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Leading Successful Projects:

Speaker:

Tim Lister

"Lots of real life examples that open your eyes to problems that sooner or later every manager faces. It was not only interesting it is also a great pleasure to listen and talk to this charming guy"
Robert Kulicki, Consultant, Infovide

"A welcome relief from the work-place, allowing an opportunity to take a detached view of approaches taken at home -–it's a scary thought what you learn!"
Mick Broderick, Technical Manager, Barclays Technology Services

This three day tutorial is intended for senior software developers and managers, anyone sharing the responsibility for productive projects and quality products.

What’s changed and changing in your organisation since the beginning of the nineties? Nothing much, right? Only Client/Server, Business Process Re-engineering, Object Methods, virtual offices and virtual teams, new databases and new database technology, downsizing, reorganisation, 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 spry organism, nimble to the changes it’s sure to encounter.

The purpose of this seminar is to prepare delegates for a leadership role in designing, populating and inhabiting these adaptive project organisms. Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister offer practical guidance to help your project meet its specific challenges, and to achieve it promise of success.

Building Better Software Projects:

We think of ourselves as systems designers, but the project is a system too, and do we ever properly turn our skills to 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 as well to design of software projects. Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, in three fast-paced days, turn their attention to proper design and implementation of software projects. The goal is to help projects be more productive and better able to turn out quality results.

Overture
The bread-and-butter mechanism by which projects and organizations improve is this: Seek out and identify practices that work well, and utilise them where appropriate. Organisations that can do this prosper and those that can’t don’t. What new practices are best-of-class organisations implementing today? Emphasis here is on new approaches that can pay for themselves on the very first project where they are applied.

Risk Management
All projects incur risk. Because risk and opportunity are closely linked, the best organisations positively court risk. The developing discipline of risk management provides a methodical way to uncover, assess and mitigate the principal risks. Without sensible risk management, your only alternatives are to flee from risk (and from opportunity) or to be undone by it.

Dynamic Modeling
The science of system dynamics gives managers a way to perform "What if" analysis on their projects: What if we add two more people in January? What if the product grows by 10% beyond what we expected? What if we deliver with only three months of testing instead of two? In each case, the dynamic model provides a prudent projection of what the consequences would be. Managers who have already begun using dynamic models depend on them so heavily that they have trouble believing there are others don’t use them at all.

The Software Best Practices Initiative
The Best Practices Initiative, first set up by the U.S. Department of Defense to govern D.o.D. contracted software has begun to have impact far beyond its originally intended domain. The initiative identified nine principal best practices, a "breathalyser test" for project health, a project control panel, a set of six quantitative targets and a lot more. One major focus of the initiative is metrics, not as an academic discipline but as a bread-and-butter management tool.

Making Change Possible
An organisation can’t become more productive as long as it can’t change at all. And most organisations can’t. 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
The software industry is presently caught in the throes of software process maturity. There are capability models for every aspect of daily life. Implementing all of them can’t be the answer. What’s needed here is a means of separating the wheat from the chaff of process improvement, of coming to grips with the fad factor. We need to learn to improve ourselves in spite of all the hype.

Box Prototyping
The advantage of today’s prototyping tools and methods is lost when projects spend valuable time and effort building exquisite expansive prototypes. The point of prototyping is to determine what is wrong, not what is splendid. Prototypes vary by project stage to provide cheap and coarse confirmation of project hypotheses.

Last-Minute Implementation
If you grimly conclude that you started coding too soon on your last project (and the project before that) you need to wonder what the alternatives are. The alternatives are: Front-loaded projects, substantive design, and meaningful testing before the first line of code is written.

Tiger Teams
Tiger teams are like S.W.A.T. teams for software development. When projects are conducted in ‘crunch mode,’ such teams can succeed when more conventional workgroups have no chance at all.

Endgame
As in a chess match, success of a software project depends on how we plan and carry out the Endgame. Some projects are lost because management has postponed the Endgame strategy until Endgame is upon them. Setting up for Endgame is what project planning and tactical management are really about.

Growing Healthy Corporate Culture
What is this thing called corporate culture? Whatever it is, it seems to have more impact on success than mechanical things like methodology and process. The focus here is on characteristics of corporate culture, patterns and pathologies, and the ways of change toward healthier community.

Building Teams and Harmonious Workgroups
Sometimes teams jell (form into a cohesive whole) and sometimes they don’t. When a team does jell, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Jelled teams cause a massive improvement in effectiveness. They focus attention naturally on product quality. And that is just a beginning. Jelled teams help you keep your best people, make the work more fun for everyone, and help ensure project success. Sensible team dynamics doesn’t even cost very much. In this final session, Lister and DeMarco lay out a strategy to help teams jell and stay jelled.

Timothy Lister is a Principal Member of The Atlantic Systems Guild Inc., based in the New York office. He divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing. His present focus is on tailoring methods and selecting tools for software development groups interested in increased project productivity an product reliability.

Tim Lister has 25 years of professional software development experience. Before the formation of The Atlantic Systems Guild, he worked at Yourdon Inc. from 1975 to 1983. At Yourdon he was Executive Vice President and Fellow in charge of all instructor/consultants and responsible for the technical content of all seminars, and the quality of all consultations.

In addition to their joint creation of the book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, Tim Lister is co-author with Tom DeMarco of the immensely popular course and video sequence, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement and Estimation. The two partners have also produced a new video entitled Productive Teams, available through Dorset House Publishing in New York. Tim Lister also instructs on the latest methods of software systems analysis and design. His specific views on Risk Management were featured in the Point/Counterpoint section of the May, 1997 special issue of IEEE Software.