BISON - Building Information Summary - Ongoing (for the customer)

I finished my first project since moving into the Solution Center as a Product Manager in the PAM group. I would like to tell you about my experience with it.

As many of you know I worked on space information systems for many of my years at MSIS. This project brought me back to my roots.

Owners

As the first step to the BISON project, I met with the product owners, Mary Tresh from NCRC Facilities and Horace Bomar from Medical School facilities, along with Julie Walsh and Dan Duckworth.  I learned that their request was related to the desire to do strategic planning and analysis for all of the Medical School buildings.  Up to now, space information was presented by room, department or principal investigator.  In order to do building planning, it was necessary to redo some of the metrics for a building.

Inception Deck

After this meeting, I began working on the inception deck.  It was decided that this project be a small t-shirt size (4-6 iterations).   The customers were interested in learning about the inception deck. They were included in three rounds of updates.  Both the process and the t-shirt size proved helpful for them.  The customers identified what was most important for them.  The constraint on size eliminated requests that fit more of a "it would be nice to have someday" category.

MSIS wanted this project to stand alone after its completion so that it did not require continual maintenance.  To satisfy that, I took advantage of the skills that exist in the Office of Space Management.  Scott Williams, who is in that office, was put on the project as a programmer.  With a degree in electrical engineering, Scott has programming experience and was very happy to write programs for BISON.  He continues to monitor the monthly refreshes.

Pair Programming

Scott and I worked together.  Paring with Scott was very helpful since his insights in space proved to be invaluable in developing the product.  We had many discussions about how to best accomplish the goals before we started programming.  Scott was often on the keyboards since he was learning how to program in PL/SQL.

Product

The result of this collaboration is a set of tables that can be refreshed by the customer on a monthly basis.  Tables provide the following information:

• Building Productivity, $ of Indirect Cost / Research Square Footage
• Building Square Footage by Room Type, Lab, Lab Services and Office
• Building Station Count and Headcount
• Building Research Capacity and In Use Percent - number of average researcher would fit in a building.

Space requirements for an average Lab PI vs Office PI were defined; 1,300 sq ft vs. 300 sq ft.

Conclusion

The tools used in the process help define the project and move it to completion.  The customer's especially liked the inception deck and the agile methodology.  We would meet each week to plan out the work.  This kept us focused and the customers well informed as to the product that was being built.

Bennett Stallone