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Human Resource Pools
  • Hello Everyone

    I believe the organizational structure of the organization is in serious need of improvement, and since I'm stuck in an airport all day today I am going to be fielding a series of proposals to try to strengthen the OSE team.

    At this time it seems as though there are, at most, two hundred highly specialized people who can make a part time commitment and a handful who can make a greater commitment.

    Our current system is to divide people into dedicated roles within specific projects, but that is inappropriate for an organization as small and scattered as ours.

    My proposal is to adopt a "pool" approach, where you have a CAD pool, a Fabrication pool, a marketing pool, and so forth. Each project will have a dedicated project manager and the pm will send work requests to the various pools. Within the pool the group of peers will be able to allocate those tasks based on schedule constraints and skill levels. In this way junior members of the pool will be able to contribute without being overwhelmed and the senior members can help multiple projects so they don't get stuck waiting when their project moves into a phase where they aren't needed.

    In order to remain in alignment with the goal of preventing over specialization this dynamic process will enable cross-training and prevent the formation of isolated project cliques.

    This would also allow us to develop a handful of fabrication/testing locations easily accessible to the majority of fabrication pool members.

    If necessary, I volunteer to coordinate this process.
     
  • 8 Comments sorted by
  • Thank you for your great suggestions and willingness to jump right in. I must say that before much of this can be done we need to go over the core values to make sure we can actually achieve what is being said. I have commented on this in more detail but can't find it at the moment.

    In order to develop standards we need to make sure our footing is strong. I will try and start a thread in this and see where it goes.

    The Dawg
     
  • This is much needed and it's going in the right direction. Please connect to Vann Miller - who is currently on site and we discussed a related systems engineering approach to project management .
     
  • I love it! That kind is insight is quite valuable.

    A skill pool is a fantastic approach to organize this. Great idea!

    Lets talk to Vann to see about how we can take this approach with our project management.

    -Chris
     
  • @Marcin Can you post a link to Vann Miller's profile page? I can't seem to find it on the Wiki.
     
  • http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Vann_Miller

    I just saw this in the recent changes, it was created a few hours ago.  Looks like the page didn't exist when you were looking for it originally.
     
  • aneiren, I'm onsite with Marcin during the production run and in the evenings we're evaluating project management and contact management tools. There can probably be a lose coupling between the two. I'll PM you and let's get a discussion going.
     
  • Yes and yes.  This type of thinking is on the money.  We are currently constructing a badge system to award and recognize contributors based on their skills and contributions.  Besides on giving a user status and recognition a PM could easily find contributors to recruit for projects.  

    There are much more organizational needs like project structure. I know I saw a project structure that had between five or six tiers but can’t find it again.  The only thing I can find is a 22 step project document…not very effective or useful. 

    We need to define core elements that are required to build a project, release the project and expand the project.  There maybe document out there that already do this but the information is such a mess I’m sure where to find them.
     
  • I know there are some contributors that do not show up as users on the wiki, but presumably they are relatively few in number, aren't they?

    If so, a look at the special:userlist page indicates there are far less than 200  active people on the project.    There's 470 or so "users" but the vast majority are not active or prefer to add only encyclopedic content distantly related to the gvcs rather than do specific dev stuff (which is still good of course but let's face it...)

    There is a statistics collection tool called wikistats.  If someone can obtain a database dump of the wiki (must be available as a backup anyway right?) we could use it with wikistats to come up with some statistics to get a view of the current size and activity on the project.
     

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