eRA Project Team Meeting
Date: February 27, 2001
Time: 9:00 am
Location: 6700B Rockledge, Room 1205

Next Meeting: March 6, 2001, 6700B Rockledge, Room 1205 at 9:00 a.m.

Announcements:

Staffing: It will take 3 to 4 months to ramp up contracts, including meeting support. The hiring freeze is having a negative affect on recruitment.

CIT is recruiting a high-level system architect to provide oversight and help assure that the enterprise systems communicate with each other.

CIT is bringing all the projects together at one table at the Information Technology Management Committee meetings.

Budgeting: There is a crunch this year to get the eRA budget on track with other central services budgets. The FY2002 request for eRA needs to go to the Steering Committee by the third week in March, then to the Board of Governors (BOG) April 6. This push will mean that by summer, eRA should know its FY2002 spending ceiling. John McGowan reviewed an NBS Budget Planning document to help facilitate mapping priorities to resources. The Project Management Team should generally map to the 5 year budget projections. Anticipated exceptions may be additional cost requests for the new Commons architecture and a contingency fund. By the next meeting (March 6), the advocates should look at aggregating priorities at a higher level than was done for 2001 and mapping priorities to resources. Advocates who will have that information available by March 6 should let Dr. McGowan know so he can plan the meeting accordingly.

Schedule: The Project Team will meet weekly during March to complete Budget Planning documents in preparation for presentation to the Steering Committee meeting scheduled for the third week in March and to meet the April 6th deadline.

Status Report:

Migration Update: Jim Cain reported that the database migration to Oracle 8i was a success. There were no problems with the database, indexes, or software. The bumps were related to installing software in the ICs using a new software product. All ICs were up and running by COB Tuesday, February 20th, with the exception of those ICs that voluntarily delayed installation until Wednesday. Performance problems (especially with report generation for large queries that caused memory overload) were detected during the week and required system downtime to correct by adjusting parameters. These memory problems caused the bridge to fail, thus affecting the IRDB. The problems took until today to be resolved. A proposal is currently being prepared to request additional equipment to create a more robust test environment.

Lessons Learned from Migration: 1) Users need to be better informed about what is happening. The newsletter can be used to broadcast timelines and inform users. 2) What is the line between enterprise vs IC responsibility. eRA is taking on more and more (i.e., ODBC support). If it is decided that this support is an eRA responsibility, the cost needs to be built in as part of the project.

Upcoming Decision Point on Summary Statements: In April the Project Team will need to discuss turning off the legacy summary statement system. The review advocate will be responsible for giving the "go" on that, after consultation with the user community.

Core Dossier: The COTS product used to provide rich text in summary statements is being eliminated. An in-house product was developed that is faster and cheaper, reducing compilation time of summary statements from 2 minutes to under 30 seconds.

Outreach:

Inside eRA: The Team was asked to review the proposed outline for the next newsletter and send comments and suggestions for the next or future issues to Megan Columbus or Virginia Van Brunt. The newsletter is being issued monthly for now, but will be issued more frequently as the project ramps up and more frequent communication with the community is required.

Presentations:

New Architecture for Commons - George Stone and Bob Reifsnider gave a presentation (attached) on plans for the Commons and the new Commons Working Group. They were asked by the Project Team to return with more formalized and detailed plans of staff involvement and budget information.

Data Integrity Plan: First Steps - Bob Moore gave a presentation (attached) that outlined the need for additional resources to improve data quality. A $2 million/yr. contract is being readied with a three-part scope of work: reduce errors, correct the data, and develop a plan for improvement.

Thor Fjellstedt announced that the latest version of the Electronic Council Book is available for downloading.

Action Items:

1. The Project Team is to aggregate priorities into a Budget Plan mapped to resources by the next meeting (March 6). Advocates should let Dr. McGowan know if you will have your budget ready by that time.

2. The Team was asked to review the proposed newsletter outline and send comments on present or future issues to Megan Columbus or Virginia Van Brunt.

3. The Team was asked to review the draft scope of work for a contract to provide project management support. Send comments to Megan Columbus by Wednesday, morning, February 28th.

4. Advocates agreed to have a project team meeting each week in March.

5. We will focus on developing project priorities and budget for the FY 2002 during the next two meetings

6. Group Advocates who will have their priorities and budgets ready this week for presentation next Tuesday should let Megan know by Friday and if possible provide copies of write ups in e:mail or bring to the meeting.

7. The remaining Group Advocates will be scheduled for the second week in March for presentation of priorities with an open discussion of prioritization

8. Depending on time we will also schedule implementation plans for the other group advocates

Attendees:
John McGowan, Clare Benfer, Eileen Bradley, Carlos Caban, Jim Cain, Dave Carter, Megan Columbus, Zoe Ann C Sewell, Michael Cox, Bud Erickson, Thor Fjellstedt, Carla Flora, Cassandra Gibbs, Ali Ghassemzadeh, Chip Groh, Steve Hausman, Mary Kirker, Maria Kosky, Carol Martin, Greg Milman, Bob Moore, Pete Morton, Richard Panniers, Bob Reifsnider, Belinda Seto, Wally Schaffer, George Stone, Derrick Tabor, Shante Thompson, Jim Tucker, Richard Somwaru, Tim Twomey, Virginia Van Brunt, Janna Wehrle

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