ZIMS Mid-Course Review

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Last summer, the ISIS Board of Trustees required an external review of the new ZIMS development plan before the effort could proceed. The Trustees also required that periodic mid-course reviews be conducted. ISIS has again hired the Info-Tech Research Group to conduct the first mid-course review to ensure that ZIMS is firmly on track.

This is not only good business practice, it acknowledges the less-than-happy truth that the failure of the first development effort led inevitably to heightened concern and lower confidence. We understand that it is your money we are spending to build ZIMS, and we are eager to regain your confidence. The ISIS staff perspective is that the new ZIMS development is going very well at this still-early stage.

In the next couple of weeks, Info-Tech’s team will be looking carefully at the processes we’ve been using as well as the results so far. ISIS Trustees have established concise criteria for this review:

1. Were Sprint 1 and Sprint 2 completed on time as scheduled?
2. Is Sprint 3 expected to be completed as per the schedule?
3. Has the established scope for each milestone been met or exceeded? (Scope = the number of screens planned, the amount of actual code-writing done as per the schedule.)
4. Do all project risks have a valid mitigation strategy in place?
5. Do the processes that are deemed broken or unstable have a valid mitigation strategy in place?
6. Are there any communications gaps between offshore and onshore teams that seriously affect the project?
7. Has adequate time been scheduled for fixing identified bugs in subsequent Sprint schedules to ensure that bugs do not accumulate over time in such a way as to disrupt future sprint schedules?

This is a very good moment for an external review because the first three sprints are mostly the “boring” part of ZIMS – screens that display things like institution street addresses and staff contact information and taxonomic references. Sprint 3 begins in two weeks, focusing on screens with similarly routine information like enclosure names and dimensions, water pump manufacturer names, and the like.

On the other hand, it is during the first three sprints that the ISIS team in Minnesota is building most of the ~150 re-usable screen components will appear on all of the ZIMS screens. This work is essential to the ultimate usability and success of ZIMS. All in all, it’s a good time for an objective assessment.

We will report the results of Info-Tech’s review as soon as we can!