For the season windup, join us for this special meeting when we try something new! – An interactive discussion in which we explore a number of project leadership challenges and difficulties.

Possible topics include the following, amongst a long list:

"I have challenges completing agile projects with dependencies on non-agile (i.e. waterfall) projects."
"My team is totally dysfunctional? Where do I start? How do you build trust within a team?"
"Sponsorship, what sponsorship, is anyone really there? How to address the problem of an absent sponsor."
"At our firm, how do I determine which projects can benefit from Agile methods?"

Bring your own discussion topic and add it to the mix! Get involved in the dialogue and get your own ideas on the table! If a group feels passionate about exploring one or more of the topics further, perhaps it becomes a topic for next season.

The use of personas has received scant attention in project management literature. First utilized in the late '90s as a tool of business analysis, a persona is a detailed description of a fictional end-user including how they use and perceive the product you're delivering. However, personas can have a strong impact on projects by providing a project team with a human face to enhance otherwise abstract data about customers. From streamlining communications, to managing stake-holder expectations, to maintaining the team's alignment with the project goals, personas can engage your team and enhance your capability to move the project forward rapidly.

This presentation touches on the origins and definitions of personas, the benefits and criticisms of their use, and includes a case study of persona implementation on a complex application development effort. Focused on how personas can galvanize a project team into action, it is an engaging, interactive presentation lasting of interest to all members of systems and application development teams.

Presentation Slides

Some organizations have done successful agile pilots and rolled it out to the rest of the organization and failed. If it works for one team, it should work for all, shouldn’t it? There are also early adopters that have had many successful projects using agile, but are becoming complacent or have lost the thrill of being on the leading edge of change.

One of the problems organizations face is changing their culture to embrace agile projects. Management may buy into the idea of delivering business value faster but don’t realize their roles change too and need to change their views and actions as well. They may not realize some the up-front investment in time or training will pay off over time in higher quality and speedier development.

Janet will explore common mistakes that organizations make, and introduce practices that can be used to help overcome them to create and nurture an agile culture. Agile development is all about baby steps, celebrating small successes, and continually improving. The right investment will yield a big return.

In order to foster trust and credibility between a project team and its stakeholders, the team has the responsibility to clearly communicate the health of the project. As the leaders of a project, we can apply the metaphor of medical care and their use of “vital signs” to help form a holistic view of the state of the project. Come learn the five “Project Vital Signs”, their associated quantitative metrics and how to enable a team to effectively use them as a tool to diagnose and treat project health problems.

Presentation Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/spantazopoulos/project-vital-signs

Want to be the next Twitter or Facebook? Find out some of the challenges in building and growing a "startup" software company with an agile development philosophy. The speaker will address how the ideology and practices of agile development, while healthy for development teams, can also be at odds (or perceived to be at odds) with success when defining your business focus, building your team, raising capital, applying for grants, pitching to investors, cultivating early customers, gaining certifications, meeting domain legal requirements, and even potentially selling your company. This talk will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of agile for tech startups, and offer some suggestions to new companies and budding entrepreneurs.