[13] in magellan
Discovery Team Leaders meetings,
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Anderson)
Tue Jan 12 11:49:13 1999
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1999 11:49:09 -0500
To: magellan@MIT.EDU
From: Greg Anderson <ganderso@MIT.EDU>
This is a reposting of my original message.
Apologies for the clutter.
Greg
----------
Everyone,
Like many of you, in this new year, I'm in the midst of climbing back
into the saddle and trying to think about ways to move work forward.
This past fall we began to work together on a one-hour per week basis;
at times we've been more structured than at others, but I think we have
generally accomplished the goal of information sharing, mutual support,
and issue discussion and resolution. In short, we've begun to develop
good habits for our work and for helping each other.
With these accomplishments, I would like to propose two changes:
1. Begin to meet every other week; our first meeting will be:
Thurs. Jan. 14 from 1 - 2 in N42-203.
2. Begin to capture and share in writing, a _brief_ project report.
As
an introductory format for the report, I propose the following
elements:
<bold><underline>Project Name
Project Leader
Report Date
Accomplishments past period
Goals for the coming period
Issues
Key learnings
Team dynamics
Additional comments</underline></bold>
I ask that these _brief_ reports be submitted as ascii text to the
mailing list magellan@mit.edu by 4 pm on the Wed. before our meeting.
Magellan was created by Mike Barkert for this purpose - your names have
been added to populate the list and to make it easy for everyone to
cross-post their reports. Magellan also feeds a discuss list:
magellan-mtg@menelaus
All reports would then be archived for future leaders to see.
The purpose of these two changes is to remove meetings from your
schedule and to give a little more structure to our information
sharing. In sharing these brief reports with each other, we should be
able to use our one-hour time more productively. This is not intended
to be either punishment or admin. overhead. It is intended to provide
you with a structured pattern to pause for a few minutes and reflect on
the work, become cognizant of your progress, and to think about your
next steps. I would hope that no one would spend more than 30-45
minutes every two weeks on these - hopefully less. It should also be a
useful mechanism to insure that your team has a common understanding of
the work. You could then put these into your project notebook as a
reflection of what you've accomplished and a tactical pointer as to
where you're headed. Finally, this will help us establish better
measures in our project space.
Thanks. If you have questions, please let me know. I know that many of
you have other reporting channels - if we need to negotiate a more
commonly accepted format, I'd be pleased to have that discussion.
Greg
