Leading Successful Projects

General Overview:

What's changed and changing in your organization since the beginning of the nineties? Nothing much, right? Only client/server, business process reengineering, object methods, virtual offices and virtual teams, new databases and new database technology, downsizing, reorganization, and most of all, a fierce new focus on competitiveness and return on investment.

How does all of that affect your project? Most of the fixed rules that governed projects only a few years ago have been thrown out the window. Today a project needs to be run as a spry organism, nimble to the changes it's sure to encounter. We think of ourselves as systems designers, but the project is a system too, and do we ever turn our skills to properly designing it? All of the heuristics governing system design can profitably be applied to design of the project. Consider these fundamental rules:

• Design for Manufacture: Make sure to design in such a way that the implementation is possible and successful implementation likely.
• Design for Testability: Make sure your design allows for ease of testing of all its key features.
• Design Defensively: Assume things will go wrong and design in specific ways to counteract error and fault.
• Design Iteratively: Expect design to mature over time; become expert at design improvement (even if the initial design is imperfect, you can end up with an excellent product if you improve it enough and often enough).
• Design for Human Interface: Design for ease of human use, short learning curve, automatic memorization of key system features.

Each of these rules is routinely applied to the design of software products. Now it's time to apply them to designing software projects.

Leader: Tim Lister

Workshop Goals:

Tim Lister turns his attention to proper design and implementation of software projects. The goal is to help your projects be more productive and better able to turn out quality results. The purpose of this seminar is to prepare you for a leadership role in designing, populating, and inhabiting these adaptive project organisms. Tim Lister offers practical guidance to help your project meet its specific challenges, and to achieve its promise of success.

Intended Audience:

Senior software developers and managers, and anyone sharing the responsibility for productive projects and quality products.

Outline:

OVERTURE

• What new practices are best-of-class organizations implementing today? Learn new approaches that can pay for themselves on the very first project where they're applied.

RISK MANAGEMENT

A methodical way to uncover, assess, and mitigate principle risks.

DYNAMIC MODELING

• The dynamic model gives managers a way to perform "What if" analysis on their projects and provides a prudent projection of what the consequences would be.

THE SOFTWARE BEST PRACTICES INITIATIVE

• This Initiative, first set up by the U.S. Department of Defense, has begun to have impact far beyond its originally intended domain.

MAKING CHANGE POSSIBLE

• Focus is on inhibitors to change, models of the change process, coping with levels of change resistance, and the critical role of safe culture in making change possible.

SENSIBLE PERSON'S GUIDE TO PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

• Separate the wheat from the chaff of process improvement and learn to improve your organization in spite of all the recent hype.

BOX PROTOTYPING

• The advantage of prototyping is to determine what is wrong, not what is splendid.

LAST-MINUTE IMPLEMENTATION

• If you grimly conclude that you started coding too soon on your last project, here are the alternatives: front-loaded projects, substantitive design, and meaningful testing.

TIGER TEAMS

• When projects are conducted in `crunch mode,' such teams can succeed when more conventional workgroups have no chance at all.

ENDGAME

• Setting up for Endgame is what project planning and tactical management is really about.

GROWING HEALTHY CORPORATE CULTURE

• Focus here is on characteristics of corporate culture, patterns and pathologies, and the ways of change toward healthier community.

BUILDING TEAMS AND HARMONIOUS WORKGROUPS

• Strategy to help teams jell and stay jelled.

For more information on bringing this workshop to your organization, contact Dennis Crowley by phone at +1 781 641 5125, by fax at +1 781 648 1950, or by e-mail at sales@cutter.com.