[116] in I/T Delivery
14 November 1997 Delivery Team Leaders Meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Thu Nov 20 20:53:14 1997
Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 20:53:07 -0500 (EST)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: delivery@MIT.EDU
Next Meeting is 12 December in E19
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Agenda:
1. Discussion of alternate format of Delivery Team Leaders meeting
2. Update on Team Leader HR Functions and Mentoring
3. Infomation Items
Power Builder resources needed
Web infrasructure update
User interface dveloper conference
4. Roundtable Q&A
5. Status/Announcements
Hiring -- results of Globe ad
Project DB
ITLT update
N42 Move news
6. Next meeting
5 year plan
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Detail:
We did item #3 first:
3. Infomation Items
EDI
We had two vendors, Priminos and Harbinger, come in to talk about
their EDI products. Lorraine was happy with Priminos product, but
Priminos has been acquired by Harbinger. Priminos said that they
thought that both products were well positioned and so they probably
wouldn't be discontinued right away. Harbinger hasn't been willing
to say much about the subject though, so there's a certain amount of
nervousness about this subject. Mike Barker suggested the
possibility of code escrow as a way of discussing this.
There was also a bit of discussion about about Sterling Software as
a distant third runner, because it apparently doesn't provide good
support. There was also a desire to use EDI from SAP for NECX, to
be in production by
Web infrasructure update
The meeting as a good one. Because there was a lot of people with
different goals, it went a lot of places. Where we ended up was that
we could support "I/S users with a clue", with a set of sources,
possibly a built binary release, for a web server. We also need to
build an information flow between the groups that are working on web
projects.
Miki will put together a gold standard Apache packaging for
use within IS for development by people who are clued in
on using Apache.
User interface devloper conference
Brief discussion on whether there really were competitors to BRL.
Discussion tabled when people's religion dectors went off. :-)
Power Builder resources needed
We've been asked to find a resource for the Roles project. We've
also be asked to bring some coaching and help to the Alumni Doner
Development (Adstrat). They want to deploy it in July 98.
TQF and EPS are ending. How do we transition the resource
trained there into the emerging Power Builder based projects?
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1. Discussion of alternate format of Delivery Team Leaders meeting
Bob handed out a table of one-liners of what we did at previous
meetings and asked what we did and did not find useful.
Information: Delivery team leaders meetings had 5 goals:
1. Develop a common expectation of the Delivery Process
2. Communicaton forum for other IS Processes.
3. Provide summary status of Delivery Projects.
4. Monitor the Project database.
5. Discuss project managment directions
(NOT for design reviews.)
Discussion:
Mike suggests we use the meeting to do peer review of emerging plans.
Bob says he would have liked to use the meeting for more input into the
5 year plan.
There should be a calendar mapped out for the year's meetings to show
when we address such things as the 5 year plan and other things that we
need to work on every year.
Bill asks where we are in balancing the strategic vs tactical in the
Delivery Team Leaders Meeting? Bob answers that he things our focus
should be primarily tactical.
Mike asks what the information flow is for ideas coming from Jim, going
through ITLT, to the team leaders, and team members, and then feed back
up through the chain?
Ted reports on the old Manager's hierarchy that did that in a
well-defined manner.
Consensus: The current information flow is unclear, and NEEDs
clarification, because otherwise the information is at risk of not
flowing.
Mike raises the issue of how we can improve how we prepare for the
Delivery Team Leaders Meeting.
Is every three weeks the right cycle?
Bill shares the observation that the constitution of the meeting is
EXTREMELY broad based.
Jana likes to hear from the wide areas of IS.
Rocklyn suggests more frequent meetings, with maybe only once a month
being required attendance and the other 3 weeks for interest.
The problem is that we don't know where we would slot in the additional
meetings.
Consensus: we need better contact with the other processes, but not by
everybody going to every meeting.
Bob thanks us for the input.
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2. Update on Team Leader HR Functions and Mentoring
Discussion:
Would it be possible to get an accounting of how long the various tasks
might take to do?
Doing that might be good except for:
1. We might discover we're WAY overcommitted.
2. The HRSupport team is not the right group do make those estimates.
3. Some tasks are VERY difficult to estimate resources for.
Mike Barker suggests adding another line to the Human Resources matrix:
Team Volunteering. (sort of the opposite of picking team membership --
volunteering to serve on a team.)
Paul Page suggests that there is Team Dynamics: for example: morale,
team health, working together, a broader topic than just Conflict
Resolution. (Maybe under Staff development -- a group rather than an
individual focus.)
Under Admin: separate office and computer equipment.
The Admin procedures largely lack assignments for primarily
responsibility.
Need someone whose primary responsibility IS clarify MIT Policies.
Purchashing responsibilities are implicit and maybe should be explicit.
Note: it seems like the definition of "Primary" responsibility is a
little different for different tasks.
Under staff development:
too many P's, and too many I's to be a useful model. Let's try and
clarify the different Primaries and maybe cut down on things.
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4. Roundtable:
Bob: Attended Forum "Taking Charge of your MIT Career"
Mike: SGI O^2's have arrived. We're on track for supporting the O^2
platform in January. In the Sun line, we're looking into supporting
Ultras. We expect Ultras will not be at all difficult to support.
Jana: Starting Monday, improvements to ICE-9 will be live.
Rocklyn: Final stress testing on account number enhancements to SAP Web
taking place today, with roll-out on Monday or Tuesdy. Last Wednesday
demoed a create a requisition transaction.
Ted: Integration has been doing in a Fire Fighting mode for a while.
For example, the Benefits Application -- infrastructure being deployed
very close to required need. Separately, Kerberos 5 is getting ported
to Rhapsody. The Rhapsody environment has a number of interesting
aspects as far as being both user and developer friendly.
wdc: pass.
