Managing IT Projects in the Real World
Hard Data and Methods to Keep Your Projects in the "Win Column"
 

Wednesday, November 14, 2001
 

Presented by:
 

Ira Grossman of Emergeon, LLC
 

Please join us for our next meeting with members of the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) as Ira Grossman discusses the issues of keeping projects on track. Commercial pressures of today's economy result in imposed deadlines being the norm for technology projects. Yet, the nature of software projects demand that teams deal with the constant dynamics of change.

This creates extreme degrees of project risk, and perpetuates the so called "software crisis", whereby a large percentage of projects are canceled, delivered late, or with cost overruns and poor quality. However, knowing the nature of these dynamics empowers managers to make decisions on promised requirements and functionality, thereby controlling the very factors that degrade software quality and reliability.

This presentation will address why software projects are different than other classes of work, and how the nature of lifecycle dynamics can be used to avert disaster. We will discuss benchmarking against industry and "the competition" to fully understand how an organization stacks up, in multiple dimensions of speed, cost, staffing, and reliability. We will outline an approach for "just-in-time" staffing to maintain efficient teams. We will address laws of "cause and effect", so that managers can control their own destiny, using proven and reliable techniques for software portfolio management.

Ira Grossman is Founder and President of Emergeon, LLC, a professional services firm with a focus on management and metrics located in Troy, NY. Emergeon specializes in applying sophisticated scientific methods to the business of project management on behalf of their clients and utilizing these methods to deliver software applications with a high probability of success. Prior to Emergeon, Grossman was President and Managing Partner of QSM Associates, Inc. for over 13 years. QSM (Quantitative Software Management) Associates specialized in software productivity benchmarking and lifecycle modeling with an extensive list of Fortune 500 clients. He is married with two daughters, sits on the board of several community organizations, is a member of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization, and holds a degree in Computer Science from the City University of NY.