What is the Role of the Hub?

• Communication hub for a small work group
• Supports the work of others in the group by facilitating communications, relaying requirements, pulling together solutions to solve problems
  • Summarize discussions: What are people’s concerns? Requirements? Limitations? Proposed solutions? External constraints?
• Identify, define, drive and keep track of projects
  • Works 1:1 with individual contributors to keep on top of progress, answer questions, relay concerns, identify issues that need to be addressed, prioritize work
  • Summarize projects for Apex
• Facilitate setting priorities, planning and scheduling
• Tasks are mostly non-repetitive, amorphous and grow organically over time
• Examples: Mini Kahlon, Katie, MS PMs (see May 18th email to strategy list for more) http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/TargetUserInterviewMiniHub
• Also see interview with Katie below.

What Kind of Person is a Hub?

• Gen X: 30s-40s
• Spends most of the day working with computer, most likely a laptop (due to # of working meetings).
• Relatively office-bound. Not a lot of traveling.
• Not particularly organized (aka doesn’t necessarily have a ‘system’ down).
• Uses a motley combination of ad-hoc task/project tools, centered around their Email client: Stickies, notebooks, outliners, text files, non-enterprise calendars, day planners, whiteboards.
• Needs to thrive on interruptions and parallel processing to do their job well,
• Enjoys working with others, needs social interaction at work or gets lonely ;o)

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Interview with a Hub

(Katie, as of August 8, 2005)

Katie is an Engineering Manager and Project Architecture Coordinator at the Open Source Application Foundation which is building a personal information manager and information management platform called Chandler. She is responsible for the overall architectural soundness of the Chandler project. (She makes sure all the pieces fit together okay.) She also manages the Developer Platform working group.

Some Stats:

Katie directly manages 3 engineers and 1 engineering manager who in turn manages 6 engineers. However, she works closely with all members of the OSAF team (20-25 people) including Design, Quality Assurance testing and the two other Engineering working groups: Services and Applications development.

Katie is currently juggling over twenty projects ranging in size from a few hours of work to a few months of work with around 10 members of the OSAF team, across all areas of the Chandler project. She is the primary owner for ~5 of these projects and co-owner of most of the rest and is therefore responsible for defining goals, deadlines and project plans. Katie is typically the driver or instigator behind most of her projects and the bulk of her work is proactive rather than reactive. In other words, she is more of a coordinator that figures out what needs to get done and less of an individual contributor that ends up with a list of things to get done.

Katie organizes 1 group meeting and 8 one-on-one meetings and is a participant in 3 group meetings every week. Additionally she averages about 2-3 ad-hoc meetings on top of her regular schedule.

Katie's role in the organization:

As Project Architecture Coordinator, Katie is responsible for making sure that all the various pieces of the Chandler project are inline with each other and aligned with higher level organizational goals.

This coordination work spans across all areas of the project and requires Katie to interact with almost everyone in the organization.

Some common scenarios for Katie:

1. More often than not, project information doesn't just flow to Katie and she has to first figure out what it is and then second, run after it to collect it. In other words, not only is she responsible for finding answers, she oftentimes has to first figure out what the question is.

2. More often than not, things aren't aligned. As a result, Katie needs to understand individual parts of the project well enough to identify where things don't fit together well and then negotiate with the owners of each project piece to figure out the most effective and least disruptive way to achieve seemless integration.

3. Interacting with one person in one area of the project, will often raise issues that Katie needs to follow-up on with other people in other areas of the project.

As a result, Katie has an across-the-project view but is also close to the details of each project area and digs in deeper on an as needed basis. She is the best person in the organization to understand the subtle ways in which different parts of the project interact and depend on each other and keeps an eye out for potential collisions and mishaps. Katie has become the central gatekeeper of information for the project. If all information flows to Katie, then Katie can make sure that all information flows to the right people, at the right time to make sure things happen in relative harmony.

Katie is also responsible for making sure that day-to-day progress on Chandler is consistent with the mid and long term goals of the project. This involves working closely with her manager and Lisa and Sheila, who have shared responsibility for project planning to set goals and requirements.

In addition to her coordination work, Katie is also responsible for coming up with written proposals for a number of projects. Katie's projects tend to leverage her role as Project Architecture Coordinator. ie. Come up with a plan for making Chandler the Platform easily extensible by outside developers.

In the end, the sum total of Katie's work is reviewed on a weekly basis by her manager. These weekly review and discussion sessions is a project in and of itself, requiring preparation time and space in Katie's information management system where she can synthesize and put into perspective the work she's done across all of her other projects.

What Katie needs:

Katie's workload can be characterized as having many projects and many pieces of information to keep track of in each project. As a result, Katie often feels the need to focus in on a single project at a time in order to review progress, plan next steps or work on a proposal.

Katie also has a need to manage and cultivate a set of shared information for the various people she interacts with so that the coordination work she is doing is transparent and accessible to the rest of the organization. This includes both her manager, so that he has a top-down understanding of the work she is doing as well as the people she's coordinating, so that they have an across the project understanding of how their areas of the project interact with the rest of Chandler.

-- MimiYin - 16 May 2006