Hi,
At the DLF Forum in April, a few of us started having corridor
conversations about the idea of holding a DLF “Project Managers’
Forum” pre-conference, mirroring the “Developers’ Forum” that has
existed for many years (and that mostly targets programmers).
The idea would be to have a half day session (probably on Monday
morning) where DL project managers could share their experiences,
strategies, challenges, etc. It would be open to anyone who manages
DL projects (large or small), and more generally to anyone interested
in the topic of DL project management. Here are some examples of
issues we could talk about:
* How do you manage cultural differences among the project
participants (IT staff vs. catalogers vs. content specialists)? Acting
as a translator.
* How do you come up with a realistic time line?
* How do you control the “feature creep” in a project?
* Staffing: how do you ensure continuity despite grant-funded short-
term positions and natural staff turnover?
* Managing a portfolio of projects: how do you prioritize? how do you
control the impact of the projects on each other in terms of resource
allocation?
* Managing expectations: how do you communicate about time lines and
other issues with the various stake-holders of a projects (including
top library managers)
* Which software management tools have you found useful and not too
much of an overhead?
* How do you find project management training that relates to the (non
corporate) Digital Library environment.
* How do long-term maintenance issues and legacy projects affect your
operations?
* Are there specific initiatives that DLF could take to help DL
project managers?
So we would like to gage interest here. Who among you would
potentially consider attending such a session? (You can just reply to [log in to unmask]
with a quick "yes I would be interested". Of course if you have more
elaborate suggestions or comments, we would love to hear about them.)
Thanks,
Delphine Khanna (U. of Pennsylvania) and Jennifer Vinopal (NYU)
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