[254] in Project_DB
Notes, 10/30 Project DB meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Barker)
Mon Nov 17 16:23:46 1997
From: Mike Barker <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
To: project-db@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 16:23:33 EST
Attending: tjm, mbarker, wdc, brlewis, brendakg (aka "The Witch of IS")
We reviewed action items:
- the draft project-db pages were moved to
http://web.mit.edu/project-db
- brenda provided a draft glossary
Key decision: No more meetings until further notice. Keep v2 running.
Wait on v3 to see what the HR effort and customers need.
We discussed v2 and v3. Some comments and questions:
Does V2 solve the customer's needs? (who are the customers?)
How can we roll in people/effort tracking/planning? Should this be
time-based or perhaps look at deliverables/goals?
What is the scope of the v3 effort? Will the discovery project define
that?
Could we provide people with day-to-day functionality? For example,
could we start with todo lists, roll those up to status reports, and
keep summarizing upwards? Would this "bottom-up" approach be more
useful to the individuals we are asking to put information into the db?
Suggested action item: directors should learn to interact with each
other in a matrixed organization. (context: we were discussing how the
current db helps, but doesn't solve everything. in the discussion of
what needed to be added to make the current db -- or any future
implementation -- successful, this suggestion came up)
People at MIT do what they want to do, not what someone thinks they are
doing. (this makes planning tools ironic)
People are never free.
Part of what the people/effort initiative may be asking is "What is the
impact of assigning these resources to this project?" This kind of
"what if" planning may be difficult to provide good automated aids for.
Directors want to know when people are available.
People want to know when project are available.
(these are NOT the same)
Technology cannot replace the human process. We need to be careful to
avoid that.
Temp agencies do this kind of project/person matchup at a finer scale
than we need. How do they do it? Can we learn from them?
We need "safe havens" for new ideas.
