Case Study 3 -- Introducing the RMS Project

"Good morning, everyone."

Thursday morning, 8 A.M. Only three days had passed since the kickoff meeting for the RMS project team, but Dan Shelly noticed that the mood in the conference room was much different from the last meeting. The team members were in place, binders open in front of them, pens at the ready. They were all eager to get down to business on the new project, and they were all eager to begin applying their new knowledge of MSF.

Everyone, it seemed, except Tim O'Brien. "Alright, where's Tim?" asked Dan, his voice a mixture of exasperation and amusement. "I hope he didn't oversleep."

"No, I didn't oversleep!" came a voice from down the hall. "In fact, I didn't sleep at all."

"Tim, you look awful!" exclaimed Jane Clayton as Tim came into the room. "What happened?"

Tim slid into the seat beside Dan. "Well, you know that new server we were bringing up on the 24^th floor, the one for the CAD drawing storage? It came in a couple of days ago, and I told one of my guys to bring it up, get it on the network, assign the proper rights—you know, the whole deal. We had promised it by today for that group of designers, and I told him when it came in to get right on it.

"Anyway, at about 10 last night he paged me. When I called in, he told me that he had been working at it for two days and still couldn't get it on the network. I tried to walk him through some stuff, but he didn't seem to understand me. So I piled into my truck and got here about 11. We finally got it on the net and useable about 30 minutes ago."

"Thanks for going to the mat, Tim." Dan's gratitude was genuine. "I know the CAD folks were anxious to get that box running, and I especially appreciate that you did what you had to do to keep IT's word to a business unit." Everyone gave Tim a good-natured round of applause, and he smiled through his blushing.

"Before we move into the agenda," Dan continued, "I'd like to introduce the new face at the table. Most of you already know Jim Stewart, our CFO. I asked him to join us this morning as a resource for the second part of the meeting. His insights will be valuable to us, both today and as we move through our project. Jim, welcome."

"Glad to be here, Dan," Jim replied. Only Dan seemed to notice a note of caution in his tone. "I'm looking forward to hearing the information your people have gathered."

"Yes, I think it will be informative, if not necessarily heartening." Dan looked at the agenda for the meeting, then back at the group. "As always, our first item is Agenda Building. Does anyone have adjustments or additions they would like to make to our agenda today?"

Marilou Moris spoke up. "I thought we were going to go over the materials you gave us last time, Dan. This agenda doesn't mention them at all."

"That's true, Marilou, it doesn't. Before I respond, does anyone else have a change to the agenda?" No one spoke, so Dan continued. "As Marilou has said, I gave you the MSF Development Team Model and MSF Development Process Model materials in our last meeting and asked you to study them. After hearing some of your questions in the last meeting, though, I decided that we needed a background meeting on the current situation before we could move forward effectively.