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One useful question likely to reappear is "if we cancel this project, what resources will it free up?"
Tim reinforced the point of "What are the questions that the data needs to answer?"
Mark mentioned these issues:
a.) you have to capture time;
b.) you have to have people willing to be honest with you;
c.) each reporter needs their own work labels for work that 's unique, and shared labels for work that is the same.
To be successful, the group of us needs to commit to collecting time, and all the other stuff that ought to be known.
Barb's summation:
- as good as it gets for the moment is for each manager to have their own model that they commit to maintaining
- but it seems early to share because it wouldn't make sense to another view;
Kate's response, maybe it would be valuable to understand the list of categories per team against which %s are allocated.
Agreement around the room to send me the list of their task names, to be aggregated into a single list, with breakdowns by team retained, to be posted on the wiki for all to see and learn from.
- Quick overview of RT Enhancement project underway. Pat Sheppard, Oliver and Steve Turner have been in conversation with Best Practical on steps to both get us up to a more current version of RT and carry out some much needed performance enhancements. I've asked Oliver to give us all a quick overview of this project and where it stands. (goguen - left over from last week)
Oliver recapped the current issues:
a.) RT has been degrading in performance over the last few months, a lot over the last few weeks. Varies with load, including spamming to en email list generates tickets.
b.) there are few developer resources available to do performance tuning, etc.
c.) NIST is stretched thin when taking on services like RT, including the web server, DBA work, etc. Mark did some heroic work Monday night to keep things running better. Relying on Mark's heroism is not a sustainable state.
d.) wilson is pushing to have Best Practical do most of the tuning and enhancement work on RT, under Pat Sheppard's spearheading. The current plan is to have BP assess the running system and make recommendations, which would be run past NIST before application.
e.) Oliver does not believe that we can get along with just BP and Mark running RT. But no one else in the organization wants to step up as yet.
f.) there is also no one left on tooltime-team. Steve and Oliver have been doing it ad-hoc so far. Maybe there should be a training class or better documentation of queue menagement.
g.) BP will be absorbing MIT customizations into the core as part of this operation.
Rob remarked that Helen Rose is interested in an RT-Partners group. Oliver remembered rt-users.
h.) there is no data archiving policy for what to do with the data in RT. The RT server will fill up with, say, deleted tickets unless we set some practice for actually getting rid of them. There is a piece of software called the RT Shredder that can deal with this complicated issue of interconnected data elements. (Users, groups, attachments...). Sadly, RT Shredder is a few revisions behind the current RT version and is risky to start using, let alone we don't have a copy of the working system to test on, etc.
The thought is to make the warehouse feed turn into an archive of the ticket metadata over time (as it is now a snapshot of the current RT database, refreshed daily.) Steve is working on this with the warehouse team now. If you delete a ticket from the server it will diseappear from the warehouse.
- Thoughts on priority projects (goguen - in prep for VP staff meeting on Thursday)
Not enough time for this agenda item.
- Anne round-table: SAP update reminder functionality is being used to prompt managers each month to check SAP for errors in epsnding or whatever and let Quentin know.
- Jon round-table: TSM Energy tool got the attention of Terry Stone in the ideabank, and so it's much hotter now than it was two weeks ago; Theresa has offered up resources to take care of it. More to come...
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03/03/2009
11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers
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