12/09/2008

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

Agenda

• Roundtable
  • Tim: High Impact Data Project bringing recommendations forward at some level 12/17.  Newsletter article in IS&T will try to give a carefully crafted message setting expectations. 
  • Jeff Reed: trying to improve Timesheet to Business Model mapping to connect predictions with actuals.  Grade20 project is more under control.  New DCAD brochure submitted to communications team.
  • Mark: SAP update project ramping up. 
  • Chris: CRM project update -- sharing of customer information across teams is the issue at its heart.  What is the scope of the solution?  Is the Scope in daptiv?  Need is for an API to allow connecting our transactions in myriad systems to merge into a leveraged multidimensional view of a customers "footprint" in CSS.  Knowing that there IS a relationship with a customer is important, not detailed assessment of which is&t people, say.
  • Anne: will be sending tickler reminders monthly about EDACCA checkups, and to review what's in SAP about charges that are hitting that month, in time to correct the data before the quarterly review meetings.
    Procard "issue" is underway -- looking at Swept charges.  Goal is to improve timeliness of getting receipts in on time to avoid Swept charges at all.  Wilson adds that we need to streamline the reporting of per-person spending, ProCard reimbursements especially.  We need to channel business transactions through a central node.  Wilson uses personal credit card and then request for reimbursement; can you ask a single central staff person to buy stuff "for you" rather than have distributed credit cards.  But Anne says that the Manager of the area needs to have an approval process for all charges, so they're on top of the procard flow. 
    Holiday event issue -- Wilson says No more celebratory lunches on MIT money, except for any student appreciation events, which are different.     
  • Kate: IAP is coming up and Training coordinates it.  We have rlatively low IS&T involvement in the official roster this year.  But Wilson knows of people doing events that are just not listed in Anna Pope's list.  On the other hand, Tim is involved in events that are under the Auditor's nameplate.  It's not a quota issue really, but an urging for
    Kate: has identified three outside vendors that
  • Rob: mentioned the Helpdesk reporting dashboard project that is meeting this afternoon.  
    Daptiv -- come to a team meeting or a couple of teams to get Daptiv skills, rather than a css-managers-wide session.
    Wilson says:  automate the reporting of the current snapshot stack of the projects to css-managers.
  • Oliver: students expire on Wednesday, as the last day of classes, and their labor will disappear from our pool until IAP.
    RT: pretty rapidly moving forward with having Best Practical do some work on Performance Issues in the 3.6 upgrade and MIT customizations.  Will attempt an RT upgrade again in March, perhaps straight to 3.8.  BP will take on most of the responsibilities for support and development of MIT customizations.  Wilson is paying for this relationship.  Using one MIT person to support RT does not scale, though having a technical and business contact point is still necessary.
    Oliver wants to start highlighting new users of RT -- Sloan Management Review came on line recently.
    Technology Trends document updated for TAP, nearly finished.  TAP will be looking at Kuali Student this wednesday (tomorrow), with High Impact Data Protection the week after.
  • Barb: freshman students were assigned to the helpdesk to analyze it and have issued their report.  They were overwhelmed by a lot of data and then they came out with what is more or less a corroboration of the current staffing model, except there should be more throughout the day flexibility to match peak demand with peak staffing.  Data window did include the fall swell. 
  • Jesse: working on costs of recruitment with central HR.  Because of a tripling in fees, Monster.com is off the list, though it also includes bostonworks.com.  We can no longer assume that an MIT posting will automatically go to that avenue.  There will be an effort instead to drive more traffic to the MIT HR website.  Perhaps a limited number of group postings purchasd in bulk.  Spots would slotted, charged back to the directorate, justified by the manager for inclusion in the slot, basically used when you aren't having luck getting quality applicants in the normal way.
    Central HR is trying to save money in their area, and the downstream impact is felt by us; if we want to do better, we'd have to offer up our own money.  We worry that folks who don't plan to come to higher ed would not on their own go looking at, say, Highered.com for job opportunities. 
    There are real economic reasons for HR's decision, but they are offering to drive more folks who come in at all to then look at the MIT web site.  This is in fact how things were done in the past.  An attractive Monster.com deal years ago led MIT to continue the relationship, but now they're off the list.  There will also be less jobs to post.
• Costs segue from the Monster.com -- our own services can be seen in the way that we relate to our clients, darned if you do and darned if you don't.   Success will include: Need to communicate up front our rationale for the decision.  Explain it in detail.  And have a mitigation plan to dampen the impact. 
  Hearing it unofficially first is bad.  Having very little time (in the Monster case because of hush-hush contract negotiations)
• Wilson: I want to talk about reaction to Jerry's note -- how are your people taking it?
  Angst: using the layoff word in an email word creates it.  We'd feel better if had any idea what Jerry values in the kind of work we do.  Well, if we don't know Jerry's values now,
  We need to be much more deliberate about the downstream impact of cost cutting, the true load to us of a consultant, or of avoiding a hire to say near-term cash.   
  Need to carefully depict how Apples are not Apples from person to person.  The Kerberos Consortium staffing model as a case in point.
  A supportable approach is more one of Pruning, rather than hewing with a big axe.  We should be in a cost-savings mode all the time, but we are generally too polite to talk about it.
• Jesse: Jerry's use of the l-word in the email was not the first time (the all-hands meeting was where it was mentioned).   If a lot of people have been with him for tfive years, but a lot of people have NOT been with Jerry for that long.  
  Mark then said that the groups want to know if their work is valued and seen as core work, rather than extraneous overhead.  Everyone's core work is someone else's luxury. 
  Until the storm passes, there is nothing you can do about it. 
  A few years back, more staff in certain EVP offices were hit harder than others, in a quota-like system distributing costs.  We are in fact a large organization and you have to go where the money is to actually save it. 
  Jerry is probably waiting for guidance from his bosses, aka Terry Stone and Chris Colombo.
• We should have plans for 5%, 10% etc., and hope that we don't have to do it.
  The hope is that everyone at MIT will step up and we all get through it.
  Maybe we can cut one big project that saves MIT gobs of money?  DOS project -- how much money would we reap if we did it? 
  The last time we cut people, the work stayed the same and then we hired people back a few years later.  IS&T has more than 20 open positions now, and maybe you existing staff person need to do something else.  Those people need to be offered the chance to reconfigure their job and stay on. 
• Jesse: how realistic are these cost savings to help us completely avoid layoffs?  Well, we're not going to know that until the CSIR group comes back with recommendations and see what ones are likely to fly and which ones not? 
  There might indeed be a "work to this percentage" idea at the same time as a "cut a line of business and keep it cut". It's not just headcount and dollars. 
• We will have to continue to emphasize important new areas, like mobility.  We have to continue to invest in some key things.  Investing in tools where we are now very manually intensive. 
• Decision: CSS ideas will be attributed as "CSS" and not by individual, to shield folks from direct responsibility for a dire idea.
  

12/02/2008

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

Agenda

• Review, and approve minutes from last meeting
  • people can update the minutes themselves if I got something wrong.
• Hot Topic Roundtable
  • bomgar: DITR and Sloan are top users; license to be renewed.  helpdesk staff being briefed on using it more often or better.  Costs of license are being divided among the user constituencies, but not more seats right now.  Question: has the idea of people peeking in to their machine to fix things remotely surfaced as an issue that should go to TAP, say?  Oliver remembers there was a TAP meeting, as an afterthought to the Altiris review.  (Action: circulate the link from the TAP meeting, back when it was TRB. )  Chris: The concern is that it's a server sitting in the basement of E19 (and needs a more permanent home).
  • Mr Aguocha is doing a bang-up job.  He will have to disappear in Jan when Joszef comes back, but that would be sad.  Barb wants to surface the idea of someone else hiring him in to the organization because we ought to keep him. 
  • Brian Murphy: he's back home in the US and wants to resume work in early January. 
  • Hermes Training overview from Barbara was well-received by Pubs.  An emergent effort to consolidate widely distributed hermes-like material into the One True system.  Philoosophically, where should all knowledge live?
  • Exchange project is going well, though Calendaring is not. 
  • Drupal: is looking at mid-to-late January for a migration environment to be up and ready to fill.  Production-ready environment is what we mean.  Migration completed by then is NOT the plan.
  • Lots of cross-campus interest in Drupal, judging from the reception of a Drupal presentation at Webpubs.
  • DCAD has a new threefold brochure.
  • VoIP transitions are ramping up again after a couple quiet weeks.  Where are we campus-wide?  ~30%.
  • ACD upgrade is happening this week -- dec 3 to 5.  No user-visible impacts planned.
  • Daptiv meeting on Friday is ON and should be unset from Tentative. Come if you can.  Confirm attendance to plan food.
  • Anne has no hot items but we are glad to have her back.
  • News from CSIR -- turning ideas in to actualization.
  • Kate -- are we still using the Vacation resource tracker thing.  We haven't decided not to, so we plan to make it so.  Action: use Day Event to record your outages.  If you know you're not around, put it in so we can all know.  It should be one spot for Wilson or whomever to look.
• Review and discuss cost-saving ideas
  • What should we do next with the cost-saving brainstorm list -- how much filtering can we do on our ideas ahead of time.  Need to have Wilson in the room to do.
  • Comment: many ideas seem HR related (salary reductions..., managing how people do work...) 
  • The CSIR group's attitude is just get them in, and don't preedit anything.  Sensitivity about HR-ish impacts is in the front of the group's attention, so we don't need to be afraid of it.
  • Is submitting an idea an endorsement of it?  No.  The idea is an idea.  Want to make sure that pretty raw ideas are "forgiven" for their rawness.
  • What does the CSIR team really plan to do?
    • Area ideas are collected from the Area.  May or may not be directorate specific, -- brainstorming is the key quality. 
    • Groundrules of the CSIR group are NOT to make judgements early nor to task the person submitting it with the responsibility of carrying it out.
  • The ideas that are thought to save MIT money are best.
  • The level of comfort within the group is currently these ideas are good to submit and openly discuss within the CSS Managers.  The risk is that someone outside CSS will propose the same idea that we didn't want to put forward.  Manageable risk.
  • Process suggestion -- give everyone a change to "vet" the wording of a suggestion before it goes. 
  • Listing the risk of doing an idea is important -- the "Impact" column would serve to hold both positive impacts and negative. 
  • The finance team wants to be able to assess all the ideas for their cost-savings potential, drawing on the raw idea pool, with estimates of money saved of whatever quality of estimate.  Managers can estimate based on their own pool of finances.  Extrapolating a broadly applicable idea from one small budget to a larger organization budget will turn an apparently  mickey-mouse idea into a powerful one.
  • Some idea changes would be more about influencing behavior less than saving a few bucks in one budget.  Finance team needs the chance to really vet it, together with the other CSPMs.
  • Proposal on the table: ideas generated by the group should not go forward to the central list without clear signoff by the submitter.  The back-and-forth between Rob/Anne and the idea generator will be to have a feasibility discussion as the idea matures.
  • Each idea should have an "Opinion" section associated with the idea, input from others about what they think.

11/25/2008

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

Agenda

• Hot Round Table items (15 minutes)
  • Jeff: clients asking for news on rates, and Jeff can't say because he's waiting for the rate plan from the Virtual Server Service.  Jeff wants to raise his rates anyway, in smaller increments and more often than in the past (which may have been a multiple year skip), perhaps in line with MIT annual budget process.
  • Jeff: Grade20 extract has changed and some fields have changed, breaking alignment with some other filemaker programs used that eat that data; to do this fix work, Grade20 in the new format may need to be given to them, triggering sensitive data issues.  Wilson: the solution before was to completely scramble the data.  Followup up with Mark Damian to find out the holistic approach.  Steve Lerman will have something to say about iti.
  • Chris: DUE 50-50% split position is currently on hold waiting for DUE to complete a position approval process.  Steve Burke working on it.  So we'll see.
  • Wilson: some of the cost savings idea seem radical, but hey, they're proposals.  Gratifying that our "personal well-being" was a major filter on the ideas submitted.  Creative thinking in personnel matters will be essential to achieving savings rates of 5% more each year for three years.
  • Wilson: organizational review news: massive amounts of data has been collected by Jerry.  Now he will review things with Terry Stone to socialize the rationale for decision-making.  Deans, VPs, other Sr Mgmt need to be behind any changes.  Likely to be an All-Hands on January 20 or 21st for the personal announcements of the plan.
  • Wilson: Exchange thing -- next steps include developing the downstream effects of what will happen if Exchange goes live.  The big question we need to have an answer for is "Email for the community", not just "calendaring".  We need to have a story about Email/Calendaring.
  • Wilson: Winter Project Priorities list was mailed for confirmation to VPStaff yesterday, and that list will go around to css-managers today for review.
• More on Cost Cutting (15 minutes)
  • Taeminn is in charge of the overall project.  Rob is the CSS point person.
  • Work we can do while a central list of ideas is being gathered is to analyze out team businesses to see what is what with respect to services delivered vs the cost of doing them.  How would we know how much we could actually harvest if we change the way things are or what is done.
  • There is a central server space on Sparkler for the aggregating of ideas from all the directorates
• XDPP visit by Mark Wiklund, report out...
  • followup with internal team managers and project managers about pubs engagement with project managers.
  • want a periodic process. 
  • Kate: met with Rob yesterday -- discussed the evolving project engagement process.
  • Waiting to be contacted won't be helpful.  we need to take charge and engage them with defining our requirements. 
  • What is the FBC view into the projects?  Can't see very much time allocation.
  • December 5th meeting should include an overview of the whole project milieu and not just how to put projects into Daptiv.
  • Wilson: Daptiv use -- I want everyone to use Daptiv at level 3, with these attributes: 
    • project members
    • list handoffs and deliverables
    • overall milestones
    • some tool, not necessarily daptiv, for detailed project plans, resource commitments, etc.
    • ISDA approach shows all the projects to all the managers, for instance, and we could adopt this practice ourselves.  Wilson would like us to catch up to the ISDA example without going to time sheets. 
    • Jeff Reed noted that there isn't enough support for Daptiv in the organization, around reporting development in particular.
• Performance Objectives (30 minutes) -- come with an understanding of how your four or five performance objectives align with the Operating Plan or the Service Quality Goals plan of 2008. 
  • I don't want to see just the list of 109 activities. 
  • I want to see personnel development activities, etc., that are part of grooming the team you are leading.  How are each of you helping to make CSS a better place?  Cross-team goals... how say Jana is collaborating more with Barbara to improve relationships across CSS.
  • Don't put items that are wishlists -- put items that can be measured, have impact, etc.  It's not just projects, but people development, communications, etc.
  • Back to costs: it makes little sense to axe training (since it's an investment in our people) rather than axe a project whose money could be recovered to do different work.  It's important to sustain the investment in our people.
  • I would like to have you come prepared at a one-on-one coming up with a list of goals. 
  • We need to look at the 109 for the ones that pertain, then edit them down and make something of them. 
  • We need to make a Living Plan and we have decided it will be editable text in the wiki, (not the Word document).   The wiki will be easily exported for attractiveness in Word or PDF format. 

11/18/2008

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

Agenda

• IT cost cutting at MIT (wilson)
  • opened with the response to Susan Hockfield's letter of 11/10/2008. Find some % to save in the coming year. 
  • The intent is to be better prepared with "what can we cut back on" if asked.
  • So let's collect ideas just in case.  Send 'em to Rob and we'll aggregate them.
    • the printing of needless flyers now mailed and then thrown out, including is&t newsletters.  Doing away with printing these things across the institute.
    • Lunches and other feel-good gathering enablers -- better prediction of how many people will actually eat it, reducing extra $50 here and $50 there.  Don't schedule metings over lunch time just to justify getting lunch brought in.
    • Follow hardware standards that extended support warranty repair rather than cash repairs.
    • Managers should reduce their travel, in favor of staff being able to continue to get out and have training.  Go to local outlets for training, like the Waltham office of some company.
    • CSS is mostly people... so can the same people do more work in order to prevent hiring additional hires.
    • Can DCAD take on more pay-MIT-first-inspired work (which might take an additional staff person) and capture money that would otherwise be leaving the campus.  Can we be more creative in establishing a close supplier relationship and get a better price on the web site contracting that they do?  (Cut down the inefficiencies of too many suppliers.)
    • Need to balance morale against luxury -- like, for whom do you cut travel and development? 
  • Who can really do the cost analysis to justify the savings?  If it's in your area, go ahead, else don't spend a lot of time on it.
  • Defer future expenditures in a three-year horizon ...
    • hardware replacement
    • "luxuriant" open positions  -- the real savings come when you don't fill a planned position.   Should be able to take credit for giving it up.
    •  
  • Luxuriant expenditures --
    • internet access, cell phones. Seven years ago, okay, but not in this day and age. 
  • Increase collections --
    • Jana mentioned VoIP.  Once a DLC is transitioned in the VoIP space, we should start charging that DLC for new, future MACs.   We don't do that now.
  • Is there room to institute new revenue-generating services?  The DLCs might say they don't have the money for that.   
  • Watch out for other departments forgoing basic technological health care visits (which is to say, they have no sysadmin or help staff and don't plan to get any).  Chris says only two departments have left DITR and that's only because the DITR consultant went to work for each of those departments. 
  • There's a risk that short-term savings of $50 here or $50 there will lead to big losses down the road if some dire problem then happens.  E.g., big security spill because no one wanted to buy small things.  MIT Press data spill was the example discussed.
  • Remember the goal is save MIT the money, not just IS&T. 
• A parting thought on Goals from Wilson..  
  • Glad to formally move Paul H into Software.  I don't like floaters -- want to see individuals with a specific managerial home. 
  • what are your top five performance goals for the year?  Measurements, if possible.  Not "I should do well" but put some metrics around it.  The team should not be penalized from the managers' lack of
• review status of Fall 2008 Service Quality goals (smyser)
  • see http://web.mit.edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/ist/org/css/managers/workplans/CSS-Service-Quality-Goals-Fall-2008.doc
  • the group looked at the document with little recognition.  For Mark and Jana, there was no prior participation.  All want a chance to look at it more closely. 
  • Closer look required especially in light of the current economic climate.  Given the present situation, would we still want to put these forward as things to do or be able to say we have done?  Or would we cancel some as cost-cutting measures?  Or would we elevate some in priority as ways to really save MIT some money?
  • The question to work on with Wilson is "how publicly are we committed to this list?"  What is the current level of our public commitment to the goals as listed.  Does Jerry expect us to be working on them?  Do the Directors as a group know about or expect them to be followed up on?  Was it just a list of things Don collected to appease Jerry in their one-on-ones? 
  • This list could very well evolve into part of the five performance goals per team idea that Wilson mentioned. 
  • More dicussion is needed, perhaps at the next Managers' meeting, assuming there is room on the agenda.
•  

Notes

Kate Kibbee is at a Training All-day offsite and cannot attend.  Kate will followup with Rob to post her ideas to the spreadsheet. 

11/12/2008 - Wednesday substitution for 11/11

1:00 pm, N42-286, CSS Managers 

Agenda

• Update on the Exchange project (Deb Bowser)
  • Deb Bowser posted her notes as presented to the group .
• High-Priority Item Roundtable, as time permits

Notes

• Oliver will be traveling and will not be able to attend this meeting
• Rob will be taking children to medical appointments and will not be able to attend this meeting.
• Kate is teaching all day and will not be able to attend.
• Mark will be working from home - plumber coming to restore hot water - but will have a Pubs Team member attend in his place.

11/7/2008 -- CSS All-Hands

12 am to 2 pm, Broad Auditorium, CSS All-Hands

Agenda

• 12:00 to 12:30 Lunch
• 12:30 to 01:30 Q & A, Town Meeting-style, mostly about the IS&T Organizational Assessment with Accenture.
• 1:30 to 2:00 Jerry will join us.

Notes

• Oliver will be traveling and will not be able to attend this meeting
• Jonathan will be traveling and not able to attend this meeting

11/04/2008

11 am to noon, N42-286, CSS Managers 

Agenda

• Review software vocabulary for Software Grid (jmhunt & atticus) 
  • printed writeup of proposed vocabulary was circulated by Jon at the meeting.  That text is posted off the main CSS wiki page.
  • we reminded ourselves of the IS&T new web site look-and-feel, into which this download page would fit. 
    See http://mv.ezproxy.com.ezproxyberklee.flo.org
  • Questions that came up:
    • Should we devote web page space to the "Support" column on the web page (the group says Yes) 
    • How do we indicate that a product is on the way out?  How do we convey the current lifecycle discussion about why we're at the version we're at and you should know about it.  (Maybe Hermes.)
    • What about the "More details..." link -- put all the useful detailed info there.  Include the product lifecycle info, accessibility compliance, download size, etc.
    • How do we decide to provide, say, Brio, instead of some competitor tool -- who is "we" and "when did they know it?"  Sidebar conversation about the internal team-driven politics of major software acquisition.
    • How does a product get on to the web page -- what set of checkboxes in a checklist will get the product into which category?  Mark Kate and other in-CSS support providers want to have a more formal process and have a role in shaping the check list.  Jon went through attempts at this years ago, but it's time to do it again, and better.
    • What's the timeline for having this finished up -- Spring 2009, in sync with the IS&T web site. 
  • There seems still to be a tug-and-pull about the purpose of the download page in a use-case sense.  Have we tried from a customer view to articulate scenarios about why they come to the page and what they ought to find there.  It was done a while back, but for a very and more complicatted different page design.   
  • People need to be able to see the design intent of the original redesign project so that we know what the plans were so we can align with the features articulated.
• Call for cost-cutting/cost-saving measures (tjm & all).
  • Taemin call Tim to get a list of cost-cutting measures that CSS plans to undertake, to provide content for an Academic Council meeting .  Are we being asked to look for ways to save MIT money from the CSS perspective?  Yes. 
    What measures might we take and wouuld they save money...  If you have ideas, forward them.  Rob will create a page to receive ideas.  That page will be off the CSS wiki page. 
• Proposal for a 30-minute agenda item in a future meeting -- how to link when a product is decided upon to the process of creating training and documentation and product front doors and so on.  Each is different, but what is the visible triggering event for the create-support-for-this process.  Where in the organization are these facts articulated?  Agreed on as a topic for a future meeting.
• Proposal for a 30-minute review of the IS&T web site design with respect to the information architecutre.

Notes

• Wilson is traveling
• Oliver will be traveling and will not be able to attend this meeting

10/28/2008

11 am to noon, N42-286, CSS Managers 

Agenda

• Quick look at the new CSS Managers wiki page (smyser)
• Quick recap: Hermes week one (othomas)

As it happened...

Jana joined us by phone from home.
We began with hot items roundtable, including the agenda items as we came round to them...

• Mary -- "accessibility features" will be on the campus map in a static PDF format.  This is very exciting.
  In campus map version 2, the features will be integrated in as something searchable and printable.   Campus map v.2 is being built and could be checked out interactively at map-dev.mit.edu
• Tim  -- MassRegs has finalized regulations for data breach; a comprehensive plan from MIT is due Jan 1 to stay in compliance and MIT is increasingly aware that it is not going to make it.  There are ramifications felt at the senior level of the Institute.  Big impact on ITSS, with blowback to the other sections of CSS that may be asked to comment on encryption of regulated data.
• Barb  -- a.) Josef Doczi is on extended medical leave in Hungary until at least the turn of the calendar year.  A temp has been hired for the Help Desk to backfill in the call center; an excellent fellow recently from Harvard.
  Karl Witt is assuming Bomgar responsibility in Josef's place.
  b.) HR Payroll Service Center is looking at sharing Hermes wiki as a common knowledge base, part of the larger effort to make the HR Payroll situation better.  HR Payroll is #1 on Terry Stone's radar.
• Jon  -- Oracle Client is being refreshed; choice between 10.x and 11.g not yet made.  Our current version 9 is something like five years old and is becoming unsupported in some important product, prompting the refresh.
• Mark -- old SAP documentation is being refreshed, with resources from SAIS but coordinated by CSS. 
  Payroll documentation (which was all created by Mark) will be stable until next summer.
• Kate -- SAP courses are being refreshed.  Kate will connect with Mark so the documentation and training perspectives are in sync.
• Oliver -- Hermes is now alive for Helpdesk use and IS&T viewing at kb.mit.edu.  Ability to author is administered somewhat by request in order to have team-level introduction to system and authoring expectations.  DITR is a target client, as is DCAD.  DCAD wants to move its web publishing tip-set out of AFS into Hermes.
  Oliver will be gone for two weeks starting tomorrow.
• Chuck -- an 8-hour per week SLA is starting up with Libraries.  This is a new use of DITR, where a DLC with an active IT organization of its outsources desktop support to IS&T in order to concentrate on the application of IT within its own core business (namely academic research).
• Jana -- strides have been made to get a much larger proportion of VoIP tickets resolved without mandatory escalation to OIS.  
• Jeff -- Testing the HR prioritization of help with hiring system discussed last time, Ken Lloyd proved to be very helpful with a level 2 position that had been open a long time with very few resumes submitted.
  Jeff will be involved in the News Office's search for a web strategist for the home page (recently mailed around by Susan Curran).
  Must move the Filemaker Users group meeting to accomodate the All-hands on 11/7; the move is underway.
• Wilson --
  a.) has created an Exchange project wiki to contain the for-now private material needed by the team to do its work.
  b.) partly because of the Exchange project meeting he attended, Wilson has identified a need for someone in CSS to be the coordination point for all the commitments of people to projects.  Putting so many CSS people on so many projects will not scale.
  c.) some sort of central tool to take care of this needs to be adopted.  it's likely that daptiv can play this role when CSS is ready to use it.  daptiv has also put a change in resource requesting into the next planned release, in which projects can request specific individuals and not just a resource type to be filled from the pool. 
  Action item is for Rob to coordinate with Darlene a session on how CSS should go about adopting Daptiv as a work coordination tool.  Collect questions from the managers and leads, and have a two-hour afternoon demo center meeting about it.

We should have the meeting next week even though Wilson is away.

In Wilson's absence, he plans to appoint a delegate to act as him, including going to VP-staff meetings, etc. if needed.  No hiring and firing (you're safe, you now who you are).  Tim will be Wilson's avatar for next week's trip. 

The All-hands agenda has turned into Lunch for the first 30 minutes (12-12:30), then 12:30 to 1:30 Q&A town meeting, then jerry joins us at 1:30.

Notes

• Jana works from home and cannot attend; access phone number is 781-436-3630. 

10/21/2008

11 am to noon, N42-286, CSS Managers 

Agenda

• Ken Lloyd (klloyd@mit.edu) discussed the 1/2/3 prioritization of HR attentiveness to particular open position efforts.
• CSS All-Hands date and agenda setting.  Nov 6 or 7, noon to 2; agenda is 1. lunch, 2. Q&A, mainly on Accenture project.  Efforts will be made to ensure this is really all-hands.
• Future CSS_Managers' agendas -- will be assembled using contributions from us to a wiki-mediated agendas page that Rob will facilitate. 
• Equipment -- be sensitive about sporting the very latest best stuff yourself, but if a staff person is using old, sad equipment, feel free to instill a point of pride by way of a new laptop, say.
• Accenture updates and discussion