[61] in magellan
Minutes: Joint Project Leaders meeting Friday 2/19/1999
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Fri Feb 19 12:11:11 1999
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 12:10:59 -0500 (EST)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: delivery@MIT.EDU, magellan@MIT.EDU, fortoul@MIT.EDU, jjv@MIT.EDU,
pbh@MIT.EDU, mca@MIT.EDU, thorne@MIT.EDU, dania@MIT.EDU, repa@MIT.EDU,
tytso@MIT.EDU, gii@MIT.EDU, kelley@MIT.EDU, bobmah@MIT.EDU,
reidmp@MIT.EDU, pakulat@MIT.EDU, jives@MIT.EDU, hogue@MIT.EDU
Joint Project Leaders Meeting
19 February 1999
The next planned date is 3/19/1999.
----
Agenda:
Opening
Issue Capture
Updates
- Project DB
- Discovery Web Pages
- Integration Web Pages
others from issues
Annnouncements
Metrics -- Bill Hogues
Adjourn
Plus/Delta
--------
Opening
Issue Capture
Updates
- Project DB
http://web.mit.edu/project-db/www/index.html is the Project Database
Project Notebook page.
That page describes the current initiative to better understand
how the Project DB is used, and tune it to better serve.
That section points to the revised Job Flow analysis.
The next work is to convene a meeting of proper stakeholders and
develop an Entity Relationship Diagram that describes the Project
DB as desired. After that, the differences will be measured, and
tasks to close the gaps will be sorted for relative cost and benefit.
- Discovery Web Pages
Greg Anderson has made a draft of a significant rewrite of the
Discovery web pages.
- Integration Web Pages
Susan Minai-Azary reports that the Integration web pages are also
changing. A significant change is that Jonathan Ives is adding
a lot of information on how to find things.
- others from issues:
Bob Ferrara mentions that Delivery too will revise its web pages.
The significant difference will be in cocumenting the "Buy"
process within delivery. The Delivery pages talk a lot about
the process of building, but not at all about buying. Buying
often involves collaboration with either Discovery or
Integration. Up to now we've had to learn how these
collaborations should go on.
Jim Bruce has circulated an article, "Results Driven
Incrementalism -- RDI" that specifically addresses buy situations.
Craig asks, "Where do vendor relations factor into our work."
"Good question." Often every different process ends up having
some vendor relations work. Examples:
Buy might involve Discovery if there is a pilot project.
Buy might involve Integration if there are infrastructure
issues.
The Service process gets involves in vendor relations when
services are purchased.
Bob reports that a consulting company, TAVA is making a sweep
through MIT facilities to help assess Y2K exposure.
TAVA will pass over areas we tell them not to evaluate.
Athena and Administrative Systems are to be passed over
because we are working them ourselves.
Mike Barker reports that the Athena printing infrastructure,
formerly based on Berkeley lpr is being replaced with a new
system called lprNG. This has MANY benefits.
But there is a migration issue: The new print clients
won't talk to Kerberized old print servers.
If you know of a private Kerberized print server, we want to
know about it so we can make a house call and help upgrade
it.
5YP:
Expect an announcement to infosys from Jim Bruce very soon
wrapping up the work of the 5YP team, and naming the next
steps.
The ITLT has been charged with shepharding the initiatives
forward.
Jim has a template for moving a Strategy to concrete action,
and another for moving an Initiative to concrete action.
Announcements
Reminder: Next Wednesday is the IS Forum with our new Executive VP
Johm Curry, at the Wong Auditorium at 2:00 PM.
ECAT2 interfacing NECX to SAP Web is going into production next
Tuesday!
NERCOMP (a regional higher educational computation organization)
is meeting in Sturbridge in March. Large MIT presense is expected.
Metrics -- Bill Hogue
update on the Gartner Group IT metrics work
There has been a long-standing issue of how we tell ourselves
about what we are doing, for example, the quarterly reports.
Measuring customer satisfaction has been an issue.
The new Executive VP, John Curry likes tangible measures, for
example to justify budgets.
IS needs to improve how it measures performance of processes
and customer satisfaction. So we contracted with the Gartner
Group to help. The Gartner Group helped with 2 things:
Deliver an IT Customer Satisfaction Survey.
There is a delicate art to picking the right questions to
ask.
The Survey has been drafted, and is expected to be used
in March.
Analyze IS operating processes.
12 week process beginning around March 15, we hope.
Will measure costs and benefits of different processes.
The Gartner group comes in with a template of what the
business process are of an organization like ours.
One of the exciting areas of work will be to have
conversations about how Gartner's template differs
from how we think of ourselves.
Gartner has a track record of doing VERY WELL at
identifying the right process boundries and metrics.
If anyone is interested in participating in ths work, please
contact Bill Hogue, hogue@mit.edu
A question Bill is posing to ITLT is: "Is IS in a position to
allocate the resources now to do this?"
Adjourn
Plus/Delta
No Plus Delta. Meeting ended a few minutes overtime, and nobody
raised any Plus Deltas.
