Information Technology

Prototyping the process at a local eatery.

The OSU Libraries IT Division has a large to-do list. Very large. We have been working on formalizing the process for getting ideas on the list, and it has worked: we have 86 projects on our Project Index! We can’t work on all of them at once, so which ones do we work on first? How much effort should we put towards each one? How can we let the organization know that we are providing value and not just arguing the industrial merits of various gemstones?

The Meeting

The Assistant and Associate Directors agreed to help us prioritize the work and assign how much effort we should put towards it. For our meeting, I prepared a card for each project and distributed them to the appropriate Sponsors.  Each card had the project title, requestor, and a very brief description; the cards were also sized according to the very rough estimate of how large the project was expected to be: S,M,L,XL. As a group, we reviewed the projects: which ones were already active, which one had real deadlines, how they affected each other, how they fit with the Libraries goals.  The projects that the group selected to move forward with in the next calendar quarter were pushed into a pile.

That’s a start, but not all projects are equal, and we couldn’t hardly finish all 22 in the next thirteen weeks. The next step was to assign the relative effort that we were to put towards them – much like a monetary budget, there is a limited amount of effort that the IT division can expend on projects after we have answered all of our trouble tickets, meetings and day-to-day responsibilities. This we represented with poker chips and arranged them across the different projects.  The number of chips on each project signified how much effort we would put towards it.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that we would finish the project in that amount of effort, only that we would work on it. This seems like an odd way to go about things — after all, isn’t the goal of a project to finish it? We are trying to ensure that the amount of effort is proportional to the expected value to the organization.

The Results

Any meeting that is led by an engineer is going to end up with some math.  I won’t bore you, but we broke it out into the various resource pools to help us organize the next few months.  There were spreadsheets, it was pretty cool. Below are the projects selected for 2013-Q4, the resource lanes are something that we’ll keep for ourselves for now.

Next Steps

This is a large number of projects, but we’re going to have something of value to show for each one by the end of the quarter. Towards the end of the period, we’ll be setting up another prioritization exercise and we’ll be making regular updates in this space, so stay tuned.