[270] in I/T Delivery
Minutes 5 November 1999 Project Team Leaders Meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Fri Nov 5 12:13:20 1999
Message-Id: <Ys8l0mBz000183kEQI@mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 17:13:22 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: magellan@MIT.EDU, delivery@MIT.EDU, integration-ptl@MIT.EDU, tomt@MIT.EDU
Project Team Leaders Meeting
11 November 1999
Next Meeting: Un-scheduled as yet.
---- Agenda ----
I. Jeff Pankin mini-course on Active Listening 9:30 - 10 :15
II. Break 10:15 - 10:30
III. Project Leaders 10:30 - 12:00
A. Project Management Update -- Tim McGovern (10 Mins)
B. Mentoring / Coaching new project leaders (15 Mins)
C. Operations Plan -- Greg Anderson & Bob Ferrara (45 Mins)
D. Performance Appraisal Notes -- Bob Ferrara (5 Mins)
E. Round Table (15 Mins)
---- Detail ----
Attendees: Goguen, Anderson, Counterman, Cattey, Ferrara, Lambert,
Pinchback, Tarashenko, Rappaport, Fox, McGov erner Hallisey, Thornton,
Turner.
I. Listening
Jeff Pankin gave a short tutorial on Active Listening.
Two Gems:
Listening as an ally rather than as an adversary is a very effective
technique in helping communication.
There are places where our stresses or habits in IS cause us to
shift to the adversarial role from the ally role, but there are
ways to STAY in the ally role in spite of ourselves.
II. Break.
III. Project Leaders
A. Project Management Update -- Tim McGovern
1. An effort to clean up and reorganize the content of
the 'pm' locker, particularly the Project Management
web pages there.
Important goal: to make the pm locker to be the one-stop
place to shop for Project Management information and pointers.
Please do look at the drart web pages:
http://web.mit.edu/is/dontindex/draft/pm
And comment to: pm-web@mit.edu
2. There is now a Discovery effort in motion to get a tool to
to keep the strategic and operational plan up to date.
This would become "The IS Work Database" embodying both projects
and ongoing work.
--
B. Mentoring / Coaching
How can we help new project leaders come up to speed in skill
project leadership.
Brainstorming resources available:
Mailing lists
Orientation session for new Project Managers
PM Pagers -- communications (often) [pm-helpers, magellan]
Make mentoring part of project startup
Create quick guide
resources for star-up and ongoing
one-on-one coaching
Develop a culture where it's welcomed to ask for help and to give it.
Finances and people logistics. IE Understanding financial impacts.
Creating peer-to-peer support mechanisms, like the magellan group.
Leverage the Competency Group Web pages -- like the Mentoring page.
Encourage team members to seek out a director for mentoring into
a project manager role. Give the team members more responsibility.
--
C. Operations Plan
This was a long briefing on the Strategic and Operational plan where
folks around the table were brought up to speed on the current draft.
Each person read the current plan under Theme 2 and picked the top
three initiatives where they feel strongly committed.
--
D. Performance Appraisal notes
Folks are encouraged to check in at least every 6 months with
their primary reviewees.
Bob will send out the current list of who's whose primary reviewer.
What can we do to help the primary reviewer to incorporate
input from project leaders that reviewees spent the majority
of their time working for?
--
E. Roundtable
SAP 4.5 upgrade -- Bob Ferrara
November 11 is the target for converting to SAP 4.5
Looks good.
Oracle -- Reid Pinchback
We are now at a transition point where it is becoming more
risky to stay with Oracle 7 than to migrate to Oracle 8.
Today 7.3.4 is ok for projects starting today, but
6 months from now, Oracle 8 should be SERIOUSLY considered.
Casetracker -- Barbara Goguen
Schedule slipped a bit.
The test database had a hiccup that was mis-reported as
a failure to go live.
The UI is done.
Modifying some low level aspects of the database back end
Target date November 15
2 projects entering preplanning for Discovery -- Bill Cattey
Athena Desktop -- investigate a facelift for the Athena
user interface, with customers, and with stakeholders
in providing Athena services. Is it feasible to do
a face lift.
Private Athena Workstation -- investigate filling the gap
between customer requirements for privately owned systems
and what is provided in the Athena release as the private
configuration
Enterprise Printing Delivery -- Dave Lambert
commissioning an effort for a new centralized printing facility
to replace the the mainframe based system currently in use.
Expand functionality in some ways such as adding PostScript.
Events Calendar Delivery -- Steve Turner
Good Discovery effort.
Have a project document is being crafted.
based on student-written code.
Cambridge University Collaboration -- Bob Ferrara
The London Times leaked plans for MIT and Cambridge
University to ally like MIT and Singapore University did.
