[215] in I/T Delivery
Minutes of Joint Project Leaders meeting N42-286 10AAM Friday
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert V. Ferrara)
Tue Jan 26 17:03:10 1999
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 17:04:04 -0500
To: delivery@MIT.EDU, fortoul@MIT.EDU, tjm@MIT.EDU, brendakg@MIT.EDU,
jjv@MIT.EDU, pbh@MIT.EDU, mca@MIT.EDU, thorne@MIT.EDU, dania@MIT.EDU,
repa@MIT.EDU, tytso@MIT.EDU, gii@MIT.EDU, kelley@MIT.EDU,
bobmah@MIT.EDU, reidmp@MIT.EDU, pakulat@MIT.EDU, jives@MIT.EDU,
cgteam@MIT.EDU
From: "Robert V. Ferrara" <rferrara@MIT.EDU>
Hello,
These are (part of) the minutes of the Discovery, Delivery, and Integration
Team Leaders meeting on Friday 1/15/1999. Bill Cattey will shortly be
sending out the details of the project database portion of the meeting.
These minutes include everything else. The next two meetings are currently
scheduled for 2/19 and 3/19/1999. Bad weather, plus the usual array of time
conflicts, accounted for low attendance. Dani Aivizian, Greg Anderson, Bill
Cattey, Rocklyn Clarke, Bob Ferrara, Bill Cattey, Suzana Lisanti, Susan
Minai-Azary, Jag Patel, Reid Pinchback, Lorraine Rappaport, Jana Tarasenko,
and Esther Yanow were there.
HRPD Team Formation Project. Dani Aivizian updated the group on the work on
team formation, sponsored by Patricia Brady of the HRPD (Human Resources
Practices Development) Reengineering group. Her MIT-wide research mission
is to identify those practices which dispose teams to high performance and
increases participant satisfaction. She discussed some of the factors,
including support staff, sponsor commitment, and formal kick-offs. Hitting
date milestones, even if it means changing functionality, seems very
important, too. She has developed a taxonomy of team types, team roles, and
best practices. The work will be reported in full in the HRPD Report which
will be ready for Academic Council this spring. A subset of her portion
will be available for IS earlier. There was a lot of discussion and several
suggestions offered.
IS Project Database. Bob Ferrara started this segment by reporting on the
previous day's ITLT session, which Allison Dolan wrote up as follows: "ITLT
has agreed to increase the focus on using the Project Database as a tool to
help understand IS' work commitments. Bob Ferrara, Greg Anderson, Susan
Minai-Azary, several TLs and others have been discussing various aspects of
the issue.There is a recognition that the existing Project DB is not
perfect. However, until we better understand how it could be used, and how
IS will manage its work processes, it doesn't seem to be appropriate to
invest any significant resources in 'fixing' this system. Bug fixes and
simple changes with big value will be considered. A more formal review of
the system, including a buy vs. build analysis, will be considered as part
of a Discovery project to be initiated a some point in the future, after IS
better understands how we plan to manage the work."
-----Bill Cattey minutes fill in the rest of this discussion here-------------
Round Table.
ECAT2/NECX. Lorraine mentioned the production pilot had begun (just before
New Year's) and 7 orders had been placed so far.
Netscape 4.5. Suzanna reported that Netscape 4.5 looks easier to use for
X.509 Certificates. We are to trying to get 4.5 as a supported product,
though some in-process work remains to be done.
SAP Planning. Bob reported that 31 of the project plans for the 1999
activities have been received, with perhaps 10 still to go. A half-day
project planning session, hosted by Mike Barker and Brenda Gillingham, was
attended by 18 people and was extremely well received.
Performance Appraisals. Will start in February.
Telephone Feed. Jana has completed moving the telephone billing feed from
the "stack" to SAP. Master data is obtained from the Data Warehouse. This
is another good step towards a cleaner "3-tier" application architecture.
Ed Tech. Greg reported that a series of discussions continues and gathers
momentum on efforts to enhance production of electronic materials for
teaching and learning. With the new Provost Bob Brown overseeing the
initiatives for distance learning, web teaching, Singapore, etc., IS
involvement has been to help shape the concept for a core service to assist
in the production and delivery of course materials for the community. On
Jan. 4, IS, CAES, and other staff from the Institute participated in an
all-day discussion to clarify the concepts and to begin exploration of
detailed issues. This could require significant IS resources in the next
6-12 months.
Java. Susan, Robert Rippcondi, and others are loking at how to share Java
delivery knowledge. They would appreciate any feedback or candidate
applications.
