[147] in I/T Delivery
Delivery Team Leader's meeting 27 March 1998
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey On the Road)
Fri Mar 27 12:32:45 1998
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 98 12:04:32 EST
From: wdc@MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey On the Road)
To: delivery@MIT.EDU
Delivery Team Leader's meeting 27 March 1998
Next meeting planned for April 24 1998 in N42-286
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Hiring Status:
Delivery and service Athena hired Todd Belton, so they are now down
to one open position.
Bob reports that there are still a few open positions, so keep your
eyes open for good folks.
Performance Appraisal:
Any feedback?
Consensus around the table was that this year's form was definitely
an improveent.
Bill Hogue is reported as still feeling that the process is still too
time consuming.
Bill Cattey again expresses the opinion that the 3 levels were not
sufficient.
The salary increase numbers that were approved are:
Exceeds Meets Below
avg.: 5.5% 4.45& 0%
range: >5% 3%-5% 0%
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Project Database:
Suzana Lisanti reports that the IS top level page points at the
project database, so it is going to have more visibility.
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Wish list items update:
We have a good equipment budget this year.
Many wish list items have been approved.
If there are new items, bring them to Bob QUICKLY.
If people need laptops, or other machines, now is the time!
Use NECX as much as possible.
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ITLT Update:
They discussed the Budget and Surplus. IS is gonna have to give back
some funds to the Institute.
Performance Appraisals:
There was some discussion on the process.
The focus was on the actual mechanics of the ITLT phase of the
current performance appraisals.
The ABST has put together a 7 person team to move forward on their
redesign. The work is intended to be completed by the end of June with
the goal of putting the new organiaton into place with the budget cycle.
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SAP Update:
The Phase II Rollout 98 Target plan was handed out. This is the
timeline that has been approved. The goal is to have the Departments,
labs, and Centers to have SAP and to be able to shut down their legacy
systems with the end of the calendar year.
There are 5 major goals for the SAP initiative that are being focused
on and well publicized throughout MIT:
1. Give the Departments, labs and Centers a tool for directly
controlling authorization.
2. Allow full use of MIT's new financial architecture.
3. Simplify procurement and reduce central, "back office" expense.
4. Speed up fiscal year end closing, and increase financial data
visibility.
5. Reduce central operational costs and multiplicity of administrative
systems.
A document is under development that describes these goals in greater
detail and provides perspective on them.
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Review of Delivery Goals
We went down the Delivery Goals, following what Bob had Jim had
discussed when they reviewed the list of Goals:
Basic:
All projects ARE on the radar
In an informal way, project notebooks are in use.
Current thinking is that we abandon an IS resources database.
We discussed this around the table.
The reality is that a database of people and effort is not the
way to allocate/review work assignments.
But a discovery project to keep a db of teams and members should
be investigated.
There ARE predictable forums and sources of help for Delivery Leaders.
OPERATIONAL
We DO have strong integration influence.
We're in process for core project techniques.
Some planning and estimating. We can do more
Want to work more on peer reviews.
By this we mean 'project reviews'
Still finding our way with project tracking.
Need to have techiques blend with project db.
We are doing a better job of not overloading people.
Abstracting a project is a coming effort.
ORGANIZATION
We're doing well in ramping up to a flexible and process oriented
organization.
People ARE operating in the fluid environment.
We can improve on how we let people know of opportunities.
PROJECT-RELATED
Some successes and migration to Service and Support
Athena source trees DEFINITELY in the best shape ever.
DEFINITELY have strong IT partnerships.
SKILLS
Short term, we still have contractor dependency -- focus is to hurry
up and finish things like SAP roll out.
Discussion of what this item means.
Trying to set IS and Institute goal of nurturing internal talent.
More business, integration and project managemrnt talents are
being cultivated.
PowerBuilder, and Oracle, skills are deepening (slowly).
We've met our goal for Release Engineering.
Definitely leading the way in security and web capabilities.
Need to multiply the skills of our few security experts.
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Round Table:
Bill attended training in upcoming Sun Operating System issues, and
visited SGI and is working to inprove our relationships.
Craig is working delivery of the conferencing system 'Web Crossing'.
This is a third party software product that we are customizing and
adding security to.
Jana is working on the assessment phase of the Year 2000 project.
They mainly concentrated on the larger systems, and on getting the
word out. They identified about 200 systems, and got responses from
half. The MIT Audit division is now taking an interest in Y2K issues.
More traffic is expected in the assessment with the Auditors involved,
and as others around the institute become informed.
Effort to get ICE-9 to reflect the SAP architecture is in progress.
Bob and Craig went to NERCOMP. Other sites are facing many of the
same issues we do. Vijay spoke well.
Rocklyn reports that SAP web requisitioning is up, but the older
machines seem to have it run slow under java script. Improvements
are under way. Focusing on essentials of NECX interface first.
