[BBLISA] May BBLISA talk: IT Project Management

[John P. Rouillard]

Hello All:

The May BBLISA talk will be done by one of the original BBLISA
members.  On Wednesday, May 14, 2014 the talk will be "IT Project
Management" by Peg Schafer.

20 years ago SAGE was defining IT job skills sets for HR
departments. Today (no surprise) IT departments are the heart beat of
the enterprise. With burgeoning budgets and even more complex
technologies management is trying to get more of a handle on their IT
processes and align them with standard management
methodologies. Sometimes with good results.

I will touch on TQM, ITIL, PMP & Agile practices and why some
practices work and some do not. Much of it depends on the culture of
the enterprise. Managing projects at large enterprises
(e.g. Microsoft), higher education (e.g. Harvard) and startups is
vastly different and requires a large bag of tricks.

A major issue of project management is who is "The Boss"? Is it the
technical lead, a non-technical manager or the project manager? In IT,
it is often the technical leader that is the real boss, regardless of
titles.

Most Project Managers come from a business background. But IT Project
Managers better be able to understand the technical aspects of IT. If
an IT Project Manager asks naive questions like "Do you really need
fail over for DNS?" They will be abused and ignored by the technical
staff. Hence, many IT professionals see Project Managers as someone to
avoid. Management hears "The IT department is not cooperating" from
the Project Management staff.

I will share my horror stories, but actually explain how Good IT
Project Management can help your IT department be more successful.

Peg is the Senior Technical Project Manager for Starfish Storage.

The meeting will be held at MIT in building E-51, Room 149
starting at 7AM.

More details: http://www.bblisa.org/

--
				-- rouilj
John Rouillard
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My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.