[598] in magellan
Amended Minutes: 16 Feb 2001 Project Team Leaders Meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Mon Feb 19 16:18:16 2001
Message-ID: <YuYMqIJz0001I6YmU=@mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 21:18:12 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: magellan@MIT.EDU, delivery@MIT.EDU, integration-ptl@MIT.EDU
CC: saurons@MIT.EDU, jdb@MIT.EDU
Here are minutes from Friday's Project Team Leaders Meeting.
I missed the beginning of Jim's presentation, and a few bits along the
way, so Jim graciously agreed to fill in the missing bits.
These "minutes" are rather long, but they contain many good ideas
that are worth slogging through if you were unable to be at the meeting.
-wdc
----
Project Team Leaders Meeting
16 February 2001
Jim Bruce on issues with the Project Planning Process:
The Oxford Dictionary defines a project as
plan
scheme
planned undertaking for presentation of results at a specific
time
As you think about a project you rapidly come to the conclusion
that it has a beginning and an end, a goal and therefore desired
results, and that it must have a plan.
Last year IS spent time developing and discussing its vision:
Quality, service, value, leadership
quality -- meet [latent] customer needs
service -- what we provide is done well -- professional,
helpful, courteous
value -- our work enables, and is recognized as enabling,
our customers to excel. NOTE: this has elements
of both reality and perception
leadership -- engaging to understand new needs and work to
meet them
At the March 20th IT Forum last year, we talked about the five
year plan that was under construction at that time. We talked
about what a project required:
Goal
Plan
Staffing
Milestones
Customer/Sponsor expectations
Customer Communication
I also noted then that John Curry, the Executive Vice President,
expects that projects will be
on scope
on time
on budget
and that administrative organizations at MIT will demonstrate at
least productivity improvements of 1% per year.
Now, some thoughts about a successful project.
First comes a plan, which contains
a complete understanding of the business reasons why we are
doing something.
Everything we do has a business reason associated with it.
Must sell doing technology because there is a business reason
involved.
It is vital that we capture the business case for the project
during Discovery. There are projects that went rather out of
control dealing with business issues that could have been seen
and prepared for during Discovery.
Next in our plan are our technical goals.
We need to deliver products and services:
that we are proud of.
that are production quality.
Production quality means:
that the product/service can be deployed and maintained.
that we can measure performance.
that we can continuously improve what was deployed.
The three aspects of production quality named above need to be
built in from the beginning.
6 P's about planning:
Piss Poor Planning Produces Poor Performance
After technical goals in the plan comes staffing, setting milestones,
...
IS does not do staffing well. If we are going to succeed, we
-- directors, team leaders, and team members -- must become better
at making and keeping commitments about staffing teams.
Finally, to be successful, we must be open about our plans. They
need to be available both within IS and to our customers.
After planning comes Accountability:
for work commitment.
for the time.
for the resources.
The third key is Communication
Open plans -- nothing hidden. People know what you are up to.
You need to communicate up to management.
Communication to sponsors
To customers
And especially to our Community. -- We need good Public Relations!
Message from Curry discussing the budgeting process:
Know your work.
Know your processes and improve them.
Replace weak performers with strong performers.
Make the services better.
Significant budget increases have been given to departments who have:
benchmarked.
projected a credible improvement compared to the norm.
demonstrated accountability.
There are areas where IS is delivering higher quality services
at significantly lower cost than the norm in many areas, but
we do not have the data in hand to show it. Lack of facts leaves
us vulnerable for uninformed negative comments.
IS recently got praise for the Customer Satisfaction Survey.
----
Team leader learnings:
tomt: Benefits from staying caught up with minutes, reading them, and
publishing them.
Sarah Schreves: importance of communication, and clear expectation.
Daniel Sheehan: ditto communications!
lambert: Plus/Delta
Delta:
need to practice time estimates
thin slicing is still an issue
still need to improve appreciation of process
need more IS wide resources in the project space.
Plus:
efforts to keep the project management web site up to date
project notebooks and status reports have been a big win
Magellan group very helpful
better at understanding roles
good business involvement
improved go/no-go decision process in place
Randy Winchester: managemnet by walking around;
meeting with team members one on one.
amb: It can be difficult to take an idea and turn it into a deliverable
that can be accomplished with resources in hand. But nonetheless this
is key.
You can write all the documentation you want but sometimes a demo
makes all the difference.
wdc: Getting alignmnent amongst stakeholders -- sponsor, champion,
project team leader, implementors, customers, and community -- is difficult!
Never underestimate the value of a clear head that comes from NOT being
overloaded.
joanne: small teams that are working teams seems to be very effective.
Having the right sponsor(s) is an important help! Pre-planning is very
helpful.
rferrara: Sponsorship matters a lot. Sponsor satisfaction survey
is showing that the loss of contact with sponsor was a factor in
problem proejcts.
rclarke: Thin slicing is a BAD thing. Gotta learn to say no.
Working on stuff a week or more ahead of when its due keeps you
out of the tyrany of the urgent so you are able to produce higher
quality and work more strategically.
tjm: Review of enduring themes: We should not declare a project done
until we've asked ourselves if what we propose to do is the absolute
simplest approach. -- Reduce risks!
Visions are visions, and strategies are strategies. Goals are different.
Projects need Goals -- Concrete. One syllable descriptions of what we
are doing.
ganderso: There is value to the HOW we do work in addition to the WHAT we do.
Focus more around IMPACT. Ask repeatedly what the impact and the outcomes
for the community. We should focus on enterprise-wide impacts in preference
to little, localized improvements.
How we stay in touch with ourselves and how we learn from each other
is important. Repeatability of our work is important. Critique of projects
is important.
Gerry Isascson: Most successful project in his portfolio is the one where
most of the time is spent planning.
ljr: Relationships are important. Within IS. Within project team.
With customers. Within the community. It takes time to build them
but has tremendous value.
khiggins: This conversation is very useful!
azary: Justifying infrastructure is sometimes a difficult sell to the
community. Sometimes infrastructure work is tagged on just in time
to other projects. But that results in us not being leading edge.
Need to be more proactive with infrastructure.
mjv: Times of crisis, rather than being fatal to a project or team,
can be valuable farther down the line. Learning people's individual
strengths and weaknesses can result in a group that is greater than
the sum of the parts.
jdb: Sees common themes:
Communications
Setting expectations
Difficulty of alignmnent
Connecting with sponsors
Teams/committments/thin-slicing
Building relationships
----
Round Table:
Personnel Changes
Jeff Harrington moving to Alumni.
Jag Patel is joining Delivery.
Linux Delivery for ITS
SAP Internet Transaction Server. We used to use our own.
Used to be only on NT.
ITS needed for HR payroll. A Linux-based port seems coming in on time.
Team being formeed now.
Academic Offsite
Last wed, vkumar hosted offsite focuesed on future direction of
Academic Computing -- this is a BEGINNING.
Sets the stage for some positive changes for the future.
Need to understand what the business is for Academic Computing.
Need to find the appropriate role for IS.
New focus:
Moves from "providing technology for faculty if they choose to use it"
to providing help to faculty to use technology.
On customer rather than on technology.
Engage majority, rather than the few technology-friendly faculty.
This has ramifications to possibly radically change what we do
compared to what we've historically done.
Project Performance Appraisal
Project based work is a major slice of certain people's job, but not
yet well enough integrated into the Performance Appraisal process.
A form is under draft. The roll-out of this will begin AFTER current
Performance Appraisal is done -- for projects beginning in April '01.
Can serve as a relationship building tool.
An evaluation tool for projects rather than team members is another
topic, that is under consideration too.
DSpace: Joint project of HP and MIT Libraries. Bill has has a constantly
shifting role in the project. A significant milestone has been met:
The "little-D" proof of concept demo is at:
http://www.dspace.org/dspace/
----
FY02 Budget
9 numbers:
The budget of all things on Curry's portfolio is $200M
The IS budget is $50M
Internal sources of money to IS is $26M
The remaining 24M of the 50 comes from selling services.
The amount unexpended from last year's IS budget was $0
Other departments had a total of $12M unexpended.
Curry's organizations asked for a total of $15M.
IS asked for 4.3M
Curry gave out a total of 3.6M, and reduced budgets by a total of $1.2M
Net budget increases across all is $2.4M or 1.2%
Restated as a table:
Budget: $200M $50M IS Budget
$26M IS Net Budget
$0 IS Unexpended in '01
FY '01 Unexpended across all other depts: $12M
Requested in increases by all depts: $15M
Requested increase by IS: $4.3M
Total new allocations approved: $3.6M
Total reductions to depts made: $1.2M
Net increase: $2.4M
We don't know what we got, but NONE of the new allocations
are as big as 4.3M.
We could have gotten a cut of 1.2, or an increase of 3.6 or anything
in between.
