[178] in I/T Delivery
Delivery Team Leader Meeting Notes 6/26
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (who is my neighbor?)
Mon Jul 6 23:32:29 1998
Date: Mon, 06 Jul 1998 20:39:46 -0400
To: rferrara@MIT.EDU
From: who is my neighbor? <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
Cc: delivery@MIT.EDU, mbarker@MIT.EDU
Notes, 6/26
Attending: Bob Ferrara, Jonathan Ives, Craig Counterman,
Tim McGovern, Mike Barker, Lorraine Rappaport, Dan, Jana,
Steve Neiterman, Rocklyn Clark, Bill Hogue
1. Hiring: Rocklyn has hired Gail Wilman for the year 2000
team. Pismere has added Art Leather and Cuong Nguyen. The
network group has hired Anne Salemme. And Rob Smyser is
working on BLT.
2. The project database has had operational problems. Bob
thinks we may want to consider reworking.
3. ITLT is making a serious effort to publish regular
notes. Please read them.
4. MIT has a corporate membership with PMI. There will
probably be a sig group in the fall.
5. Bob Ferrara attended a CAUSE meeting in Boulder. He
will report on it at a Tuesday afternoon meeting. he met
Jeffrey Dengate from Australia who will visit on July 2nd.
6. We discussed the delivery "directional" issues. The
basic question is how to reach more delivery/developer
people. One suggestion was a simple list of projects with
people associated.
Mike got the assignment to talk to Allison about this.
There was a question about how to get more "low-level"
involvement with the delivery process. One idea was to
open up the "team leaders" meeting on a regular basis; i.e.
perhaps every third meeting invite all people interested in
or working on delivery projects.
Do people identify with delivery?
Could we have lunches? With a theme or topic? Project
management, development tools...
Could the process area have a reporter? Some kind of
lightweight newsletter?
Is this a cultural problem? Partly methodology -- during a
project or immediately afterward we need to summarize or
collect lessons learned. But we also need to have more
ongoing exchange of information.
Do we need journalists who can make delivery exciting? Do
we need marketeers who can sell what we're doing?
7. Mike gave a short report on Pismere. The NT source
contract has been signed. The CSG/MS meetings provided
better insight into the difficulties of getting NT 5 to
work with an existing Kerberos infrastructure; possible
relief on getting the active directory services to work
with Moira; we are talking with Transarc about AFS; we
began conversations about the system administration (ZAW);
and we are working to refine the "small" applications area.
8. Bill Hogue discussed support. Some notes: proximity
helps. Involve support people as early and in depth as
possible. A concern is that the current focus on
administrative space could lead to a loss in the academic
space. [This was a richer discussion, but my notes are
bad]
9. The year 2000 team needs an "Esther Yanow" role.
10. There's talk of legacy conversion by January 1st.
11. PSALMS -- Reid Pinchback will be the technical lead.
12. Beers: Lite... for good story, call Bob.
13. Jonathan Ives: ITIT is beginning the product
evaluation of Web products, such as graphical development
tools for GUI Web, java applets. Bob pointed out the need
to make a Web front-end, secure middle, and Oracle back-end
architecture simple to create and use.
14. Craig Counterman is having trouble getting Web
crossing into service.
15. Bill Hogue reminded us that the help desk is having
summer turnover.
16. Wade mentioned the new system casetracker.
17. Jana mentioned that the warehouse is rolling out July
1. [I think this is the data warehouse, but again my notes
are not good.]
