Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 22:45:59 -0500 From: Withall Subject: SPIN Meeting Announcement: Tuesday January 16, 2001 6:30 PM Meeting Announcement Topic: Aligning Project Management Goals with Corporate Goals Speaker: Al Davis When: Tuesday, January 16, 2001 6:30pm-8:30pm 6:30-7:00 Networking and Round Tables 7:00-7:10 Announcements 7:10-8:10 Presentation 8:10-8:30 Questions and Answers Who: Everyone (Academia, Government, Industry) Location: General Dynamics, 77 "A" St., Needham MA. Info: See our web page, http://www.cs.uml.edu/Boston-SPIN For SPIN info, contact Anna Allison: anna_allison@yahoo.com Note: Boston SPIN meetings are free. No RSVP is necessary. Abstract: Aligning Project Management Goals with Corporate Goals; Software development teams know that a well-defined process is critical to the success of any project. However, few organizations recognize the importance of implementing a process to help them make the right trade-off decisions while in the product planning stage. Whether doing "shrink-wrap" product development, embedded system development, custom software development, or in-house IT projects, every software manager struggles with the difficulty of balancing requirements, development risks, budgets, schedules, resources, and impact on revenues and profits. The relationships between these variables are complex, and finding an optimal balance is nontrivial. And how can you communicate the results to your management team, peers, and developers? This talk explains how to perform trade-off analysis among your software requirements, schedule and resource constraints, development risks, projected effects on revenues and profits, market share estimates, budgets, ROI, etc. The trade-off analysis starts with a list of candidate requirements, takes you through the triage process (which considers all of the above factors), and ends with a list of selected requirements, an optimal allocation of development resources, and a believable financial plan. It will also show how seeing simultaneous multiple views of your product is essential so that you can see the ramifications of any change you make during the process. Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) About the Speaker: Al Davis is president of Omni-Vista, Inc., a Colorado corporation dedicated to helping companies prevent software disasters. He was a member of the board of directors of Requisite, Inc., acquired by Rational Software Corporation in February 1997. He is a non-managing general partner and investment advisor for Catalyst InfoTech Development Fund, LLC, a venture capital fund investing in software startups in the Rocky Mountain region. He has consulted for many corporations over the past twenty years, including Boeing, British Telecom, Cadence Design Systems, Cigna Insurance, Federal Express, Flight Dynamics, Fujitsu, General Electric, Great Plains Software, IBM, Loral, McDonald’s, MCI, Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, NTT, Rational Software, Rockwell, Schlumberger, Sharp, Software Productivity Consortium, Storage Tek, Sulzer Intermedics, and Sumitomo. Previously, he was a Vice President of Engineering Services at BTG, Inc., a Virginia-based software startup that went public in 1995. Prior to joining BTG, he was a Director of R&D at GTE Communication Systems in Phoenix, Arizona, and Director of the Software Technology Center at GTE Laboratories in Waltham, Massachusetts. He has held academic positions at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (El Pomar Chair of Software Engineering and Professor of Information Science), George Mason University (Acting Chair of Computer Science Department, and Professor of Software Systems Engineering), University of Tennessee (Assistant Professor of Computer Science), and University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science). He is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of IEEE Software after serving as Editor-in-Chief from 1994 to 1998. He is an editor for the Journal of Systems and Software (1987-present) and was an editor for Communications of the ACM (1981-1991). He is the author of Software Requirements: Objects, Functions and States (Prentice Hall, first edition 1990; second edition 1993) and the best-selling 201 Principles of Software Development (McGraw Hill, 1995). He is the founder of the IEEE International Conferences of Requirements Engineering, and served as general chair of its first conference in 1994. He has been a fellow of the IEEE since 1994, and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in 1975. About the Roundtables: Roundtables are focused group or “birds-of-a-feather” discussions, with a facilitator, to stimulate and moderate discussion. Roundtables are held during the Networking portion of the SPIN meeting. See our web page, http://www.cs.uml.edu/Boston-SPIN to see which topics are selected for this SPIN meeting. Directions: From Route 128 in Needham, take exit 19A onto Highland Avenue East. Take your first right by the Ground Round and take your second left onto "A" Street. General Dynamics is the last building on the right. Enter the parking lot by the General Dynamics sign and come into the building by the cafeteria entrance, which is located to the left of the main entrance. There will be a security guard at the entrance. . See http://www.gd-cs.com/needham.html for directions. Cancellations (including weather cancellations): We will notify the membership via email to the SPIN distribution list, post the notice on the SPIN web page, and send the cancellation announcement to Channel 7 TV and radio, WRKO AM 680 starting at 3pm. SPIN Sponsors: General Dynamics Communications Systems, Needham, MA, http://www.gd-cs.com/needham.html Raytheon Corp., Lexington, MA, http://www.raytheon.com Edelman & Associates, http://www.edeltech.com We thank the Computer Science department of UMass-Lowell for providing support and hosting our web page.