Project Management

This week's readings on project management were largely a tedious duplication of topics already well-covered by Professor Walters in 672 last semester. I did find some additionally worthwhile components in some of the readings. All but one of the Frank Cervone articles were helpful to a certain extent. In "How Not to Run a Digital Project," Cervone's discussion of AULITs in Rule no. 8 hit home. "The average senior manager only spends - at most - 10 percent of their time on a daily basis on detailed tasks." I don't think I ever really stopped to think about it so succinctly, but it is true! I am always complaining about how I have no time to get "real work" done because I spend all my time in meetings, writing monthly reports, and program planning. If I stop and think about it, it probably is split about 80%/20%. "Standard Methodology in Digital Library Project Management" was a nice succinct refresher on PMBOK, but I was very dismayed to see that pretty much all my projects would be deemed failures based on his 4 major criteria for success. The project definition report description and key documents breakdown on page 6 of "Library Project Management in a Collaborative Web-based Working Environment" I think will prove very helpful when starting my next project. The sample MS Project Plan was also helpful since that is the software we use at work for project management and it was interesting to see how someone else might structure projects in that environment. I also really liked the Project Plan for the Odessa Mobile Technology Project for use as a template for my next project.

It is probably also worth mentioning that I found two of the articles to be particularly NOT helpful. "Nurturing Project Management in Higher Education IT" was all about establishing a project management office, which is most definitely will not be happening at my institution any time soon and I think is considerably more overhead than most archival institutions can afford. I also found the "Methods for Digital Library Project Teams" which essentially just generically talked about the decision making process to be not terribly informative.

Course Retrospective

This week we are supposed to compare where we were at the beginning of the course to where we are now. I have learned an extraordinary amount about all the technical components that operate behind the scenes not only of digital libraries, but computers in general. Some of the highlights for me have been learning that there is a "kernel" in my computer, lol. It think the most valuable part of the course for me, at least as far as immediate application at work, is learning how to work in MySQL. That is the database that runs behind out Archivists' Toolkit installation, and I am quite excited about the prospect of running queries through the back-end MySQL database to capture information that is more difficult to search and compile through the user interface. In general, I think that is the one aspect of technology that has changed the most for me this semester. I am so much more comfortable working with the command line and not relying on graphical user interfaces. It is very empowering to know you can access information more directly and not be afraid to look at what is going on behind the user interfaces for applications. And, although I certainly wouldn't even call myself proficient in MySQL or PHP, I now have the basic skills and knowledge to build on. I can easily take an understanding of basic commands and syntax and continue learning.