[54] in I/T Delivery
9 May 1997 Delivery Team Leaders Meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey On the Road)
Fri May 9 12:37:11 1997
Date: Fri, 09 May 97 12:13:02 EDT
From: wdc@MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey On the Road)
To: delivery@MIT.EDU
Next Meeting 30 May 1997, 10:00 AM E40-212
Updates:
Project Database:
A maintenance page has been added to make fault isolation a little
easier.
Bob and Brenda are (as a background task) to come up with some
documentation of minimum standards for what team leaders should put in
the database for high quality project tracking.
----
SAP Rollout:
SAP Web replacement for EREQ is on track for a June deliverable.
Certificates are a part of it.
Release 2 phase 1 is a focused rollout of particular functionality
(report generation and display) to particular audiences will begin
August 1.
Maxi-Web -- an enhanced version of SAP Web (including transactional
part) is scheduled for August 1. (Assuming user id's and profiles are
in place in time.)
Release 2 phase 2 will rollout the rest of the functionality to the
broader audience (focus on transational stuff.) It will begin on or
about Jan 1 1998.
Bob visited SAP and IXOS in California this week. He'll be sending out
a detailed trip report later. Bob pursued ideas in closer collaboration
between MIT and SAP on Web issues. With IXOS he learned more about their
interface to SAP for archiving and document images (for such things as
paperless invoices.)
----
Hiring status:
Is proceding apace. Bill and Mike are looking at someone, but may end
up having to advertise the position or to do something new to get more
applicants.
----
3Q97 report: Bob filed it. He says he missed a couple things.
----
ITLT update:
Quarterly reports gone over.
Yesterday was a shortened meeting.
ITLT went over promotion issues with Kathy Allen. The group went over
the process of promotion, a long term plan for who to promote or give
increases to between now and December, and got a sense of what to do
when.
----
Status of Project Descriptions:
On 15 may the content of the project database will be showed off at the
IS Forum.
----
Delivery Vision:
Taking stock on the vision document and our progress.
(Side note, it's a useful doc, but it's not a "vision statement".)
Issue: Bill suggests that folks need more help in knowing what a project
notebook can be and what appropriate things to put in one.
We've been more successful in filling open positions and in retaining
staff.
Brief discussion of the "Piloting of recommended methodology" item.
Seems like recommending a one size fits all methodology is a bad idea,
but becoming aware of methodologies, and successfully applied ones is a
good idea.
----
Roundtable:
Bob attended IVY Plus with Tim McGovern. Lots of folks are also doing
data warehousing and credit card stuff. Met lots of interesting folks
and heard about what is going on at other sites. Of the IVY Plus group
only MIT and Duke are doing SAP. Many sites are just beginning to
investigate some sort of financial system reengineer. Cornell is the
only one using PeopleSoft. (They have an alum at PeopleSoft.) Many
sites are investigating Oracle or home-grown systems.
Paul Hill has been in contact with Hummingbird to get fixes and
distribution rights for Host Explorer, the Kerberized Telnet and tn3270
application. A working 16 bit version is expected.
Paul and Ted gave a presentation on Kerberos 5 and Certificates at the
Common Solutions Group.
Teresa Regan: The office of sponsored programs application "Coeus" is
getting close to being able to provide its data to SAP.
Julie Norris gave a presentation to the school of engineering on Coeus.
Note that Teresa wants the customers installing Coeus to take more
responsibility for making sure that their desktops meet particular
minimum requirements before trying to run the installers. This desire
comes from the fact that her team used to have a lot of knowledge about
and control over the kinds of systems receiving the software. That is
no longer the case with the broader audience. Her small group having to
support the wide diversity at the hand-holding level does not scale.
Steve Neiterman: Turning his attention to help desk tools. Assessing
changes relating to email interfaces.
The online MIT phone directory now has, in addition to personal entries,
a prototype of the Blue Pages.
Mary Weiss: Her team brought Warehouse implementation proposals to the
Research labs and the Process Owner's Council. The proposals were well
received.
Bill Cattey: Gave another plug for "The Beautiful Report Language".
Mike Barker: Looking at the "CPU Leasing Project" (a long job
facility.)
Greg Anderson: The MCC proposals have been reviewed, and a vendor has
been selected. NECX of the North Shore has been selected. Very high
priority project to cook up some sort of ECAT interface to NECX has been
started.
