# Presentation: 284880

## Project Juggling The Evolution of a ProcessJoy HathawayFermi National Accelerator Laboratoryhathaway@fnal.gov

**Notes:**
View from above occasionally visible while flying to and from O’Hare.

Site about the same footprint as O’Hare airport.  Now serves as wildlife refuge.  Prairie restoration.

Point out  FCC.

- _[High Energy Physics](http://www.hep.net/)__ research facility._
- Operated by the _[DOE](http://www.fnal.gov/pub/about/doe/index.html)__._
- Direction of _[Universities Research Association](http://www.ura-hq.org/)__._
- Largest HEP laboratory in the U.S.
- ~2200 employees + ~ 2300 users.

**Notes:**
URA includes many of your institutions.

## Computing Division

- Over one petabyte of data stored.
- 1,024 terabytes
- (2 to the 50th power bytes)
- (1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes)
- 294 people in the Division.
- 1.2 people on this project.

**Notes:**
The first point is to explain why we have so many people in IT.  

Your choice of how to think of large numbers.

Data is what we do.  
HEP is very computing-intensive. 

- SIGUCCS ‘04

**Notes:**
Included primarily for reference (for the curious).

## This Presentation

- Think about how your institution tracks projects and effort.
- How much detail would be useful for future planning?
- Do you really know where the effort goes?
- Do you need to?
- Can you learn anything from our “growing pains?”

**Notes:**
Opportunity to think about...

“That’s more information than I really need.”

What I hope people get out of this presentation is a feeling for where project tracking and effort reporting might lead them.  You should think about the level of detail which might be useful to your institution and whether or not it is resource effective.

## Projects Database

- “Prototype” a projects database.
- 75-100 substantial projects.
- Basic information about each project.

**Notes:**
Dangers of “prototype”
Some of us never learn

More interesting 
Programming again 
after many years of doing mostly web development 

## Our Environment

- Research mentality.
- Physicists as upper management.
- Like herding cats squared.
- Enterprise project management tools not a viable option.

**Notes:**

Your physics faculty 
physicists’ theory of knowledge:  “Since physics is the most basic science, if you know physics, you know everything.”

Many software tools for enterprise project management 
Require a level of detail which was not suitable for our environment. 
Tool to take more resources than it saved
Cutbacks

## Available Tools

- IIS server.
- Windows 2000.
- On an under-powered pc.
- ColdFusion server.
- Programmer with no ColdFusion or real database experience.

**Notes:**
ColdFusion server with a few small applications

Played with Access 
Took an SQL class about 16 years ago

Project expanded
I came up to speed but the computer just became slower  
We gave it a memory infusion as a stop-gap measure 
Clear that the application needed to be more robust for future expansion.

## Functional Requirements

- Maintain projects web pages.
- Project status meeting schedule.
- Reports from the meetings.
- Descriptions of the projects.
- Web interface to all project information.
- Links between all of the above.

**Notes:**
Projects web pages for people both inside and outside the division 
(and even outside the laboratory).

The meetings are primarily internal to Division – Lab only

Link reports

Core information

The Division head uses the combined pages to help jog her memory about projects for planning and decision-making.

## Projects Web Page

- Grouped by Categories
- Description
- Leader(s)
- Stakeholder(s)
- Deliverables
- Start and End Dates

- Responsible OU
- Status Reports
- Status
- Issues
- URL of project website
- Etc.

- List of all major _[Computing Division projects](http://wwwserver2.fnal.gov/cfdocs/projectsdb/index.cfm)__._
- Links to detailed information about those projects:

**Notes:**
The projects web pages are sort of a “toot your own horn” about what we do.  

This core information about the projects if fairly static.  

Up-to-the-minute information is found on the project website and/or project status reports.

Disclaimer – data not very complete.
Servers: Site-wide Backups
Astro: SDSS-SSP61 CCF 
GRID: SAMGrid 

## Project Status Meeting Schedule

- Quarterly updates on project.
- General _[meeting information](http://wwwserver2.fnal.gov/cfdocs/projectsdb/meetings.cfm)__ on the web.__	_
- Links to project information.
- Links to presentations.
- Expanded to include briefings.
- Project proposals.
- State of the technology discussions.

**Notes:**
Servers: Site-wide Backups
Astro: SDSS-SSP61 CCF 
GRID: SAMGrid 

Mostly for people within the division 
Some representatives from experiments 

These meetings serve several purposes 

They keep the Division management aware of what the projects are, how they are progressing, and issues which may be affecting that progress.  

Department heads who attend can evaluate how they think this project might affect their department and the projects they are working on.  

They help us to avoid redundant work.  Projects are not necessarily confined to one department.  The boundaries about who should do what are blurred.

Experimenters who attend may discover that a project which is being worked on for another experiment will work for them also with little or no modification.

Briefings are requested single ad-hoc meetings 
to present specific proposals, issues or areas which need decision or work. 

There has been some discussion about using software designed especially for meetings.  This decision is pending a final decision on document storage.

## The Data Issues

- Input/Update forms.
- Search forms.
- What data would be useful?
- Where does it originate?
- Who knows the answers?
- Who will keep it current?
- Security

**Notes:**
We had the usual data issues 
(Does anybody know?) Seem to crop up only when a process is automated.  
The technical issues were the easy ones.

When we started this project, we didn’t have a clear understanding of where it was going.  In some ways it was a case of “build it and they will come.”  Nobody knows what they want until they see what they can have. As the information became more organized and accessible, people found new uses for it.

as more people looked at the data, we found more mistakes.  
I firmly believe that the only data which is correct and current is data which is being heavily used.

The only serious technical issue we faced was security for data entry.  We didn’t have a totally secure server available to us.  We decided that we didn’t need Fort Knox security.

## Document Database

- _[DocDB](http://cepa.fnal.gov/DocDB/)_
- Web-accessible managed repository for status reports, conference documents, etc.
- MySQL / perl.
- Originally written for a Linux platform.
- Documentation leaves something to be desired.
- _[Computing Division Documents](http://computing.fnal.gov/cd/documents/)_
- CD DocDB is on a Unix server running Apache.

**Notes:**
We made a preliminary decision to use DocDB for status reports.  We wanted to have a single repository for all Division documents.

We chose this one because people at the laboratory were familiar with it and seemed to like it. No final decision has been made. (Notice any trend here?)

We have had complaints about the CD version being slow.  That has not been a problem with the other installations of DocDB.  We have not yet determined why.

It was relatively easy to install and the developer was very responsive to our requests for changes.  It may help that he is physically here and we could meet with him in person.

## Relating Projects and Budget Items

- Many-to-many.
- New lab-wide budget system.
- Who does the mapping?
- Strict relationship is a new concept.
- What about “ongoing” activities?

**Notes:**
Success leads to more requests.

How do projects relate to budget items?  Budget organization is determined by the department head and the budget officer.  Projects organization is determined by the project leader and division head.

Remember the “herding cats?”  A modified dictatorship seemed to be the solution which worked most expediently.

How do ongoing activities – operational tasks – fit into the system?  Projects have status reports.  When do they have their say?  

## The Old Way

- Previous application was java-based -- originally written for one department.
- It created reports which it wrote over every month.
- No stored data.
- Single report format.
- All groups (sub-division of departments) were on separate reports.
- It took at least 5 hours to create the combined report for the lab’s accounting office.

## The New Way

- 5 minutes to create the report for the lab’s accounting office.
- Online reports by activity, budget code, department, etc.
- Linked information makes the reports more useful.
- Easy data transfer to other utilities like Excel, and Crystal Reports.

**Notes:**
September was the first time EVER that the complete report loaded into the lab’s system with no errors!

Any way that you can convince me

## Effort Reporting – NG

- Integrate the effort reporting with the new budget codes (task numbers) and the projects for FY05.
- Individual effort charged to special budget codes.
- One activity’s effort split among budget codes by percentage.

**Notes:**
We are gluttons for punishment.

## Crystal Ball

- Oracle.
- Full integration with laboratory’s personnel data.
- Integration with other Division data.
- More ways to look at relationships between activities.

**Notes:**
I see...

Downloading personnel – people disappeared.

## Finally...

- We did it and we’re not sorry.
- The Division head is happy.
- The Division budget officer is happy.
- His assistant is delighted (5 minutes vs 5 hours).
- The DOE will be requesting more detailed effort reports in the future – we’ll be ready.