Software Process Improvement Network
(A-SPIN)
Presentation: Dispersed Project Teams: Ready or Not, Here They Come!,
Presented by Bob Futrell, Motorola
To view Bob Futrell's November SPIN presentation on "Dispersed Project Teams: Ready or Not, Here They Come!" (Acrobat 4.0 document), please click here.
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Presentation Abstract:
In the past several years, largely due to the growth of the internet and the availability of sufficient bandwidth, and driven by economic pressures, software project teams have moved from simple telecommuting to be even more dispersed, with team members participating from all time zones, work schedules, and cultures. The recent events affecting the travel industry, and the current lean economic conditions, force even more use of alternate methods to coordinate and control an even more widely dispersed project team toward deadlines and quality products. How do you know they are really working? How do I know they are working on the right things? How do you estimate work and partition it for remote team members? How do you mentor and train remotely? How do you develop a shared development process? How do you handle time delays and deliverable transfers across borders? This talk will explore the characteristics of dispersed teams, how they differ from collocated teams, and provide some tips, techniques, and tools to improve success in managing them.
About the Speaker:
Bob Futrell is a consultant for Project Management Systems in Austin, TX, providing project management training and consulting on the topics of project management and software quality engineering to business and industry in the Austin area. He is currently working as a Sr. Project Management Consultant in one of Motorola's Austin Semiconductor Operations. He is also serving as a Project Management Master and as a Quality examiner for Performance Excellence in Motorola. Mr. Futrell has a BS in Information Systems Management with Computer Science and Math from the University of Maryland, and a Masters in Telecommunications Management from St. Edward’s University and the University of Dallas. He has achieved certifications as a Certified Quality Manager (CQM) and Certified Software Quality Engineer (CSQE) from the American Society of Quality Control (ASQC), and as a Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute (PMI). He has been a principle instructor in the Software Project Management Certificate Program of the Software Quality Institute at the University of Texas at Austin since 1993. Mr. Futrell has over 25 years experience in the computer industry, with 15 years of software development and management experience with Texas Instruments, Inc. and 3 years software development experience with Applied Data Research, Inc. of Princeton, NJ. He has led or managed over 20 software development projects worth more than $1M each, with up to 30 members, spread over the U.S. and 8 foreign countries, with durations of 3 to 24 months, involving technologies from micro-code to Lisp and C, on platforms from networked PC's to midrange and mainframe systems. His projects have covered a wide assortment of accounting, business modeling, communications, and operations control applications using both procedural and object-oriented approaches. Mr. Futrell is interested in the advancement of tools and techniques for project management, and business process design toward higher software quality.