Sunday, May 9, 2010

May 2010 NYC SPIN Event Announcement

==============================================================
To join the NYC SPIN or to renew your membership, please use the "registration" option at the link below:


http://nycspinmembership.eventbrite.com

Once you have joined in this manner, you can manage your membership and your event registrations by going to http://eventbrite.com/ and logging in and updating your information, should it change.
==============================================================

May 2010 NYC SPIN Meeting Announcement
********************************************************************** 
Date: May 11, 2010
Time: 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Topic:
An Evening of Shorts
Presenter(s): Bill Greenbaum, Jonathan Silverman, Daniel Minus, Melissa Haniff, Dr. David Klappholz
Moderator: Olly Gotel
Location: Microsoft
*********************************************************************
Light refreshments. Door Prizes.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS

Platinum Sponsor:

 



Rally Software provides the training, tooling and on-line resources to enable organizations to incrementally adopt Agile software development practices -- ultimately resulting in improved productivity, time to market and ROI.

NYC SPIN members get 20% off Rally’s Public Training. If you are interested, contact Mike Sanchez at Mike.Sanchez@rallydev.com or 720-221-0236 and mention discount code: NYCSPIN20.

Silver Sponsor:

BigVisible - Agile enablement and training solutions.

Other sponsors:

Microsoft (our host again beginning in January)

Bank of America (our alternate host)

KuperPresents.com (hosting and managing our website)

Pearson Education/InformIT (providing many of the books we raffle off at NYC SPIN events)


Please visit the Sponsor section of http://nycspin.org/ for information about all of our sponsors.

Registration ends May 10th at (or when all seats are filled)

Click here to RSVP for the May Meeting


==============================================================
 **PLEASE ONLY REGISTER ONCE**
To manage your registration and/or
membership, follow the instructions
at the top this message.
==============================================================
 

Abstract

The final session of our 2009-2010 season is dedicated to an evening of short presentations on interesting/emerging/controversial topics of our SPIN members’ choosing. We have a line up of 5 speakers for the evening. Each speaker will have 10-15 minutes to use for their teaser presentation on their topic of choice and initial Q&A from the audience. Speakers will be free to use this 15 minutes as they see fit, but the timing will be VERY strict. The final 15 minutes of the session will be dedicated to an open panel session to seek any synergies in and amongst the topics. For instance, do Scrum practices hold the potential to enhance the customer/vendor relationship and even draw more women into the field? All discussions this evening are intended to be short (and in the spirit of the recent Oscars, both animated and live action contributions are welcome)! The evening will be moderated by Dr. Olly Gotel.

1. Bill Greenbaum – Capacity Planning & Performance: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Championing a cost-effective measurement system for capacity and performance is a critical role capacity planners can play in any Web-dependent enterprise. Surprisingly often, such enterprises don’t measure things they need to be measuring, to manage system capacity and performance. This presentation will demonstrate the interlocking relationship of measurement methods, capacity planning, and performance management for Web-based services. It will use some real-world examples to demonstrate best (and worst) practices.

2. Jonathan Silverman – Consultative Selling: The Partner vs Vendor Dynamic

Customers are continually trying to develop strategic partnerships with their vendors. Vendors sometimes have a tough time understanding the needs of the customer and the perception the customer has as it relates to their relationship. More and more, customers are looking for strategic relationships from both a Business and Technology perspective. This is even more prevalent given our current economic conditions. This presentation will focus on aligning with the customer and partnering to add value, provide operational efficiencies and help customers save time and money.

3. Daniel Minus – What Can Scrum Do For Me?

Even though your organization isn't ready to jump into Agile methodologies with both feet, there are still a number of lessons you can take from Scrum. Decades of scientific research went into developing Scrum, and its core principles hold lessons for all software development projects. Instead of explaining Scrum, this presentation pulls those key lessons and explains with examples how they can be applied to your projects.

4. Melissa Haniff – Learning Scrum: The Agile SIG’s Grandma’s Pantry Scrum Experience

Our team is new to the Scrum methodology and the first project in which we attempted to implemented this methodology was the ‘Grandma’s Pantry’ Project. On this project, we had one ScrumMaster and three Scrum Product Owners. As Scrum Product Owners, we communicated via telephone conference to discuss the Product Backlog items, which were a wide-ranging description of all the required features, wish-list items, etc., and prioritize these items by value. Even though we didn’t have face-to-face meetings, we able to work effectively by applying the Scrum methodology of team collaboration in which there was a commitment to brainstorm. We figured out how to make this project happen despite the different skill sets each person brought to the project.

5. Dr. David Klappholz - Recruiting Young Women into, and Retaining Them in Computing Majors: A High School and College Level Initiative (ACM-W Project) Based Upon a 35-Year Psychological Study

Gender equity in computing has long been a national goal advanced by those concerned with fairness and by those who know that the female point of view improves the design and development of software systems. Unfortunately, though, the percentage of young women entering computing-related majors keeps falling, and the female dropout rate is higher than the very high male dropout rate.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a large increase in the need for B.S. and M.S. computing graduates in the next decade. The largest untapped pool of potential computing majors and, eventually, computing professionals, is science- and math-talented high school students, but only about 10% of entering undergraduate majors in computing majors are female. Despite the many initiatives aimed at attracting young women, the number of female computing majors keeps dropping. In this talk we will discuss results of an extensive psychological research study that followed thousands of science- and math-talented students from middle school to middle age and that explains why many previous initiatives have failed. We will also discuss a new high school and university level initiative that is supported by these psychological studies, and that has recently been designated an ACM-W project. We will invite interested attendees to personally participate in, and encourage their high schools, universities, and/or employers to participate in this initiative.

Dr. Olly Gotel, NYC SPIN Steering Committee Program Chair, will be moderating this event.

Click here to RSVP for the May Meeting

Biographies


Bill Greenbaum, CSM, is a Systems Engineer for Capacity and Performance at First Data, a large electronic payments processor and payments services provider, serving merchants and cardholder in 36 countries. Bill’s IT experience over the past 13 years includes stints as a Scrummaster, Six Sigma trainee, front-end Web developer, and QA professional.

Jonathan Silverman has 20 years' experience in Consulting with the last 8 focused on a Service Sales Role. He has worked for companies like Ernst and Young, Cap Gemini, NerveWire, Wipro and AXS-One/Computron. He is currently an Enterprise Services Executive with Microsoft. Jonathan's focus is on building Trust, Loyalty and Confidence with his customers and looks to build long term relationships based on customer value. He has been focused on Media and Entertainment accounts over the last few years and has previously been focused on Financial Services for most of his career.

Daniel M. Minus, PMP, CSM has 14 years experience as a business analyst and project manager in the financial services space. Most recently, he was the VP of Products and Professional Services at the Relegence Corporation, a real-time search company. Before that he worked as a consultant doing custom software consulting. He has been practicing Scrum for the last 2 years and recently obtained his Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) taught by Jeff Sutherland (co-founder of Scrum).  He also is a holder of the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute.

Melissa Haniff has 11 years experience as both a Programmer and Business Analyst in the Financial Services industry. Professionally, she had been working with the Waterfall Methodology and is trying to convince her team to move to the Scrum Methodology.

Dr. David Klappholz is an associate professor of computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology, where his specialty is software engineering. Dr. Klappholz spent a Fall 2002 sabbatical with Barry Boehm at USC and has worked with Prof. Boehm every summer since then. In addition to his interest in empirical software engineering research, Prof. Klappholz works, under NSF funding, with an educational psychologist on issues relating to engineering education pedagogy. He is also a member of a Stevens-based, DoD-supported, team that is crafting a reference standard M.S. curriculum in software engineering, a curriculum with a heavy systems engineering slant. In a previous incarnation Prof. Klappholz did research, supported by NSF, IBM Research, DoE, and others, on parallel machine architecture, automatic code parallelization, compiler optimizations, and, in his professional infancy, on natural language understanding and translation.

Click here to RSVP for the May Meeting

Directions


 Microsoft
1290 Avenue of the Americas
(between 51st and 52nd Streets)




By Train/Subway


Not all trains run at all times and subway schedules are subject to change. For current schedules, weekly service advisories and maps, contact the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) at (718) 330-1234 or visit the subway section of the MTA Web Site.

The following are the nearest subway stops:

B,D,F,V to 47th-50th St./Rockefeller Center
N,R,W to 49th St. (at 7th Avenue)
1,A,C,E to 50th St. (at 8th Ave)
E,V to 7th Ave or 5th Ave

Click here to RSVP for the May Meeting


==============================================================
**PLEASE ONLY REGISTER ONCE**
To manage your registration and/or
membership, follow the instructions
at the top this message.
==============================================================


Monday, May 3, 2010

May 2010 NYC SPIN Event Announcement

==============================================================
To join the NYC SPIN or to renew your membership, please use the "registration" option at the link below:


http://nycspinmembership.eventbrite.com

Once you have joined in this manner, you can manage your membership and your event registrations by going to http://eventbrite.com/ and logging in and updating your information, should it change.
==============================================================

May 2010 NYC SPIN Meeting Announcement
********************************************************************** 
Date: May 11, 2010
Time: 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Topic:
An Evening of Shorts
Presenter(s): Bill Greenbaum, Jonathan Silverman, Daniel Minus, Melissa Haniff, Dr. David Klappholz
Moderator: Olly Gotel
Location: Microsoft
*********************************************************************
Light refreshments. Door Prizes.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS

Platinum Sponsor:

 



Rally Software provides the training, tooling and on-line resources to enable organizations to incrementally adopt Agile software development practices -- ultimately resulting in improved productivity, time to market and ROI.

NYC SPIN members get 20% off Rally’s Public Training. If you are interested, contact Mike Sanchez at Mike.Sanchez@rallydev.com or 720-221-0236 and mention discount code: NYCSPIN20.

Silver Sponsor:

BigVisible - Agile enablement and training solutions.

Other sponsors:

Microsoft (our host again beginning in January)

Bank of America (our alternate host)

KuperPresents.com (hosting and managing our website)

Pearson Education/InformIT (providing many of the books we raffle off at NYC SPIN events)


Please visit the Sponsor section of http://nycspin.org/ for information about all of our sponsors.

Registration ends May 10th at (or when all seats are filled)

Click here to RSVP for the May Meeting


==============================================================
 **PLEASE ONLY REGISTER ONCE**
To manage your registration and/or
membership, follow the instructions
at the top this message.
==============================================================
 

Abstract

The final session of our 2009-2010 season is dedicated to an evening of short presentations on interesting/emerging/controversial topics of our SPIN members’ choosing. We have a line up of 5 speakers for the evening. Each speaker will have 10-15 minutes to use for their teaser presentation on their topic of choice and initial Q&A from the audience. Speakers will be free to use this 15 minutes as they see fit, but the timing will be VERY strict. The final 15 minutes of the session will be dedicated to an open panel session to seek any synergies in and amongst the topics. For instance, do Scrum practices hold the potential to enhance the customer/vendor relationship and even draw more women into the field? All discussions this evening are intended to be short (and in the spirit of the recent Oscars, both animated and live action contributions are welcome)! The evening will be moderated by Dr. Olly Gotel.

1. Bill Greenbaum – Capacity Planning & Performance: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Championing a cost-effective measurement system for capacity and performance is a critical role capacity planners can play in any Web-dependent enterprise. Surprisingly often, such enterprises don’t measure things they need to be measuring, to manage system capacity and performance. This presentation will demonstrate the interlocking relationship of measurement methods, capacity planning, and performance management for Web-based services. It will use some real-world examples to demonstrate best (and worst) practices.

2. Jonathan Silverman – Consultative Selling: The Partner vs Vendor Dynamic

Customers are continually trying to develop strategic partnerships with their vendors. Vendors sometimes have a tough time understanding the needs of the customer and the perception the customer has as it relates to their relationship. More and more, customers are looking for strategic relationships from both a Business and Technology perspective. This is even more prevalent given our current economic conditions. This presentation will focus on aligning with the customer and partnering to add value, provide operational efficiencies and help customers save time and money.

3. Daniel Minus – What Can Scrum Do For Me?

Even though your organization isn't ready to jump into Agile methodologies with both feet, there are still a number of lessons you can take from Scrum. Decades of scientific research went into developing Scrum, and its core principles hold lessons for all software development projects. Instead of explaining Scrum, this presentation pulls those key lessons and explains with examples how they can be applied to your projects.

4. Melissa Haniff – Learning Scrum: The Agile SIG’s Grandma’s Pantry Scrum Experience

Our team is new to the Scrum methodology and the first project in which we attempted to implemented this methodology was the ‘Grandma’s Pantry’ Project. On this project, we had one ScrumMaster and three Scrum Product Owners. As Scrum Product Owners, we communicated via telephone conference to discuss the Product Backlog items, which were a wide-ranging description of all the required features, wish-list items, etc., and prioritize these items by value. Even though we didn’t have face-to-face meetings, we able to work effectively by applying the Scrum methodology of team collaboration in which there was a commitment to brainstorm. We figured out how to make this project happen despite the different skill sets each person brought to the project.

5. Dr. David Klappholz - Recruiting Young Women into, and Retaining Them in Computing Majors: A High School and College Level Initiative (ACM-W Project) Based Upon a 35-Year Psychological Study

Gender equity in computing has long been a national goal advanced by those concerned with fairness and by those who know that the female point of view improves the design and development of software systems. Unfortunately, though, the percentage of young women entering computing-related majors keeps falling, and the female dropout rate is higher than the very high male dropout rate.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a large increase in the need for B.S. and M.S. computing graduates in the next decade. The largest untapped pool of potential computing majors and, eventually, computing professionals, is science- and math-talented high school students, but only about 10% of entering undergraduate majors in computing majors are female. Despite the many initiatives aimed at attracting young women, the number of female computing majors keeps dropping. In this talk we will discuss results of an extensive psychological research study that followed thousands of science- and math-talented students from middle school to middle age and that explains why many previous initiatives have failed. We will also discuss a new high school and university level initiative that is supported by these psychological studies, and that has recently been designated an ACM-W project. We will invite interested attendees to personally participate in, and encourage their high schools, universities, and/or employers to participate in this initiative.

Dr. Olly Gotel, NYC SPIN Steering Committee Program Chair, will be moderating this event.

Click here to RSVP for the May Meeting

Biographies


Bill Greenbaum, CSM, is a Systems Engineer for Capacity and Performance at First Data, a large electronic payments processor and payments services provider, serving merchants and cardholder in 36 countries. Bill’s IT experience over the past 13 years includes stints as a Scrummaster, Six Sigma trainee, front-end Web developer, and QA professional.

Jonathan Silverman has 20 years' experience in Consulting with the last 8 focused on a Service Sales Role. He has worked for companies like Ernst and Young, Cap Gemini, NerveWire, Wipro and AXS-One/Computron. He is currently an Enterprise Services Executive with Microsoft. Jonathan's focus is on building Trust, Loyalty and Confidence with his customers and looks to build long term relationships based on customer value. He has been focused on Media and Entertainment accounts over the last few years and has previously been focused on Financial Services for most of his career.

Daniel M. Minus, PMP, CSM has 14 years experience as a business analyst and project manager in the financial services space. Most recently, he was the VP of Products and Professional Services at the Relegence Corporation, a real-time search company. Before that he worked as a consultant doing custom software consulting. He has been practicing Scrum for the last 2 years and recently obtained his Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) taught by Jeff Sutherland (co-founder of Scrum).  He also is a holder of the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute.

Melissa Haniff has 11 years experience as both a Programmer and Business Analyst in the Financial Services industry. Professionally, she had been working with the Waterfall Methodology and is trying to convince her team to move to the Scrum Methodology.

Dr. David Klappholz is an associate professor of computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology, where his specialty is software engineering. Dr. Klappholz spent a Fall 2002 sabbatical with Barry Boehm at USC and has worked with Prof. Boehm every summer since then. In addition to his interest in empirical software engineering research, Prof. Klappholz works, under NSF funding, with an educational psychologist on issues relating to engineering education pedagogy. He is also a member of a Stevens-based, DoD-supported, team that is crafting a reference standard M.S. curriculum in software engineering, a curriculum with a heavy systems engineering slant. In a previous incarnation Prof. Klappholz did research, supported by NSF, IBM Research, DoE, and others, on parallel machine architecture, automatic code parallelization, compiler optimizations, and, in his professional infancy, on natural language understanding and translation.

Click here to RSVP for the May Meeting

Directions


 Microsoft
1290 Avenue of the Americas
(between 51st and 52nd Streets)




By Train/Subway


Not all trains run at all times and subway schedules are subject to change. For current schedules, weekly service advisories and maps, contact the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) at (718) 330-1234 or visit the subway section of the MTA Web Site.

The following are the nearest subway stops:

B,D,F,V to 47th-50th St./Rockefeller Center
N,R,W to 49th St. (at 7th Avenue)
1,A,C,E to 50th St. (at 8th Ave)
E,V to 7th Ave or 5th Ave

Click here to RSVP for the May Meeting


==============================================================
**PLEASE ONLY REGISTER ONCE**
To manage your registration and/or
membership, follow the instructions
at the top this message.
==============================================================