Off-shoring and Moving from Waterfall to Agile « Udayan Banerjee’s Blog – From The Other Side

Following an interesting discussion on LinkedIn, I ran across this blog post. Very good summary.

Off-shoring and Moving from Waterfall to Agile « Udayan Banerjee’s Blog – From The Other Side.

Free webinar from Boston U: Project Management for Everyone: A Non-Technical Approach

ndertaken to create a unique product or service. Projects are everywhere, regardless of your industry or profession, and an effective project management process can benefit everyone. If you are looking for non-technical tools and techniques to successfully manage your projects and project teams, this webinar is for you!

What you will achieve:

•Greater confidence in defining, planning and managing projects

•Reduced stress and greater sense of control of your multiple projects and daily work load

•Increased effectiveness and efficiencies by using simple, step-by step processes for project management and communications

Who should attend:

Managers, supervisors, and individual contributors who struggle with balancing the complex demands of project work while maintaining their daily workloads.

About the presenter:

Eileen Twichell is a dynamic and accomplished presenter and is highly regarded in the project management community for her expertise and knowledge of the field. She brings to you over twenty years of project management training and design experience and has developed and facilitated classes in project management, time management, presentation skills, coaching, and communications.

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/934361794

Wednesday, January 13, 2010
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST

Free Webinar: Stanford University Advanced Project Management Program

Free Webinar: Stanford University Advanced Project Management Program

Title: Executing Your Strategy in Challenging Times: Tools and Insights that Deliver Results
Free Webinar: Stanford University Advanced Project Management Program

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Time: 10:30-11:30 a.m. Pacific
1:30-2:30 p.m. Eastern

Receive 1 PDU for attending this Webinar

There is no charge to participate. Join us on December 16th for this exciting event.

Register Here:
http://scpd.stanford.edu/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do?method=load&courseId=6007647

Introduction to Agile For Managers Webinar

Introduction to Agile For Managers Webinar

Live Webinar: Wednesday December 9, 2009, 2pm EST (?)

More and more companies are adopting Agile development to gain faster time to market, increased return on investment, lower development costs, and greater customer involvement. Learn the fundamentals of Agile principles and learn how companies are implementing Agile into their process to gain these benefits. Join us for this free webinar with Robert Dempsey, Certified Scrum Practitioner, and CEO and Founder of Atlantic Dominion Solutions.

This free webinar will cover:

An overview of the twelve Agile principles
Real world business benefits gained by companies that have implemented Agile
A number of techniques that companies have used to make their existing process more Agile

To register go here

Free webinar series on Digital Asset Management

Free webinar series on Digital Asset Management
Earley & Associates is excited to announce a new Jumpstart webinar series on Digital Asset Management (DAM). This free 4-part educational series of 90 minute webinars will address both business concerns and technical know-how, with sessions exploring the strategic, organizational and technological challenges related to optimizing investments in DAM programs. Join every Thursday, January 14 to February 4, to hear industry experts address the latest insights and developments in building the business case for DAM, marketing resource management, the vendor landscape, and optimizing asset reuse with taxonomy and metadata.

For session details and registration, please visit: http://bit.ly/4JXFOS

Pillar is hosting Agile Education Webinars

Pillar is hosting Agile Education Webinars

Agile Education Events

Please pass this along to anyone who is involved in software development or application leadership by selecting the forward email link at the bottom.

These upcoming non-sales education events are focused on Agile software development best practices.

Webinar: Story Testing – An Introduction
Historically, organizations have relied on a manual, subjective test, to determine if a user story is complete. Story Testing is the process of devising an automated test, at the story level, that gives us a precise method of determining if a story is complete. Examples of tools in this space are Fitnesse, Robot Framework, Cucumber, etc. Leveraging a Story Testing approach helps teams learn how to assure that work is broken down in to more manageable segments. Join author and Senior Agile Coach Patrick Welsh to learn how you can create a test-driven approach to a requirements scope.
Wednesday Dec. 2 1:00pm Eastern/10:00am Pacific
Location: Online Register for the webinar here.

Webinar: The Role of the Product Owner
Join author, speaker and senior agile coach Daryl Kulak to explore the critical role of the Product Owner in an agile environment. Typically a non-IT, business stakeholder, the Product Owner is fundamental to a successful agile development project. Join this webinar to learn more about this critical team role.
Friday Dec. 18th 1:00pm Eastern/10:00am Pacific
Location: Online Register for the webinar here.

Webinar: Using Systems Thinking to Help Agile Scale in the Enterprise
Teams who implement Agile practices but do not experience success can become frustrated. Are they doing Agile wrong? Maybe, but some problems within Agile cannot be solved by Agile itself. We need to look at a bigger picture. Systems thinking can provide that bigger picture, offering a way to improve our Agile practices and create a process that is customized for the team, the business problem and the current environment. In this Webinar, we will use the Soft Systems Methodology to understand how to identify Agile issues, find leverage points and make incremental improvements.
Wednesday Jan. 26th 1:00pm Eastern/10:00am Pacific
Location: Online Register for the webinar here.

Add your event to the calendar!
To add an event not shown here, please contact Jay Aho at jaho@pillartechnology.com.

Free Webinar: How Telecommunication Companies Are Using Intelligent Virtual Agents

Free Webinar: How Telecommunication Companies Are Using Intelligent Virtual Agents
Attend ( http://budurl.com/virtuoz ) this FREE webinar to learn how telecommunication companies are using intelligent virtual agents today to improve sales and customer service.

Virtual Agents for Telecom Company Websites
Thursday – Dec 3rd
Time: 10am PST

Key Agenda:
• What are virtual agents?
• The unique needs of telecom companies
• How virtual agents are being effectively used on telecom companies’ websites
• Case studies

Register ( http://budurl.com/virtuoz ) for this free web event now and give your sales and customer service the ‘virtual’ power.

Free webinar Project Management Professional® (PMP®) The What, the How and Why

Free webinar Project Management Professional® (PMP®) The What, the How and Why 12/2/09 11am EST to register cgrinsztein@corpedgroup.com

Have you been wanting to learn more about the Project Management Professional® (PMP®) credential, but just haven’t had the time? This is an essential hour for those interested in discovering what the PMP® is, how it is attained and maintained, as well as the positive impact it can have on your career and your organization.

Key learning points:
-Roadmap for qualifying, attaining, and maintaining the PMP® credential
-Positive impact the PMP® credential can have on your career
-PMP® credential leveraged with your overall experience

Who should attend:
-Project managers
-Team leaders
-Project team members
-IT and business functional managers

LinkedIn Link – http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=10458989&gid=29417&trk=EML_anet_qa_ttle-dDhOon0JumNFomgJt7dBpSBA

When agile does not work

Here are some examples of when agile methodologies do not work

• agile teams are difficult to scale significantly and use on large projects
• not appropriate for mission critical and life critical systems because of their rigor, precision and quality requirements
• assumes low risk of control over the team.
• difficult to use with fixed price/fixed date projects
• does not satisfy all requirements of a mature process as defined by SEI CMM

Scrum: How to document product backlog

The product backlog is basically a prioritized list of requirements, or stories, or features. Things that the customer wants, described using the business terminology. We call these stories, or sometimes just backlog items.

Our stories include the following fields:

• ID – a unique identification, just an auto-incremented number.

• Name – a story name. Simple enough so that developers and the product owner understand approximately what we are talking about, and clear enough to distinguish it from other stories. Normally 2 – 10 words.

• Importance – the product owner’s importance rating for this story. For example 12 or 150. Rank higher priority items, but do not worry too much about lower priority as they will probably not make it to the sprint until they are made higher priority. Items are re-prioritized every sprint. Typically an item with priority 10 is NOT 5 times more important then the item with priority 2.

• Initial estimate – teams estimate during sprint planning session of how long it will take to implement this item. Typically measured in effort-days. This assumes best-case optimistic estimate.

• How to demo – high level description of how this feature can be demoed at the end of the sprint.

• Notes

ID	Name	Priority	Estimate	How to demo	Notes
101	Change Password	10	1	Login to…go to..	…
102	Lookup Account History	8	3	Login to…go to..	…

Once we complete the document, we put it on a shared network drive or upload to GoogleDocs or Microsoft Live