Leaving for India

By Nate Flesness
ISIS Executive Director

Hassan’s blog post below describes the goals and objectives for a six-week pilot project with A-1 Technologies in India. This Friday several of us leave. The basic goal is to try out the logistics and the working relationship. Here’s who is going:

For several weeks:
Hassan Syed
Doug Verduzco
Rich Langree
Craig Yellick
Wenlei Fang
Nury Sword
Elisabeth Hunt

For a week or so:
Nate Flesness
Kim Hastings

Check back in a week or so for an update!

Nate

Testing the Waters With a New Vendor

by Hassan Syed
ISIS Assistant Director

In about two weeks, ISIS will begin a Pilot Project with A-1 Technology. The work will be conducted in Gurgaon, Haryana India, known as “the Cyber City of Haryana,” sort of a silicon valley suburb of New Delhi. This pilot project is a trial step, before confirming the new ZIMS vendor. The purpose of this pilot project is to test both organizations’ working methods and to test the relationship between A-1 and ISIS.

Experience has proven that ZIMS is a highly atypical software project and ISIS is not a typical vendor’s client. ZIMS is unusual because of its very high level of complexity, which springs from the unique needs of the zoo and aquarium community ISIS serves. ISIS is an unusual client, in that we are a network of member institutions, rather than a single large organization. The “agile” development methodology proposed by ISIS reflects the extraordinary needs of the zoo and aquarium business. (More detail about that methodology will appear in the next ZIMSblog post).

The pilot project will last six weeks and ISIS will send a team of six to A-1’s office in Gurgaon, India for some of this time. While actual development work on ZIMS will be happening, the core goal of this pilot project is to test all of the ideas, logistics and stresses that will naturally occur in the project. We want to identify, confront and overcome as many problems as possible before we step deeply inside this critical relationship.

Some of these challenges we see are:

• The vendor’s ability to write code to the very high quality ISIS requires, within the time period set out by the methodology;
  
• The ability of ISIS to communicate to the A-1 development team the needs of our end-users (user friendliness) and the complex needs of the zoo and aquarium business.
  
• The ability of both ISIS and A-1 to communicate to one another and understand each other’s subtle needs;
  
• The logistics and challenges of co-locating ISIS Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) with the vendor’s developers. (If we go forward with this vendor, it will mean that many ISIS staff and expert volunteers from the ISIS global community will be spending a lot of time in India.)

The pilot project begins around June 23rd and is scheduled to conclude in early August.

Thoughtful Leadership in a Time of Transition

From Nate Flesness, ISIS Executive Director
and Chris West, ISIS Board Chair

The transition between vendors for ZIMS has inspired a great deal of thoughtful analysis among ISIS trustees. The new ZIMS development plan is not simply to hire a different company to take over where the previous one left off. The new approach is very different: ISIS will directly oversee this final stage of ZIMS, managing the process in detail.

This changes ISIS responsibilities, and this moment in time needs clear-headed assessment. Starting today, ISIS will be working with an outside firm called Infotech (http://www.infotech.com/Guest.aspx) to assess our project management needs and capacity in three areas.

The first is the ZIMS project itself. The IT technical part of the assessment is, for all practical purposes, completed and has resulted in the new development approach to completing ZIMS. The ZIMS project is continuing to move forward and will not be unduly delayed by this assessment.

The second assessment area is to make sure that ISIS has the proper staffing to manage the immense ZIMS project while also providing routine services to its members.

The third assessment area is the deployment of ZIMS, which will now be different (4 planned releases) than under the previous ZIMS process.

In the next few months we will answer these questions and make adjustments to ensure that ISIS enters and emerges from this transition not only with a great ZIMS product, but also in solid shape for the long term.