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MORNING
KEYNOTE:
Patterns of Project Management: From Adrenalin junkies to Template Zombies
Tim Lister,
Principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild
8:15am
- 9:15am
Tim Lister, a Principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, along with five of his partners at the Guild, have been compiling project patterns from their combined 150 years of project consulting, for their book due out by the end of 2007.
We all talk about "best practices" but a tiny minority of organizations actually practices them all. But not to worry, think of "best practices" for human health. We know all about them, but very few of us actually practice them all. Maybe if someone did arduously practice all health practices they would forget to have a life.
Tim has come to believe that project patterns are stronger than best practices. They are the habits, the decision practices, and the corporate culture unstated rules that dominate office life
The first key is to identify your own organization’s patterns. If they are positive, how can you perpetrate them across all projects? If they are negative, how can you break the habit?
Tim will start the talk with some examples from the book project. He will then divide the audience up into different sets of constituencies to see if they can find common patterns within each group. For instance, he may divide the room by groups who most often work on small projects and modifications, on projects of 8 to 18 months, and on projects longer than 18 months in duration. Each group will get a chance to report out their findings.
AFTERNOON
KEYNOTE:
Leveraging
Processes for Success
Rajesh Hukku,
Chairman, i-flex and General Manager and Senior VP, Financial Services Global Business Unit, Oracle Corporation
1:20pm - 2:20pm
There are many attributes about i-flex that makes its process improvement journey unique and worth telling. i-flex founders had set the goal to achieve high level software development maturity even before the company was founded. Following the establishment of i-flex and in less than 3 years, the company achieved CMM Level 4 maturity. Back in 1995, i-flex was the first Indian company to reach that level. Since then, i-flex has grown to become a large international player in the financial industry. With over 9000 employees internationally, i-flex, unlike other Indian IT vendors, provides technology products that are deployed in some of the most renowned banks in the world in addition to providing outsourcing solutions. Sustaining such growth and maintaining a disciplined approach to software development not only for its outsourcing sector, but also for its in-house product development, has been met with a number of challenges and numerous rewards.
Since i-flex’s inception and during the high growth years of the company, Mr. Hukku was the CEO and architect of the company’s success. In this presentation Mr. Hukku, now the Chairman of i-flex, will share with the audience his perspective on this exciting journey of growth. He will discuss how CMM/CMMI played a role in the success, what the challenges encountered were, what the rewards were, and lessons learned.
CLOSING
KEYNOTE:
CMMI Version 1.2 and Beyond!
Mike Phillips,
CMMI Program Manager, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
4:20pm - 5:10pm
This presentation will address the strategic direction of the CMMI Product Suite, including both the more significant changes in V1.2 as well as the future CMMI release of new “constellations,” such as “CMMI-Services” and “CMMI-Acquisition.” A brief summary of current status information (training, appraisals, and available materials) will be included to set the stage for CMMI-based discussions. A brief discussion will be included on some of the initial results from workshops to consider future updates as we approach the next decade of use.
TRACK
ONE: PROCESS IMPROVEMENT
Adopting Process One Bite at a Time
David West,
Ivar Jacobson Consulting, Americas
9:30am - 10:10am
Today there are many methods, processes, techniques, etc. that attempt to help project teams conduct their work. While there
are indeed some important differences between them, the commonalities are far greater – the end goal is for all of us to get
working software. Thus adopting complete processes does not make practical sense. Instead the focus should be on being able
to mix and match ideas from many different sources inside or outside our own world and compose these ideas to get a better
way to work. In this talk I will describe a series of innovative new ideas that enable practitioners to effectively deploy,
configure and use process. I will introduce the concept of a practice, and show how practices can be used to ‘cut up’
heavy, often irrelevant processes creating ‘developer friendly’ process guidance into smaller, digestible chunks. The
session will provide a framework for thinking about practices, a set of ideas for structuring a practice, an approach to
delivering practices and a mechanism for people to use them.
Do’s and Don’ts of Process Improvement
Pat
O'Toole,
PACT
10:40am - 11:30am
This highly engaging presentation provides practical advice that will help attendees re-invigorate their process improvement
programs. Blending real world examples, practical advice, and humorous analogies, participants will learn to think more
robustly about their approach to process improvement, and apply proven approaches that they can implement immediately upon
their return to work.
Maximizing
Associate
Potential
Using
The
People
Capacility
Maturity
Model
(PCMM)
Sandra J. Baptiste,
Pershing, LLC
11:30am - 12:10pm
Process improvement involves three inter-related components: process, tools and people. While the CMMI addresses the process
and tools aspects of an improvement initiative, the people element usually remains static. The People Capability Maturity
Model (P-CMM) is a maturity model developed by the SEI, based on state-of-art workforce practices, and is used to
continuously improve the management and development of the human assets of an organization. Using P-CMM as the benchmark,
MAPS, or the Maximizing Associate Potential Strategy, is our firm's blueprint designed to help technology associates achieve
their full potential. In this presentation we will discuss MAPS and how it helped our organization increase consistency in
people management practices, improve communications, enhance the workforce competency, and increase employee morale and
satisfaction.
CMMI® as an
afterthought: Aligning software process with business domain in a non-CMMI world
Ivan Handojo,
NJ Manufacturers Insurance Group
2:20pm - 3:00pm
This presentation highlights a case study on how an organization adapts and aligns its in-house process framework to the
changing business environment, without a necessarily formal mapping to the CMMI. Emphasis is placed on how alternative, often
creative, methods in implementing the process framework can still produce quality deliverables and compliance against
regulations, with a strong discussion on the role of Quality Agents in process roll-outs and management. The audience will
learn how, by focusing on quality elements while aligning the process with business functions, many of the PAs of the CMMI
are addressed even without management focus on CMMI.
Automation:
The Key to Successful Project Management Institutionalization
Jim Costello,
Pershing, PPL
3:30pm - 4:20pm
After spending a number of years defining and refining our software development methodology and its supporting software
suite, our parent company embarked on the implementation of a single project management application for all software
development. This opened up the opportunity to improve our process as part of the new
project management software implementation and enhance involvement of the business partners.
In this presentation we will discuss how Pershing automated the project
repository process and along the way implemented a single project
management discipline, achieved a consistent repeatable process across the
business and technical organizations, increased project visibility and
transparency, and reduced costs as measured by Function Point performance.
TRACK
TWO: CMMI
Making
Process Improvement Work
Mary
Sakry,
The
Process Group
9:30am - 10:10am
Process improvement too often reflects a significant disconnect between
theory and practice. This session bridges the gap - offering a
straightforward, systematic approach to planning process improvement
program. Project managers and teams will be able to apply the session's
practical ideas immediately to real-life challenges.
With examples based on our extensive experience, this session shows how to
define goals that directly address the needs of your organization, use
improvement models appropriately, and devise a pragmatic action plan.
This presentation is based on presenter's joint book with Neil Potter
titled "Making Process Improvement Work - A Concise Action Guide for
Software Managers and Practitioners."
Capably Applying CMMI - With Maturity! (CMMI best practices)
Stephen Gristock,
JPMorganChase / Independent Consultant
10:40am - 11:30am
Process Improvement models provide a very useful framework for establishing and developing best practices and enhanced
capabilities. However, by definition, they are necessarily generic and lacking in detailed guidance. As a result, they often
pose more questions than answers. Based upon best practices developed and implemented in the real-world, this session will
provide practical insights into critical aspects of effectively utilizing CMMI while ensuring a drama-free appraisal. All
delivered with a strong dose of common sense, and a dash of humor.
Decision Analysis and Resolution: Tools to Make it Work
Sharon Miller, L3 Communications ILEX Systems Defense Systems Services Division
11:30 am - 12:10pm
Making a critical design decision; deciding whether to build or buy? Whatever the decision, employing formal decision making
maximizes the likelihood of making a good decision and minimizes the risk of making a bad decision. Formal decision making
has several important characteristics: guidelines for when to use it; pre-established evaluation criteria for the alternative
solutions; the selection and use of appropriate tools and techniques to identify and evaluate alternative solutions; and a
documented record of the decision. This session will use a practical example to demonstrate the concepts of formal decision
making and the application of some decision making tools.
Building a Real-time Process and Product Quality Assurance Audit Process
William C McKnight,
Next Level Consultants LLC
2:20pm - 3:00pm
Organizations are learning that Process and Product Quality Assurance (PPQA) practitioners can be more than process police,
and instead be change agents. Often organizations do not fully understand the intent of PPQA, and thus implement PPQA as
little more than post mortem document reviews. This provides limited opportunity to take corrective action on many compliance
issues, which not only lowers the value of the process, but also hampers change management efforts. This presentation will
provide a fully functional PPQA process, showing how the right implementation of PPQA can foster change in an organization,
making the PPQA resource a valuable change agent.
CMMI on the Web
Shane McGraw &
Deen Blash, Software Engineering Institute
3:30pm - 4:20pm
Whatever stage you’re at in your CMMI journey there is an abundance of information on CMMI & SCAMPI. We will communicate what
Web sites, forums and user groups are available for organizations using CMMI. CMMI adoption has grown rapidly worldwide with
users looking for guidance. Based on our customer interactions while at the SEI, we have identified a need to introduce users
to the information that is available. This presentation educates users on the substantial amount of publicly available CMMI
knowledge, and how they can find exactly what they need to make their implementation of CMMI as efficient as possible.
TRACK
THREE:
AGILE
& GENERAL TOPICS
Agile and the Declaration of Interdependence: A new approach to Process Improvement Projects?
Michael Harris, David Consulting Group
9:30am - 10:10am
There has been much said and written about the mythical "conflict" between the values and principles of the Manifesto for
Agile Software Development and those of Software Process Improvement embodied in models such as CMMI. There is increasing
experience that shows that both sets of values and principles can be combined to deliver more value to an enterprise. Using
examples from a current project, this paper seeks to demonstrate that software process improvement projects, such as CMMI
implementations, can positively benefit by adopting an iterative "Agile" approach and adhering to the principles of the
Declaration of Interdependence.
A Process Architecture for Agile Implementation of CMMI
Hillel Glazer,
Entinex, Inc.
10:40am
- 11:30am
Every organization implementing CMMI has struggled with the question: "How do we *do* CMMI so that we don't slow projects
down and cost our company dearly in performance and not add ourselves to the long list of CMMI horror stories?" A common root
among horror stories can be traced to one cause: lack of process architecture at the onset. This session will walk through a
simple, scalable process architecture that relies on one thing: Successful companies must be doing *something* right; it's
our job to figure out what that is and engineer a process solution to fit that.
Some better practices for Mastering Project Scope while Embracing Agile Project Management
Rajesh
Sahu & Sudhendu Das, Citi
- Markets & Banking Technology
11:30am - 12:10pm
Formalizing
project scope and requirements is always a challenge. Embracing an Agile
Approach can be a daunting task but a great solution to this.
Prioritization becomes a key tool in defining requirements and managing
change in such a case. At a leading Financial IT organization, a pragmatic
process has been successfully deployed by the presenters. In this session
the presenters discuss some concepts and methods needed to prioritize
areas of greatest user needs. Attendees will learn the method for
introducing specific changes that need to be made and then implement them,
without a significant productivity impact on the overall project.
Enabling Software Process Using Team Foundation Server
Brian R. Hackerson,
3M
2:20pm - 3:00pm
3M’s Software Electronic and Mechanical Systems (SEMS) corporate research laboratory is expected to establish and maintain a
cutting-edge presence in its software development tools, processes and delivered software. The SEMS lab adopted Agile/Scrum
as its development methodology. Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) integrated platform was chosen to support the
software development life cycle. As the team matured in its use of Agile/Scrum and TFS, key lessons were learned. These
lessons may benefit others as they maximize the benefits of implementing TFS in their organization. In addition, there are
key environmental ingredients that must be present in order for such an alignment to be possible and achievable. These
factors include management buy-in, team member engagement as well as strong role definition.
Aligning CMMI and
ITIL: Where am I and Which Way Should I Go
Pat Mitryk,
cognence, inc
3:30pm - 4:20pm
Where should the prudent IT manager begin to address heavy and multi-layered demands for IT services? CMMI and ITIL have
both become industry standards for process improvement for IT services. Current CMMI framework dealing specifically with
services is still in its definition phase while ITIL exists and is quickly overtaking the services process improvement
market. With multiple frameworks for industry best practice, investigation is time consuming, while decisiveness is key.
This presentation is intended to provide assistance in high level understanding of the volumes of pages to streamline process
improvement efforts and achieve current and future success.
TRACK
FOUR:
MEASUREMENTS,
ESTIMATION & GENERAL TOPICS
A Case Study on Implementing an Organizational Measurement Program
Cheryl Saar and
Tim
Hadfield
, Allstate Insurance Company
9:30am -10:10am
This presentation will describe the development and implementation of an organizational measurement program. Specifically,
the presentation will cover: how an established goal measurement program was a key contributor to our creation of an
organizational measurement program; how we prioritized automation of the data collection and reporting; lessons learned from
the pilot program; how we worked around the limitations imposed by non-standard source data repositories; the importance of
clarifying the audience for measurement reports; and future program growth.
Project Quality Index - A Means for Quantifying Quality
Vijendra Mishra,
Satyam Computer Services Limited
10:40am - 11:30am
The industry finds it difficult to quantify Quality of a project on a consolidated measure. This article proposes to evolve
and discuss on Project Quality Index which can represent the overall quality of a project. Various parameters that affect
quality of a project viz. Quality of deliverables, Quality of process, Customer satisfaction, etc can be quantified using an
approach. These quantified parameters can then be consolidated to evolve the Project Quality Index. The Project Quality Index
can be used as a tool for evaluation of projects’ overall quality, monitoring the quality of project against organizational
targets and comparing projects on Quality performance across the organization.
Untethered Activities - The Real Reason for Schedule Slips
Rolf W. Reitzig,
cognence, inc.
11:30am - 12:10pm
Many estimation improvement techniques focus on the need to estimate "size" or some other work product parameter. Typically,
the root causes of failure in estimating aren’t related to mis-estimating size, etc, but rather due to failure in accounting
for "untethered activities." This session will introduce the audience to the notion of untethered activities, demonstrate
how not accounting for them severely affects project performance, and provide tools and techniques for how to better identify
them early on and mitigate for their occurrence.
Taking Software Requirements from Hearsay to Analysis
Larry Bernstein,
Stevens Institute of Technology
2:20pm - 3:00pm
When customers present ideas that need system solutions, requirements engineers help them define and simplify their problem.
Learn one way of accomplishing this feat in a measurable and systematic way. The customer is encouraged to write a short
prospectus that states the purpose of the system, its value and any constraints essential to making it useful. This should
not be confused with a complete set of requirements, which will emerge only through, simulation, analysis, prototyping and
validation iteratively. Then the requirements engineer determines the Measurable Operational Value of the system and maps
the features to software functions using a prototype and Quality Function Deployment techniques. A set of functional packages
are then sized using a novel Lambda Protocol that combines software estimation, software sizing and software reliability
technology. With performance, reliability, schedule and cost-estimates in hand, software engineers then can make essential
engineering tradeoffs as they set a course of action. Too many projects have had the seeds of their failure sown at this
critical point because they did not have suitable analysis techniques.
Peer Review – The Glue that Binds Process to Quality
Robert
Sarlo, Accenture
3:30pm - 4:20pm
You must have standard processes in place if you want to have any hope of having your team produce consistent work products. The hallmark of quality is not being able to tell which developer created which work products. Peer Review can be used not only as a tool for finding errors early, but in driving standardization of process as well as standardization of final work products. This presentation will provide real life examples of the positive impact a rigorous peer review process can have on a project as well as links to various Specific Practices within the CMMI that shed some light on how to use Peer Review as a real driver for overall project quality.
TRACK
FIVE:
ORGANIZATIONS & PEOPLE
Developing Change Agent Skills: Generating "Buy-In" at the Departmental Level
Richard Horwitz, BearingPoint
9:30am - 10:10am
The one constant in the modern business world is change, and no where is this truer than in the IT industry. Unfortunately,
many IT professionals become set in their ways and resist organizational and cultural changes. This presentation will teach
you how to develop the “soft skills” needed to become a change agent. How to listen to people, and how to ferret out their
pain points and turn them into selling points in order to effect positive organizational change. You will learn the
importance of the emotional impact of change, change perception, and specific techniques you can use to help guide people
through the change process.
Weapons of influence - Selling Your Improvement Initiative
Rob Donnellan,
Q/P Management Group
10:40am - 11:30am
Major process improvement initiatives, such as the achievement of a higher CMMI Maturity Level, depend on support from
stakeholders. That support must come in the form of funding and staffing - and in other ways such as maintaining the
initiative’s level of importance on the priority list, and allowing the decommissioning of unneeded processes. Securing that
support may itself be a major initiative. In all interaction with a stakeholder one need to present his or her case in a
manner that gains and sustains support. This presentation focuses on one key aspect of selling a major initiative: crafting
an effectively persuasive narrative.
The Overcommitted Organization: A Proposal to Fail & Possible Ways Out
L.D. Robinson, MIDCOM
11:30am - 12:10pm
From internal software groups to commercial IT organizations, failure is being proposed. Sort of! Internal IT shops are
over committing themselves. Organizations are agreeing to suspect terms in order to gain the contract. Is this what
software development and information technology have come to? What is causing it? Is it due to the competitive marketplace
(outsourcing as a factor)? Is it due to poor planning? Do we know? In this lively, participatory session, the presenter and
attendees will examine the causes of over-commitment, how to recognize it BEFORE it happens, how to correct it when possible,
and how to make lessons learned in this area count for SOMETHING when scoping the next project.
The Need for IT Change Management
David Herron,
IT Decisions Coaching
2:20pm - 3:00pm
In order to meet the challenges of today’s global economy the IT leadership team is called upon to implement new
technologies, reduce costs, and champion process improvement initiatives. Organizational change needs to be part of an
ongoing strategy to remain competitive. Getting people to change work habits and adapt to new business models presents many challenges. How to effectively manage change will be revealed in the seven guiding principles for change management. Using these as a framework, executives, change agents and coaches can more effectively manage change. The presentation will conclude with practical advice on dealing with resistance and using change agents to support the alignment of a company’s culture.
Convincing Management to Create and Maintain a Process
Justin Poggioli,
Viecore
3:30pm - 4:20pm
It is often difficult to convince management to invest both time and money in developing and maintaining a software process.
The initial step in achieving management buy-in is to show them how a process will lower development expenses and improve
customer satisfaction. In this presentation we will discuss how to use metrics to help management quantify savings and the
return on your investment. Once management sees a return, they typically will reinvest in the process by continually working
to create a “process-oriented” work environment.
______________________________
SM SEI, SCAMPI, SCAMPI Lead Assessor, and SCAMPI Lead
Appraiser are service marks of Carnegie Mellon University.
®CMMI and CMM are registered in the US Patent and Trademark
office by Carnegie Mellon University.
®ITIL is a Registered Trade Mark and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce and is Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
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