Whether you're looking for inspiration and motivation or for practical tools and techniques you can put to use right away, you can find it here! _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ | 9:00-10:00
Tuesday 22 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Wellington Strategically Speaking: Why Are We Doing This? Kent J. McDonald
Knowledge Bridge Partners (USA)
http://www.knowledgebridgepartners.com How Business Analysts can increase their understanding of organisational strategy and use it to really analyse the business. Have you ever asked “why is the company working on this project?” If so, what did you do about it? Business Analysts actually have at their disposal a full set of tools to help an organisation convert strategy to reality. This keynote will discuss how Business Analysts can utilise their tool set, categorised as Enterprise Analysis by the BABOK®, to: - Understand how their project supports the organisation's strategy.
- Help their team members understand this tie.
- Utilise that tie to guide day to day decisions on the project.
This session will also cover what to do if you find yourself on a project that does not appear to align with organisational strategy, and how to add even more value by helping avoid this situation in the first place. About Kent: Kent specialises in successfully applying pragmatic approaches to strategic planning and coaching business analysts and project managers. He is co-author of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility, a book that brings together immediately usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help organisations deliver business value and build competitive advantage more >>> |
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________ | 10:15-11:15
Tuesday 22 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Wellington Collaborative Lifecycle Management - How IBM Does Agile Alan Kan
Technical Manager, IBM Rational Software (NZ)
http://www.ibm.com/nz/en/ With over 1000 people using agile in the IBM community, an additional 2000 people trained in agile practices, IBM has one of the largest Agile adoption programs in the world. It is a demonstration and a testimony of the scalability of Agile methodology. Collaborative Lifecycle Management coordinates the software development activities across requirements, development, build and test. In this session Alan describes how IBM uses Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) to optimise agile development of 3 IBM products - Rational Requirements Composer, Team Concert and Quality Manager. He will provide an overview on how to do planning, tracking, build and testing across the teams. He will illustrate how IBM benefits from automated traceability and transparency to work effectively together on a large scale agile project. About Alan: An Australasia regional mentor for Rational Team Concert, IBM's agile project delivery tool, he has 10 years of experience in software development. Alan has experience across a number of roles including developer, analyst, architect, test manager and project manager more >>> |
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________ | 11:15-12:00
Tuesday 22 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Wellington "The Business: Do I Really Need to Talk to Them?" - The “Sheldon Cooper” Story Karina Irving
Business Solutions Manager, Downer EDI Mining (AU)
http://www.downergroup.com/Divisions/Mining/ Many of you will be familiar with the character Sheldon Cooper in the US sitcom The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon is the ultimate geek. He has an IQ of 187, two PhDs, an extensive general knowledge and expert knowledge of his chosen domain. Despite his intelligence, Sheldon is usually inept in most social and business situations. I'm sure many of you can easily recognise a Sheldon Cooper or two in your own organisation and have struggled to get their smooth collaboration with your business partners. And it's that collaboration - the talking and the partnerships - that we all understand as so important in developing successful products today. It may not surprise you to learn that the sitcoms creators modelled the Sheldon Cooper character on a computer programmer they knew. Let me introduce you to my Sheldon Cooper - Andrew. Andrew was an analyst programmer within my team. He loved his job. The things that he could design, build, and create amazed me everyday. Andrew lived a true programmer's life - arriving at work at 11am, and loving the quiet time of the evenings, working long past 7pm. I asked Andrew to commence work by 9am so that he was more available to the business; his reply, “I'm a programmer; I don't need to be here for the business. If the specifications are documented incorrectly then that's not my problem.” If I was ever going to get any meaningful interaction and dialogue happening between Andrew and the business it was clear that using a Big Bang theory was not going to work. Andrew's journey to “talking with them” was one I took him on by stealth. By the end of the journey, Andrew was presenting his new product at an international conference with his business partners. I will share with you Andrew's story and some of the tips and tricks that I learnt along the way to getting the talking and collaborating working. It's my hope that you can find here some take away points that you can use to help the Sheldon's that you work with to really get talking with your business partners and visa-versa. About Karina: In her role, Karina works closely with software development teams to ensure delivery of products that meet customer requirements and business needs. She is continually meeting the challenge to get programmers, business analysts and project managers to always be talking with the business more >>> |
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________ | 1:00-3:30
Tuesday 22 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Wellington Kanban: Delivering Faster Throughput - How it Works Katrina McNicholl and Ron Gloag
Test Analyst and Software Development Manager, AMI Insurance (NZ)
http://www.ami.co.nz In this hands-on demonstration learn how Kanban works to deliver faster throughput by putting more focus on quality earlier in the lifecycle. Improve your development by understanding how Kanban folds in. This approach gives us (AMI) high visibility; high quality and lets us see bottlenecks in process while empowering the team to improve its own processes. We are all searching for the most effective way of delivering software. Here at AMI we have moved from a tradition waterfall approach, through scrum and now moving towards a Lean Agile approach using a Kanban to visualise progress. This approach gives us high visibility; high quality and lets us see bottlenecks in process while empowering the team to improve its own processes. The two main aspects to Kanban is limiting work in progress to gain maximum throughput and the pulling of jobs into a queue when the number of jobs in a queue is less than the indicated limit. The four key aspects are: - Focus on Quality
- Limit Work in progress
- Balance demand against throughput
- Features are prioritised.
Katrina and Ron will involve you in an interactive session to demonstrate how Kanban works to deliver faster throughput by putting more focus on quality earlier in the lifecycle. About Katrina and Ron: Katrina is one of AMI's key drivers behind ensuring a high quality Kanban process. Ron has been instrumental in guiding AMI's software development from a waterfall approach, through scrum and now into a Lean Agile approach using Kanban more >>> |
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________ | 1:00-3:30
Tuesday 22 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Wellington Is It Worth It: Using a Business Value Model to Guide Decisions Kent J. McDonald
Knowledge Bridge Partners (USA)
http://www.knowledgebridgepartners.com How to develop a business case in the form of a value model that can be used throughout the project to make decisions. One trait of an effective business analyst is the ability to ask the right questions. One “right” question that applies to just about all projects can sometimes be difficult to ask, let alone answer: “Is it worth it?” This question is difficult to answer, because the answer will change as you proceed through the project and gain more knowledge about the purpose, considerations, costs and benefits involved in a project. In this session, we'll explore a tool you can use to help organise the necessary information to answer the “is it worth it?” question on a regular basis. This interactive session will simulate several stages in a project's lifecycle to demonstrate how you can create a value model to make an initial decision about whether to pursue a project, and then utilise that model as your knowledge grows throughout the project to revisit the question and confirm whether the project is on the right course, or if changes need to be made. Topics discussed during the session include: - The benefit of using multiple measures (NPV, ROI, TCO, IRR) in combination to get a full picture of the financial characteristics of a project.
- Structuring your value model to show the feature's impact on the value provided by the whole.
- The costs and benefits that you have to consider, not only during the project, but ongoing.
- The impact of timing of implementation on the Cost/Benefit discussion.
About Kent: Kent specialises in successfully applying pragmatic approaches to strategic planning and coaching business analysts and project managers. He is co-author of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility, a book that brings together immediately usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help organisations deliver business value and build competitive advantage more >>> |
________________________________________________________________________________________________________ | 3:50-4:50
Tuesday 22 March, SDC 2011 (www.softed.com/sdc), Wellington Who's On Your Team? Johanna Rothman
Rothman Consulting Group (USA)
http://www.jrothman.com/ You've probably heard the old joke about “who's on first?” where Abbot and Costello manage to talk past each other to discuss the makeup of a baseball team. Have you ever felt a little like that when you try to organise a team in your organisation? If so, maybe it's time to rethink how you create teams. It's not that the names or titles of the people are confusing - it's much more often the issue of what kinds of talents, skills and experience you want on a team. When it's time to select team members, whether you are hiring new people or organising a team from members already inside the organisation, you want to consider the cultural issues, the kinds of experience people have had in the past, and what they don't know. You also want to consider personality diversity and cultural fit. And, of course, you do want to consider technical skill fit. Johanna will discuss each of these issues and help you see how to define what you need, and how to determine if a potential candidate has the right stuff to be on your team. About Johanna: An internationally recognised expert in managing IT product and software development. She helps managers and leaders solve problems and seize opportunities. She has written a number of popular books. Her most recent book is "Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects" more >>> |
| |
