[49] in Tooltime
Meeting w/Joan Beardsley 3/13
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barbara Goguen)
Thu Mar 14 14:56:34 1996
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1996 14:55:45 -0500
To: tooltime@MIT.EDU, paheff@MIT.EDU, cec@MIT.EDU
From: goguen@MIT.EDU (Barbara Goguen)
Peter Lee, Lynne Sousa, Al Willis and I met with Joan Beardsley, Director
of Consulting Services and John Howe, Boston area manager of consulting
services for Scopus. The meeting went well - both Joan and John seem as
though they will be very reasonable people to work with.
We gave them an overview of what was going on with the help desk
reengineering implementation, how the help desk operates today, how we hope
to have it operate in the near future in relationship to the use of the
tool, etc. Joan interviewed us to get at a scenario that would help
illustrate how we would want the tool to function. We gave her a copy of
the requirements we have compiled as a team. We also gave her a copy of
the olc requirements/scenario that Carla originally did for the RISC
consultants and which Carla updated for Scopus. We discussed the possible
3 phases we are looking at as being:
1. Get the help desk up and running on the tool with the basic required
functionality, including Web and email interfaces. Timeline for this being
the month of April if possible and if we have a signed contract by end of
March.
2. Build the functionality of a tty olc-like interface to work with a
Scopus/Oracle back end
3. Add functionality as needed for other groups to include the use of
Scopus in their operations
We discussed the issue of security and how we may need some consulting
services to assist us in getting the SNS/Kerberos piece or Kerberos wrapper
piece functioning, but that we were still getting a handle on what will
need to be done from the Oracle end. But at least she is aware of this
issue. She apparently is in regular contact with Tim Guleri and Kira
McAgon, the folks involved in our conference call.
She then described the process they use to work with customers.
I. Requirements
They assist in pulling together a complete functional requirements doc,
from interviews such as we had with her today, requirements lists such as
we provided her, and more in-depth conversations.
II. Rapid Prototyping
They then build some quick prototype screens and procedures to get feedback
on whether what they think you want is what you really want.
III. Project planning and definition
They help put together a complete project plan and clear definition of what
needs to happen when.
IV. Project Plan Execution
Depending on the complexity of the requirements, this all can take 5-6
weeks or 2-4 months. She sees our phase 1 as being pretty simple.
She sees distinct roles in all of this. Some of these roles can be
"staffed" by MIT, some by Scopus, however we wish to do it. These roles
include: project manager, business analyst, implementor, DBA, and systems
analyst. We briefly discussed having MIT staff as many of these roles as
we could find time to staff, and taking as much immediate ownership of this
as possible. We may, however, need to use Scopus staff more than might be
ideally desirable just because we are so short on staff time right now. We
need to discuss and make some decisions.
Action Items:
- By Monday, Joan will have an proposal document to me broken out by
implementation piece, roles, time, and cost estimate.
- Joan will also get someone knowledgeable about their Web interface to
contact me to arrange a technical conference call regarding the Web
interface's functionality.
- Joan will get the schedule of TCL/API courses in California to me so that
we can get at least a couple of folks signed up for training
Interesting notes: Joan apparently knows Dan Geer, and used to work in
Cambridge.
-barbara
goguen@mit.edu
617-253-6135
