Crowdsourcing is a relatively new term that describes the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community.  In this presentation, that was part of the 2009 PMO Symposium, an innovative approach to developing an organization’s PMO Governance model was offered that leveraged crowdsourcing and Wikis to create a self-sustaining governance model that was easily scalable and adapted readily to changing organizational needs.

Software-as-a-Service or SaaS is a “new” approach to providing software solutions  based on a Multi-tenant solution, focusing on configuration over customization and moving companies from software licenses/maintenance to software subscriptions.  SaaS helps reduce the costs of managing software and provides faster implementation opportunities but it also requires a different perspective for large enterprise IT organizations to manage.  This presentation provides an experience report of several SaaS implementations at a large enterprise IT organization.  Presented at the 2010 Project Management Institute Conference (Houston).

Over the past five years, there has been increasing interest in agile development approaches to software development (such as eXtreme Programming), however, integrating these into a unified testing approach can be challenging given their rapid delivery model.   Applying a testing framework to an agile development approach provides a greater opportunity to ensure a robust and high quality application. This paper reviews a web-services software development project completed at the end of the year 2000 for a large Fortune 500 company. The project used an object-oriented design and blended the more formal Rational Unified Process (RUP) with the low ceremony approached advocated by eXtreme Programming (XP). The application testing approach applied the unit test framework of XP with a formal testing methodology required by the client for this high profile project. The paper describes the process followed and key learnings discovered throughout the project lifecycle.

As organizations embark on increasing their agile effectiveness understanding the agile maturity of your organizations becomes critical for scaling agile adoption.  This presentation and associated reference material provides a framework to track agile maturity and provides role playing scenarios to determine were your team members are on their agile journey.  This presentation was part of the Agile 2011 Conference, Houston Tech Fest and the Agile Alliance Summit.

Presented at the Central Mississippi PMI Chapter Annual Conference, this is the second part of a two part series introducing Agile concepts and aligning them with the PMI-ACP certification.  This presentation takes a detailed look at an Agile project and provides examples and techniques for managing an agile project.

Presented at the Central Mississippi PMI Chapter Annual Conference, this is the first part of a two part series introducing Agile concepts and aligning them with the PMI-ACP certification.  This presentation takes a provides an overview of Agile project management techniques and a review of the Project Management Institute’s Agile Certified Professional designation