Reminder Meeting TONIGHT

"Agile is great, but how do I sell it upwards?"
By Dr. Charles(Chuck) Suscheck

Agile is a great tool from the team perspective and often from the business perspective, but how do you convince upper management or executive leadership that agile is really worth the investment. Executive level leadership is constantly balancing competitive advantage with risk. In order to sell agile upwards, the process has to be understood to be not only better than the current process, but safer. This presentation will cast agile software development in the light of risk reduction and higher ROI through a variety of compelling arguments. By the end of the presentation, the participant will have a number of tools in his/her quiver to sell agile upwards

Optional RSVP for meeting tomorrow

You can RSVP for the meeting tomorrow on the Meetup. It is not required but helps us know the amount of food to have on hand.

http://www.meetup.com/techlifecolumbus/events/54239442/

Meeting March 1 - "Agile is great, but how do I sell it upwards?"

By Dr. Charles(Chuck) Suscheck
Thursday March 1st 6pm at Improving Enterprises
4449 Easton Way Suite 100, Columbus, Ohio 43219

Agile is a great tool from the team perspective and often fro the business perspective, but how do you convince, at the organizational level, executive leadership that agile is really worth the investment. Executive level leadership is constantly balancing competitive advantage with risk. In order to sell agile upwards, the process has to be understood to be not only better than the current process, but safer. This presentation will cast agile software development in the light of risk reduction and higher ROI through a variety of compelling arguments. By the end of the presentation, the participant will have a number of tools in his/her quiver to sell agile upwards.

Chuck specializes in software development methodologies and project management and has over 25 years of professional experience in information technology. Dr. Suscheck has held positions of Process Architect, Director of Research, Principle Consultant, and Professional Trainer at some of the most recognized companies in America. He has spoken at national and international conferences such as Agile 20XX, OOPSLA, ECOOP, and Borcon on topics related to project management. He has also has over 30 articles published in academic and industry journals.

Meeting this week, Jan 19th.

This month’s meeting is this Thursday Jan 19th. Randy Pagels will be presenting “A Sneak Peek of Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server 11”, see previous post for speaker bio and abstract. This meeting and all future meetings will be held at the office of Improving Enterprises at Easton. 4449 Easton Way, Suite 100, Columbus, Ohio 43219. City Barbeque will be catered in for dinner.

Welcome to Daniel Gray, COALMG Leader

Alexei and I welcome Daniel Gray of Improving Enterprises to the leadership team for COALMG. While Alexei and I will remain involved, Daniel will assume the lead for organizing meetings, booking speakers and proliferating the group. If you have suggestions, want to sponsor or would like to volunteer, feel free to contact Daniel (and all of us) by leaving a comment on the blog.

Thanks, Daniel! Welcome to the team.

Upcoming Meeting January 19th

A Sneak Peek of Visual Studio & Team Foundation Server 11
Randy Pagels, Microsoft
Microsoft’s application lifecycle management tooling is all about enabling teams to deliver great software. You will learn how to more effectively plan and track work by using the new web-based project management tools; how to bridge the divide between development and operations by utilizing IntelliTrace in your production environments; and how to help keep team members on-task and “in the zone”, no matter how much there’re randomized. See the new “My Work” experience for managing your active tasks and integrated code review features. In addition to making your team more productive, you will see how you can boost your overall code quality with new features such as code clone and an overhauled unit testing story in Visual Studio 11. With Team Foundation Server you will see the full gamut of collaboration improvements, from the newly revamped Team Explorer, to the version control & build improvements. Want to work offline seamlessly? Wish merging happened less frequently & was simpler when it did? How about find work items faster? Join us to see all this and more.

About the Speaker
Randy Pagels is a Sr. Developer Technology Specialist and a Developer Platform and Evangelism tools team member covering the Heartland District (MI, OH, KY, TN) for Microsoft. His expertise includes Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, Test Professional, and Lab Management products. He educates the customer to maximize their ALM tools by explaining best practices, installation, and configuration through presentations, workshops, or quick starts. Prior to Microsoft he worked for 16 years as a developer in the IT area and has designed and developed many .Net web applications using agile methodologies. Randy is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) on Team Foundation Server. For further resource information, please refer to his website teamsystemcafe.net.

Next meeting January 19th instead of January 5th

Due to the holiday schedule and CodeMash next week, this month's regular scheduled meeting will not be on January 5th but will be on January 19 at the office of Improving Enterprises. I will put the speaker and topic info up next week.

I’m looking forward to great year with this group in 2012.

Regards,
Daniel Gray.