For the first time, the SNEC PMI Conference Committee is excited to offer two separate “Lunch and Learn” sessions hosted by two of our Platinum Sponsors, IBM and Microsoft.

The session being sponsored by IBM Rational Software will provide an overview of this tools landscape within the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform, with focus on the requirements and change management disciplines, tied into the testing/quality discipline. Attendees will see how, through the use of interconnected tools, project managers can gain control and insight into one of the most intractable problems in IT project management today.

Synopsis of SNEC-PMI Lunch-n-Learn session, sponsored by IBM Rational Software

Room 17 

Project and Portfolio Management Automation with IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform

While there have been many studies stating that poor requirements and change management are the two leading causes of software project failures, the project management community is still failing to address these issues. ‘Scope Creep’ is still considered an essential privilege of the project sponsors. While the changing dynamics of business environments justify some of these changes, they create an enormous burden on the project managers to keep the project within acceptable budget and schedule overruns, the two prime factors determining the success of their projects. Some project managers put some quantitative and qualitative measures around this scope creep to check if it is a ‘leak’ or a ‘tide’. They are however not always successful because the task is labor intensive and largely unaccounted for. Instead of proactively managing their project, most project managers give up and easily get swept away in the increasing flow of unmanaged change requests.

The only way out of this dilemma is to automate the collection and dissemination of these measures so that this task is not considered an overhead but an integral part of the software development process. The current software development tools landscape provides enough opportunities to automate this process but the decision to use these tools is largely left to the engineering, development or testing communities with the project managers either not trying or having a very little say in their selection and usage. Part of the problem is lack of awareness and education to the project management community about these tools and the availability of automation options for collection of key project information.

The lunch-n-learn session being sponsored by IBM Rational Software at the SNEC-PMI Annual Convention in Hartford, CT, on May 2, 2008, will provide an overview of this tools landscape within the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform, with focus on the requirements and change management disciplines, tied into the testing/quality discipline. Attendees will see how, through the use of interconnected tools, project managers can gain control and insight into one of the most intractable problems in IT project management today.

From the PMBOK perspective, the discussed tools will cover the Project Management Knowledge areas of Integration, Scope, Quality, Communication and Risk Managements within the Process Groups of Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Control, covering over 20 out of the 44 Project Management Processes defined in PMBOK 2003. Such a wide usage option makes these tools almost as important as the project management software that the project management community has traditionally been focused on.

While the presentation material will be made available to all the attendees, it will be a very interactive session. So, please be there in person to share your perspective. While the focus audience is intended to be the SNEC-PMI community, please feel free to share the information with your colleagues in the development and quality management communities as well, as they can also benefit from this awareness.