NMFS E-Signature Project Activities for June and July 2008

June and July have been productive months for the e-signature project. We finalized our team participation in June. We held our pre-kickoff teleconference on June 30 (Meeting of June 30 2008) to organize for the kickoff meeting of July 11 2008 and of our initial data collection efforts (the Stakeholder Grid).

In the project kickoff (Meeting of July 11 2008), we discussed our charter, what success would look like in January of 2009, and the relationship of this e-signature project and the e-signature component of Susan Molina's NPS project. We agreed on some collaboration principles and conducted a short team-building exercise. Susan gave a presentation on the e-signature aspect of the NPS project, which introduced us to the requirements for e-signature approval under the policy and procedural directive. We then reviewed the project timeline, the stakeholder grid, the role of the project wiki, and action items.

Subsequent to the kickoff meeting we drafted a Proposed Meeting Schedule for the duration of the project and held our first working teleconference session (Meeting of July 30 2008) where we reached agreement on pilot projects and made progress on our Stakeholder Communication Plan.

Based on our experience developing the stakeholder grid (the stakeholder grid is visible to authorized parties here), we agreed that the deliverable titled Stakeholder Communication Plan should be a living document on the wiki (although we can print it any time if required for contractual or other reasons). The Stakeholder Communication Plan is behind schedule, as we had tentatively planned to complete it by July 25. But the work we are doing toward this plan seems very productive and I am comfortable with missing the somewhat arbitrary target date. One aspect of the Stakeholder Communication Plan will be to publish and distribute periodic summaries of project activities, and this document is the first of those summaries.