[41] in I/T Delivery
Delivery Team Leaders meeting 18 April 1997
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey On the Road)
Fri Apr 18 12:56:13 1997
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 97 11:55:52 EDT
From: wdc@MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey On the Road)
To: delivery@MIT.EDU, saurons@MIT.EDU
Next meeting is 9 May 1997 in W91-250.
HRPD Update:
Wade gave a progress report on the now-completed 8 week planning period
related to the implementation of some of the HRPD recommendations. They
took the 42 recommendations that came out of the HRPPD process and
boiled them down to 8 to work on. These 8 were focused primarily on
Classification and Compensation. (MIT's compensaton system has not been
reviewed in 20 years.) The plan has milestones documented for the next
12 months. (The expectation is that the results of this planning effort
will be public soon.)
----
Project Database Update:
Monday is the scheduled roll-out date for the changes to allow anyone to
create a project.
pbh raised issues of interoperability with Microsoft Explorer:
1. Jeff's certificate service won't provide them to Explorer.
2. The non-secure access point, because it presents Arachne's
certificate, CHOKES Microsoft Explorer. It doesn't give people the
option to accept the unknown certificate.
----
Bob has earmarked some of our budget surplus for collaboration with two
MIT Departments (note -- this has not been approved yet):
Center for Information Systems Resouces -- Sloan School
Laboratory for Computer Science.
----
Hiring Status:
Team Athena has hired Dan Winship. Our plan is for him to start on or
about 9 June.
Elana Sitnakov has move over as a Database Administrator in Mary Weiss's
group.
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Microsoft Interests:
We now have an official Microsoft representative, Rick Grady.
Todd Needham visited recently to resume the NT source code negotiations.
The "Using Microsoft NT" course in W89 was held again, and got good
reviews. The next run is full. Note that if folks are VERY interested
in taking it, email rferrara.
Rob Smyser and Brenda Gillingham are leading an NT discovery project.
The scope, as yet, is unclear.
----
ITLT Update
Yesterday was an All-Day off-site of ITLT to work through a review of
the IS Process Oriented organizational structure. What are we doing
right? What are we doing wrong? The "Delivery Process Map" originally
part of the Trans-IT stuff, has been revised.
There is some revised stuff that looks like the old Trans-IT stuff.
Mbarker asks: What do we MEAN by :"Process Oriented"?
Some brief discussion ensued which I summarize as: In process oriented
work, there is a goal, but attention is paid to how one goes about
reaching the goal. Note: you still need a goal, otherwise the effort in
doing the process is meaningless.
----
Quarterly Reporting:
Delivery Team leaders should send email to rferrara to summarize what
their status changes are since the last quarterly report. Please do so
by Wednesday Noon. (Folks should already have seen a request for this
from Bob.)
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Transition to Service (Dave Lambert and Brian Murphy):
Dave and Brian are working on a project to improve the process of
transitioning deliveries into service.
Some brain stormin here on what it means to put something into service,
and some issues in various historical handoffs to service.
Maybe create a services database that says who takes care of a service
and where that service is in a continuum of handoffs.
In a perfect world, when a failure occured the person observing the
fault would call any one of 100 service personnel, and the right thing
would happen to quickly recover from it.
Overall: The goal is to make things run more smoothly and have fewer
gotchas happen over time.
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Round Table:
Jim Repa: Brough on a new programmer/ analyst to integration team,
Jonathon Ives workiing on the roles database. Have a consultant working
on the PowerBuilder part of the roles database too.
Rocklyn Clarke: SAP Web. Met with Steve Kellog and got some concrete
specs on what should be done. These specs are now on the web -- go from
the Projects database down through the home page of the SAP web project.
Marilyn Smith is joining the project to help provide customer feedback.
Mary Weiss: Released first draft of the Data Warehouse financial
designs. Bill Dickson has gone on record as committing MIT to put all
the required data from the transaction systems into the Warehouse.
Wade: Rejuvinating the Scopus efforts.
Bob Ferrara: Credit card team is rolling along. Generating
requirements. Much pressure to get an early pilot out.
Gartner group is giving two half-day presentations May 5-9:
SAP: The future or the Past?
Next Generation Administrative Applications: Leap or Creep?
Email rferrara if you;re interested in attending, and representing us
there.
