PDUs Through Toastmasters

8 PDU Interactive Seminar

Projects with any degree ofcomplexity need a formal process to ensure that all of the requirements are accurately gathered, reviewed, documented and approved.

Projects must meet the needs and expectations of the clients to be successful. These client needs
and expectations are set through the gathering and agreement on the requirements of the final
solution. Gathering requirements usually requires more than asking a few questions and then
building the solution. Projects with any degree ofcomplexity need a formal process to ensure
that all of the requirements are accurately gathered, reviewed, documented and approved.

Prerequisites
•  None

Learning Objectives
At the end of this class, participants should be able to:

•  Understand a project, the Systems Development Life Cycle and the Analysis Phase
•  Align requirements to a project scope, objectives and deliverables
•  Recognize various types of requirements and explain them
•  Determine the business areas that should be understood before eliciting requirements
•  Demonstrate multiple techniques for eliciting business requirements
•  Effectively validate the requirements
•  Document business requirements so that they are understood by the project team and business clients
•  Verify that the Analysis Phase is complete and correct

Who Should Attend
•  Analysts, project managers and team members that gather and document requirements
•  Managers that need to understand the Analysis Phase and the requirements process
•  Clients, customers and all stakeholders that provide requirements

Course Outline
•  Overview
•  Scope definition and scope management
•  Requirements definition
•  Current state analysis
•  Requirements - Elicitation
•  Requirements - Validation
•  Requirements - Specification
•  Requirements - Verification

There are numerous exercises to reinforce the concepts taught in the class.

Instructor:  Ten Step Academy

TenStep, Inc. (www.TenStep.com) is a methodology development, consulting, and training company, that is  international with over 55 offices around the world.

Where to Focus First When Adopting Agile

If you are new to agile and want to understand what all the buzz is about, start by separating agile project management techniques from agile software development methods. Why the distinction? We’ve always had to think about how we manage work separately from how we actually perform the work.  To really understand agile, start with the nature of the work.

For example, listen to Alan Shalloway, whose firm provides training and consulting to software development organizations and who has several influential books on the subject of agile techniques.  To describe agile, Alan lists the five key questions that agile attempts to answer:

1. How do we deliver value quickly to our customers?
2. How do we discover as early as possible what is needed?
3. How can we accelerate the learning of the development team?
4. How can we ensure that the software written will be able to grow and be extended effectively when new requirements are  introduced?
5. How do we accurately gauge the progress we're making in our project?

Notice that only the last question is related to project management.  The other questions are about requirements analysis and product design. That suggests that organizations who are adopting agile methods should look beyond the typical Scrum techniques (project management) and make sure that developers understand agile analysis, design, and development methods.  As Alan’s questions indicate, this is a highly iterative, discovery oriented methodology.  To make it work, you need to know how to design and build products that can be delivered incrementally.

Classic examples of project management that include pouring a house's concrete foundation before raising the walls makes the point that certain activities must precede other activities.  But these examples also are rooted in linear development methods.  Software might lend itself to incremental delivery, but if you try to deliver a house incrementally, one room at a time, it wouldn't be pretty.  And it probably wouldn't be cheap.

Which brings us back to the real agile success factors: design and development techniques.  If the essence of agile is to rapidly deliver incremental value, then we have to be able to design and deliver the product, never knowing for sure which incremental delivery will be the last.  I have no problem with sprints, daily stand-ups, burn-down charts, etc., but they only make sense in the context of agile development practices.

To get a sense of how differently we need to think about building software, consider the example of a car designed with interchangeable parts.  You've got to see it to believe it. Click here to watch a short video.

Now THAT is new.  So if your organization has an agile interest, focus first on the fundamental development methods.  With those under your belt, Scrum becomes intuitive and the project management pieces fall in place.

Further reading:  Read Alan Shalloway's complete description of agile in Chapter 17 of The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, 4th Edition or visit Eric Verzuh's Power Blog. 

Eric Verzuh is President of The Versatile Company, which provides project management training and consulting to thousands of professionals each year. His clients include major government agencies, small and large companies, and nonprofit organizations in such diverse industries as aerospace, health care, information technology, and education. Contact Eric at eric.verzuh@versatilecompany.com.

Article courtesy of the Microsoft Project Users Group (MPUG) Newsletter of June 13, 2012

8 PDU Interactive Seminar instructed by

 When was the last time you had your entire project team in one place, where you could see their faces, reactions, and have full interaction? Whether you’ve got teammates down the hall, in the next building, or spread all around the globe, research shows that running virtual project teams requires different skills than "traditional" in-person projects.

With projects increasingly conducted by virtual teams, savvy project managers must understand how to succeed when face-to-face meetings are becoming few and far between. In this course, we will discuss how to get results from your virtual project teams. We’ll cover how to facilitate trust and open communication, including interpreting and acting upon verbal and non-verbal cues when you can’t see them. Finally, while we can’t help set up your technologies, we can provide some guidance on what to do when technology fails.

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Exploring  the Agile  Lifecycycle

8 PDU Interactive Seminar
Presented by Tom Mochal, CEO of TenStep, who specializes in consulting and training in business methodologies.

For many years, there were two major approaches for structuring Information Technology (IT) development projects - traditional waterfall or iterative development. New Agile approaches are now available. These Agile models have moved from the underground to the mainstream. As more and more people work on Agile projects it has become important to increase the skill level and professionalism of the Agile team.

The purpose of this class is to provide an overview of Agile terminology, concepts and roles. The class will also highlight a common Agile lifecycle model so that students can see how an Agile project could be structured from start to finish. By the end of the class students will see why these Agile processes are exciting and unique. Students will also have enough information to start an Agile initiative in their organization.

Prerequisites
None

Learning Objectives

By the end of this class, attendees should understand:

• The overall philosophy of Agile
• The main roles on an Agile project
• A common Agile lifecycle model
• The challenges associated with Agile

Who Should Attend

• Development project managers
• Development team members
• Clients and other stakeholders that would like to understand light development concepts

Course Outline

• A Little History
• Agile Philosophy
• Agile Roles
• Agile Lifecycle
• Challenges

There are numerous exercises to reinforce the concepts taught in the class.

Class Length

One day (8 PDUs)

The Practice of Program Management

SPEAKER:  TOM MOCHAL, President, Ten Step, Inc. 

8 PDU Interactive Seminar

COURSE LENGTH 
One day (8 PDUs)

Bio: Tom Mochal
Tom Mochal, PgMP, PMP, PMI-ACP, TSPM is the President of TenStep, Inc. (www.TenStep.com), a methodology development, consulting, and training company.  TenStep is an international company with over 55 offices around the world.

Tom is author of a book on managing people called "Lessons in People Management" (BookSurge 2005) and a companion book on project management called "Lessons in Project Management" (Apress 2003). He is also the author of a number of business methodologies including the TenStep Project Management Process, a complete portfolio management process called PortfolioStep, a project lifecycle methodology called LifecycleStep and a framework for building and running a Project Management Office called PMOStep.
Tom recently won the Distinguished Contribution Award from the Project Management Institute for his work spreading knowledge of project management around the world. Tom is a speaker, lecturer, instructor and consultant to companies and organizations around the world.

8 PDU Interactive Seminar instructed by Roeder Consulting

Running a successful project requires a high degree of stakeholder management. Stakeholders are anyone who have an interest in your project or will be affected by its deliverables or output. It is important to understand the values and issues that stakeholders have in order to address them and keep everyone on board for the duration of the project.

Many a well conceived project ends up in the scrap heap because of inadequate expectation setting, or sponsors and key stakeholders that become disinterested or impatient with projects that don't produce deliverables quickly enough. These projects, after creating an initial buzz, appear to enter "a dark twisty tunnel" where the light from the tunnel entrance is no longer seen, the tunnel exit is nowhere in sight, and inadequate milestones exist to indicate forward progress. Avoiding this trap is no trivial matter, as it is more than just defining milestones for your project.

Welcome to the Professional Development class history page. As students complete various courses endorsed by the chapter, the class photo will be published here. Just right click on image then 'save as' in order to keep personal copies of images