[343] in magellan
Issues discussion from yesterday
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Anderson)
Fri Dec 3 10:45:16 1999
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Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 10:41:54 -0500
To: magellan@mit.edu
From: Greg Anderson <ganderso@MIT.EDU>
Good morning,
To recap the meeting yesterday, we talked about three issues that
were submitted with the project reports:
1. Timing and the pace of projects: how to proceed with project work when
new work (both anticipated and unexpected) comes onto the plate. This is
especially true for project staff who have time-sensitive, critical
operational duties that take precedence. One mitigation for the stress
factor is to let your project sponsors know about the situation; you might
then re-negotiate your time schedules or at least get some understanding of
the conundrum.
2. Change processes to accompany implementation projects. Greg reported on
the efforts within HR-Payroll Discovery to develop a structure to assist
organizations with the change elements associated with implementing SAP
HR-Payroll. Prof. Bob McKersie, Sloan, is assisting with this work. The
outcome is to develop a map for the change journey in HR-Payroll and to
learn from that experience some principles that can be used in the change
processes for other projects.
3. Discovery projects 'discovering' other issues. This discussion focused
on how projects address new understanding/recognition of other issues.
These new issues may be out of scope for the project or they may be
obstacles impeding progress on the project. What to do? If the new issue
needs to be named and treated as another project, pass that knowledge along
the sponsors/Discovery process director. If the new issue is an obstacle to
the project, there may be need to re-negotiate scope, timelines, resources
for the existing project. Again, sponsors, Discovery process Director, etc.
can be helpful. The important learning is not to bury the new issue or
pretend that it doesn't exist.
The remainder of the meeting recapped the Casey Green CampusComputing
survey presentation on Tuesday, attended by a number of magellan members.
The key concern identified in the survey is integrating IT into the
classroom. This is a core question for current initiatives such as I-campus
(MIT/MS Alliance) and the MITCET.
We also noted that the survey indicated relatively little attention to
e-commerce on campuses, and we noted that MIT is an exception; not only do
we already have a strong e-commerce presence, but it is expanding through
Discovery work such as Online Credit-card processing.
Next meeting: Dec. 16, 1 - 2
