Power Builder v5 is still in beta).
>
>Tim: The Delivery effort for the Writing Requirement project is under
>way. Uncovered Issues: 1. With this small project there isn't going to
>be a detailed work breakdown of tasks. This means that the time
>estimates from the Discovery phase may not be verified or may not turn
>out to be accurate. 2. What happens when your customer goes through a
>radical change such as a reorganization? (They're going back and sanity
>checking the requirements analysis.)
>
>wade: Next wednesday is reserved for Help Desk release 1 acceptance
>testing. After that, Steve is looking for opportunities to demonstrate
>the system to folks. A demo in the Visitor Center announced to INFOSYS
>was expressed as a good idea.
>
>Satisfying many requirements were postponed in the interestes of getting
>release one out. Now there is the issue of finding the resources
>(people with the right skills) to move the system forward to satisfy
>more of the functional requirements (ie to do the work of adding
>necessary stuff).
>
>Bill: The requirements analysis of the Projects database is proceeding
>apace. It seems like the team is getting a good sense of the boundry
>between the Projects database, and the People Database which Erin and
>others are moving into Discovery. The team is also, in Bill's opinion,
>getting a good sense of the possible boundries for the version 1
>roll-out.
>
>Bill: The Tulip demo machine, Bulb is finally ready to shut down. We've
>met critical mass of infrastructure on some kinds of page image
>delivery. There are a few other demonstration projects such as the
>CS-TR page image delivery that fit into the "rest time" of someone's
>work day, so Bill is going to try and allow them to proceed.
>
>Bill: Heads up! The Applixware suite is coming in for evaluation. This
>might end up as just another third party software package without
>special support. But potentially it will be useful to foster
>interoperation between PC, Mac, and Athena Unix, and to provide, on a
>Unix platform, a reasonable spreadsheet, word processor, and drawing
>editor. The expectation is that a team of appropriate stakeholders will
>convene, evaluate the system and recommend an appropriate scope.
>
>Regina: EPS (Electronic Proposal Submission): Issues of enabling others
>to build on the database work that has been done on this project. The
>team has adopted Adobe PDF as an exchange format for the electronic
>proposals. They are moving to NT desktop systems for the developers.
>Apparently this is the recommended platform for folks doing PowerBuilder
>development.
>
>Mike: SGI has been in to visit. They have a new box that requires Irix
>6.3 (Oh boy! A version we've never EVER heard of.) that is designed to
>be competitive with the Sparc low end offering.
>
>Bob: There has started an IS SAP group that meets regularly to focus IS
>SAP efforts.
>
>----
>
>Next meeting is in two weeks in E40 from 10am to 12noon
