October 2, 2008
Dear Everyone:
Just when you thought you wouldn’t have to hear
anything about the GIL 3 Project anymore, did I mention that I’ve been
made the Deployment Coordinator for my workgroup?
What’s that?
Each business group identifies a person in their
group to be their GIL 3 Deployment Coordinator.
I “volunteered” when my office partner went on assignment in
In my case, there’s about 50 people in
“Pleasanton”, “Hobby” and “Martinez”.
So what do I need to do?
First, make a list of these people.
Then go into something called Web-based Asset Management (WAM)
and look all the people up.
WAM keeps track of who has which computer(s), what type (laptop/desk
model), and so forth. Now I
know who has what and where they are.
Except that they tend to move around a lot.
Thus all the nagging to update their information in the company
directory. Then it’s on to
FADS.
FADS (“…is a four-letter word”) stands for
Forecast, Assessment, Deployment, and Schedule.
I don’t have to worry about the Forecast part, or the Schedule.
But Assessment is where I go to find my people and assign myself
as their DC. And Deployment
is where I set them up in Deployment Groups.
Up until last week, all of this consisted of a lot
of “hurry up and wait” as the Deployment people kept telling us to clean
up the data in WAM and the company directory; but don’t put them into
Deployment Groups because they hadn’t decided when to Deploy yet.
That changed around the end of last week.
Suddenly there were Deployment Groups available,
but when I tried to add people to groups it turned out my access didn’t
include that functionality.
So I complained. Eventually,
someone met me in a conference room and showed me how to add people.
Turns out it was easier for them to give me access in a way that
isn’t covered in the Computer-Based Training (CBT) that was made
available to me.
So finally, almost everyone is taken care of.
But here’s the thing:
With a few exceptions, nearly all of them have served on one GIL 3 team
or another. So they already
have GIL 3 computers.
Out of 50 people, only about five actually need to
be deployed. The rest is
just cleanup. Lots of people
held onto their GIL 2 machines because there were a lot of “bugs” (also
called “known problems”) in GIL 3.
So one of the things I still need to do is locate all these “old”
machines and arrange for them to be picked up so we don’t keep paying
for them.
And, of course, going into FADS and officially
marking all these people as “Deployed”.
Some of them have had the newer machines for over a year, yet
they are still not “deployed” until it says so in FADS.
All of my workgroup should be “deployed” during the
4th quarter of this year.
The rest of deployment, worldwide, will take place through 2010.
So chances are, you’re going to hear about GIL 3 for a while
longer.
Love, as always,
Pete
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