[70] in I/T Delivery
20 June 1997 Delivery Team Leaders meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey On the Road)
Fri Jun 20 12:09:17 1997
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 97 12:09:02 EDT
From: wdc@MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey On the Road)
To: delivery@MIT.EDU
Next Meeting is 11 July 1997 in W20-250
Updates:
Budget: We're in good shape. Still working to spend end of year money.
Hiring:
Teresa has hired her last contractor.
Bill and Mike are getting serious about a candidate for their open
position.
Paul Page is still looking for people.
Erin Hoffer is leaving.
ITLT:
Most recent ITIT centered around financials.
The project database is being used more extensively by ITLT.
It is becoming the basis for discussions of priorities.
It is becoming the basis for quarterly reports.
IS Forum:
Roz Williams will be the speaker.
6 to 8 teams have offered to do posters.
Latest N42 Moves:
Tuesday Morning the Architect interviewed many people to get a feel for
the working relationships that people have.
Thursday the E40 group came together and new volunteers to move to N42
came forward. A formal announcement of the results will be coming.
Summary of facts:
CWIS will move to N42
ACS Team will move to N42
Vijay will move to N42 (Where David Hogarth goes is pending
discussions with him.)
Ted, Tom, and Wade will have offices allocated in N42 but will have
primary residence in E40.
Denis Barron will stay in E40.
Vacatons:
Bob is taking June 30 to 4 july
Rocklyn is taking the week of June 30 and either the week before or
after.
Bill, Larry Dean, and Mike, and Lorraine will probably take a week in
late August.
Teresa plans to be out for a significant part of Sepember (2-3 weeks)
Paul Hill is going to many conferences, and taking vacation
interspersed. His web page has his schedule.
Greg Anderson is out the week of July 7.
Lorraine out July 14-17
Andy plans vacation in September after all his stuff rolls out.
----
Competency Group Discussion
Shirley is leaving IS.
Erin is leaving MIT.
(An announcement by Jim of these facts and naming some sort of process
to move on should be out concurrently with these minutes.)
IS is very committed to Competency groups, but still unclear on how to
do it right.
............
Plus (+) , Delta (-) on Competency groups.
- Vague in terms of comptetency structure -- need a goal
Should be where all people sit. (Projects pull from this pool)
- Range of budget issues never addressed to reflect reality.
+ Vision is to increase mobility and spread knowledge.
+ The competency group is there to help take care of you career-wise.
+ Original Trans-IT plan called for compency groups to have a budget for
training, conferences, etc. not provided by process or practice budets.
Comptetency as a project office.
- Recognition often seems to come from project work rather than ongoing
service activities.
- Need base of TECHNICAL competencies in addition to those Behavioral
ones.
Are we going to design competencies as an ideal organization which we
never may achieve, or as a stressed organization as we seem to normally
operate? Example: Where will the competency overhead come from?
- What is the payoff to the individual for having expended the effort to
do the Competency stuff?
- Standing teams advantaged in competency issues because of reporting
relationships and resources.
What techniques will come out of the Competency process to realize the
vision of competencies? What roles? What assessment procedure? Etc.
Team leaders, at this point, (even project leaders) need to take
responsibility for doing the competency stuff.
- Mobility can leed to a loss of effectiveness if people are spread too
thin.
- Previous efforts at competency group work looked upon as work on top
of every-day work.
- Competency folks started outside everyday work, and seemed to be kept
there.
- The competency group seems counter-cultural to MIT. The effort spent
in those activities has not been adequately recognized/rewarded.
- Admin and Finance are feeling the same kind of "on the outside", and
"unrecognized" situation themselves as the Competency.
Communication, Respect, Involvement are VERY important.
- People need to understand "What is a competency group?"
You can have a competency group director without having competency group
leaders in a hierarcy. Just as we have Process directors but not
process leaders.
Competency groups should not be outside work.
There are MANY de-facto competency groups amalgamating as different
groups of folks gather together professionally. (co-located support
folks or developers.)
+ We should not get hung up on GROUPS of competencies, maybe we should
focus on techniques instead.
+ Competency group could become yet another stove pipe.
Maybe think about Competencies like Boy Scout Merit Badges?
Competency group work by Erin and Shirley perceived as distant from
teams.
What can we do to move Competency stuff forward?
----
Office Computing Practice Update
Teresa gave a thumbnail history of the Office Computing Practice, how it
came from Trans-IT, how it started as an analog to the well-established
Academic Computing Practice, how Diane Devlyn, as a long-time MIT
employee brought a certain style to the practice leadership which is
different from Teresa's style.
Now Office Computing is looking into what exactly is out there as far as
office computing issues.
What are the issues for office compting for folks with PC's, Mac's, and
UNIX boxes (yes even UNIX boxes!) in their departments?
Many issues are sensitive ones and have required care even to discuss,
and lots of care to overcome problems or history.
In the past there has been a tactical focus, and now Teresa is hoping to
have a progressively more strategic one.
Deliery leaders can help in office Computing by paying attention to
cross-platform issues. Trying to deliver technologies that run
multi-platform, and keeping Teresa informed on what is and is NOT
available on all platforms.
Scalability is also very important to Teresa.
----
Projects, Summer Deliverables, President's report
(Cut from agenda. There was a handout. Bob will be in touch with folks
if he needs help in putting things together for the next President's
report.)
Bob mentioned that there a few little bits of things he tweaked in
people's project database entries.
Examples: Project Database priority went from Hi to Medium.
----
Duncan-Nevison Proposal
We asked Duncan-Nevison how to keep things rolling to follow through on
the project courses taught to IS.
Duncan-Nevison proposed to have a series of Lunchtime seminars, but at a
seemingly high cost.
There was brief discussion of what sorts of interventions would be most
helpful in improving project management skill and realized value.
----
Round Table
Your humble minutes-taker left as Round-table started.
