July 2007 Archives

Got too many in my pond at home: want some?

Actually, this is an example of false advertising. I really wanted to follow up with the Libraries' Subject Heads and a discussion we had at their meeting on July 2nd. Are you there?

Well, what does what Kevin says in his blog entry today about communication and collaboration in ITS mean for DLT?

The DLT group met with VP and CIO Kevin Morooney this morning and had a very useful discussion on ITS in general as well as updates on goals and projects. Here's a very short presentation that we used to ground the discussion.

A group of DTL staff met Friday 7/13 to talk about implementing what was learned at the Learning Tree Project Management training we took in May. We used email system migration as a test case and came up with an initial list of required project mgmt components and steps. First, we distinguished between a "project" (activity with beginning, middle and end) and a "process" (operational and support activities such as data back-up, software upgrades, etc.); the latter are out of scope in this discussion but we have already agreed that we need to take a look at our incident, change and risk management processes next. We also discussed document sharing and the various options we have currently; no conclusion at this point.

We agreed that the following were absolute requirements for DLT project management:

1. Project Charter describing the project goals, timeline and milestones, resource requirements, etc. at a high level with names and signatures of project sponsors and a project manager or project lead. Although the charter is describing a project with an end date, it also needs to include ongoing maintenance and support requirements (FTE resources, licensing, upgrades, security risks, opportunity costs). Here is a charter template that we used at the institution I must not name and that we've started using here. We'd need to amend this to include space for the maintenance and support requirements.

2. Functional Requirements document, i.e., what needs to be done.

3. Technical Specifications document, i.e., how the requirements should to be implemented.

4. Project Plan with timeline, milestones, dependencies, resources, risk analysis, communication plan (meetings, status, communications), etc.

5. Post-mortem or Lessons Learned document.

Our next meeting is scheduled for Friday, July 20th; at that meeting, we'll be refining and reviewing templates for each of these five documents/steps and how we could apply project management software. We'll also take a look at our current project inventory and look at where and when we can apply this methodology.

Did I capture everything we discussed?

Brownbag today:

July 9, 2007, 12:00 P.M. - 1:00 P.M. in Foster Auditorium, University Libraries

Join CIO Kevin Morooney and DLT Senior Director, Mairéad Martin, for a discussion of why and how Google challenges University IT services and how we might think about them.

Librarians are accustomed to the fact that Google has challenged everyone to work within a changed information habitat. But if you're a user of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar or other Google services, you might be wondering why we still have Eudora, Meeting Maker, Microsoft Word, and the U:\ drive.