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.

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.
  

12/16/2008

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

Agenda

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12/23/2008

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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12/30/2008 -- Cancelled

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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01/06/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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01/13/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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01/20/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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01/27/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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02/03/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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02/10/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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02/17/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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02/24/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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03/03/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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03/10/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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03/17/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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03/24/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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03/31/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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04/07/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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04/14/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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04/21/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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04/28/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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• awaiting the first agenda item
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05/05/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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05/12/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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05/19/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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05/26/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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06/02/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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06/09/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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06/16/2009

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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06/23/2008

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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06/30/2008

11 am, N42-286, CSS Managers 

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