Game Changers (The Atlantic Systems Guild)

New rules for a new era: For most of the last two decades, we've been focused on process, cost reduction, and implementation quality. These trends have by now run their course. Today's priorities have everything to do with the mesh of complex assemblies of software. Yesterday we were concerned with programs, but today is all about systems. Huge systems. The secrets of building such systems are not to be found in our methods, but rather in our social structures. And it is these that we need to re-construct, almost from scratch.

Coffee Break

Dead Fish (Tim Lister)

Behavior patterns are at the heart of what we call “Organizational Culture.” By calling it culture, we tend to write it off as unmodifiable. But focusing on the behaviors that make up a culture, gives access; patterns are consistent, often almost invisible ways of acting, but they are not immune to change. In our ongoing attempts to become ever more effective, we have improved everything but culture. We at the Guild believe that project patterns, good and bad, trump best practices, and so any IT organization attempting significant improvement must confront its own prevailing patterns. During this conference you have an opportunity to discover, describe, and name, your organization’s patterns.

Lunch Break

Clean Start for Projects (Tom DeMarco, Suzanne Robertson)

Projects go right or wrong, almost from Day One. In too many cases, the game is lost before the heroic efforts even begin. Death March projects are marching toward death, not because they are failing to progress, but because they have set goals that cannot be reached. These goals are not flawed simply for being too ambitious. Rather they are flawed for being vague or internally inconsistent. The inconsistencies are hard to spot because they lie in the project's "conflict space," where stakeholders have varying visions of what would make the project succeed. Being able to identify project level and individual “win conditions” and “fail conditions is the key to aligning all from the beginning.

Coffee Break

Conflict Resolution Workshop (Tom DeMarco, Suzanne Robertson)

Coffee Break

Requirements Myths (Suzanne Robertson, James Robertson)

Requirements are the most crucial ingredient for successful projects, and yet they are probably the most misunderstood part of systems development. Requirements specifications tend to be large, unreadable and usually unread documents. But the irony is that willing and able people write these documents. Unfortunately, they do so because they misunderstand the real objective of the requirements process.

Lunch Break

Collaborate! (Tom DeMarco)

The size of the systems we build has, on average, increased almost exponentially over the past twenty years. Yet during this same period, our approaches to system building have changed only modestly. Some of the methods of the 90s – still in use today – are simply swamped by the size of the systems we’re building today. This leads us to a drastic reconsideration of the need for and methods of collaboration.

Coffee Break

The Architectural Imperative (Tom DeMarco)

Most organizations have competent project management and they know how to implement and test their systems. We know this from the huge amount of working software that we have today. Many of these organizations have also learned that the effort put into requirements is repaid when the right and appropriate software is built.

However, many of the same organizations fail to grasp the relevance of system and software architecture. Designing a software system without considering the evolutionary path that the system (and its offspring) will follow after delivery is the essence of short-sightedness. Yet we do it all the time. Being a great architect is much more than having vision in the first place; you have to learn to protect that vision in the rough-and-tumble of schedule pressure and project politics.

Coffee Break

Velocity! The Human Factors of Fast Companies (Tom DeMarco)

You might think that organizations known for velocity have high velocity processes. Think again. The difference between those who get projects done swiftly and those who can’t is only distantly related to the technology they embrace. Much more important is the set of human factors that defines the group. This is another case of Sociology trumps Technology.

Lunch Break

Matching the Terrain (Peter Hruschka, Tim Lister)

It is 2012 and a tiny minority of projects fit perfectly into a standard process. For a project to be truly effective and efficient, the process has to be modified to fit the specific situation in hand. Project complications are too commonplace to be treated only reactively. The Software Industry has spent years working on the generalities of standard processes; The Guild believes we need to focus on the project specifics.

Coffee Break