While I concur with Greg’s recommendations for what needs to be in an IT Projects Tracking document, I’m not certain that I agree that IT oversight is singly the responsibility of A&FC. The Bylaws charge A&FC with: “Monitor and review key infrastructure projects, including capital improvements and significant information technology changes”. However, the Bylaws also charge P&SC with: “Guide development of service delivery mechanisms, evaluate services, and recommend program priorities”. I believe valid arguments can be made that both committees have roles in the oversight of IT. The more conversations I have with people both inside and outside HQ, the more concerned I am becoming about exactly how IT projects are being carried out. For example I just learned that one department has yet to be asked for input to the ARRL Information System (AIS). While I’m not quite certain when the AIS project was launched, it is clear from the 2014-15 Plan that it is not a brand new project. All projects of this magnitude that I’m familiar with always begin with consulting with ALL of the stakeholders to find out what their prioritized needs and wants are. Only after this information has been gathered and digested can the design phase begin. Failing to properly begin a large project will always result in it taking too long, costing too much, and not meeting the needs. Gantt Charts are a basic tool of large project management. Despite numerous simultaneous large IT projects being underway, I haven’t seen any Gantt Charts for them or ever heard any reference to them—if they exist I’d like copies. (For those not familiar with Gantt Charts, here’s a reasonable overview: http://www.gantt.com/. In short, they break complex projects down into segments and visually depict the order the segments must be completed in along with the person/group responsible for that segment.) One of the most troublesome issues is there do not appear to be existing completion dates or milestones for the various projects. Virtually every time I ask a question about the cause of a problem/issue/delay in a program or service the answer includes “waiting on IT to do xyz”. The foregoing is not intended as an indictment of anyone—however, we need to act quickly to gather OUR OWN information on what is going on so that we remedy every problem/issue/delay being caused by “waiting on IT to do xyz”. As an organization, we cannot afford to wait months to receive information and more months to then act on it. The creation of the LOTW Advisory Committee was a good response to issues with LOTW. I believe the Board needs to as quickly as possible create an ad hoc IT Oversight Committee composed of 3-5 Directors and Vice Directors, each having in depth IT knowledge. The committee should be tasked with reviewing all ongoing IT projects and operations so that they can make recommendations. Doug K4AC From: arrl-odv-bounces@reflector.arrl.org [mailto:arrl-odv-bounces@reflector.arrl.org] On Behalf Of G Widin Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2014 2:58 PM To: arrl-odv Subject: [arrl-odv:22477] Tracking IT projects in ARRL With regard to the recent requests on ODV for information about IT projects, I think would point out that IT oversight is in the charter of the A&F Committee, not the entire Board. The intent of obtaining project information is for the Board to be able to gauge projects' progress, while avoiding micromanagement. With that goal in mind, I propose the following approach to move forward. A&F will request IT management to provide some additional detail to the task list from the 2014 Plan. Specifically, for each project, we wish to see * the current stage of the project (see below); * a rough estimate of the number of hours of IT effort remaining at the time of the report; * a rough estimate of the hours (per week/per month or other appropriate index of effort) currently being devoted to the project from IT; and, * a projected date for completion. It would also be instructive to know if a project is on hold awaiting input from anywhere outside IT. The report should be provided for the April A&F meeting. After A&F review, the document will be published to ODV. For the "current stage" item, an indication of where the project is, in the 4 or 5 stages between Concept and Release, would be adequate. Since we do not have an ongoing report on project stages, initially we will request definitions of the stages along with the projects' ratings. The Board needs to monitor the progress of these important IT projects, at the same time that it provides IT management the freedom to do their jobs without excessive overhead. Hopefully a periodic report such as described above will meet both those needs. 73, Greg Widin, K0GW 2014 A&F Chairman