Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
January 10, 2012 meeting
Present: Jon Grunzweig, Sean Brown, Jim Sutter, Subbu
Murthy, Joel Manfredo, Jeff
Hecht, Keith Golden, Jeff Reid, Jennifer Curlee, Dave Phillips
The
following is a list of topics and speakers through May:
2/14/13 IT Governance Subbu Murthy, uGovernIT
3/14/13
4/11/13 Social Media Sean Brown/Scott Korgan
5/9/13 Preparing
for Cloud Computing John Mooney, Pepperdine
Action
items from the survey:
1.
I will contact each member who didn’t respond to
the survey to find out why they didn’t respond and why they don’t attend that
often.
2.
Each member present will invite at least one new
CIO (or equivalent) to join and become an active member of the group.
3.
Other occasional speakers could include a CEO,
and/or CFO, lawyers, executive recruiters, sales managers, and vendor management.
Topic: Controlling Project Costs
Jon used the Endeavor’s last mission as a project that had some
problems despite the planning that went into preparing the best route through
LA to it’s final parking spot. Why is
this so like a number of IT projects? Too many moving parts? Changes in scope? Incomplete scope and
estimates? Poor cooperation between IT and the business? Unscheduled events? Issues with the vendor
and/or supplier? Lack of sufficient training?
Unfortunately this is true even on projects that have been done before,
or at least similar to ones that we have done before. Jon focused on the accountability cycle, on
control of scope, hours charged and the timeliness of cost tracking. Several members spoke to the notion of
projects being a 3-legged stool – scope, cost and schedule – any changes to one
affects the other two. You either design
to a budget or budget to a design.
Perhaps performance incentives help.
Jon describes some of his foundations for control in slide 14, and
onwards. Scope can be defined in terms of deliverables. Each deliverable should
include testing and integration, deployment and training, (and on-going
support?). Costs include estimated costs
by deliverable and actual cost tracking by deliverable in a timely fashion.
Sometimes fixed price contracts work when the deliverable is the responsibility
of a vendor or supplier. Schedule is again defined by deliverable, and by
deliverable dependency. Jon’s
presentation was well received and led to an active discussion. The slides are posted at: http://www.slideshare.net/occio .
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