Transforming Chaos to Clarity: Making Your Software Development Hum (& VOTING)

SF Bay ACM Members: We NEED you to attend!

Chapter Elections will be briefly held at the beginning of this meeting.

Ron Lichty, Lichty Consulting Inc.

Agenda 

6:30 Doors Open, Food & Networking 
7:00 Chapter Elections & Announcements
7:10 Presentation 
*** Please arrive by 7 PM due to Security ***

Event Details

Prepare to engage in an interactive session where you will learn to:

• Take the temperature of your product development organization and efforts

• Assess your product organization’s chaos

• Diagnose its sources

• Look for the gaps that are holding you back

• Change the elements that are sapping your organization’s potential and limiting productivity

• Reflect on your organization’s strengths and opportunities with other leaders

• Identify an easy route to making your software development efforts hum

• Have fun!

Does your software development feel chaotic?  

If you have ever been dissatisfied with your software development flow – if you would like to figure out how to avoid chaos – this is a presentation for you!  

Ron Lichty has found himself repeatedly called in as the cavalry to help development groups stuck in confusion. A recognized engineering leader, Ron says, “I’ve found that I excel at coming in cold, identifying the causes of chaos, untangling organizational knots, creating roadmaps everyone can follow, building communications with other parts of the organization, and getting teams productive and focused on delivery, quality and customers.” He adds, “With a few pointers, any team member can more deeply diagnose their team.”  

Ron is author of  Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, which has been compared by reviewers to Fred Brooks’  The Mythical Man Month. After managing software and product organizations for 25 years, Ron has catered his leadership roles to the needs of his clients, including interim VP Engineering and acting CTO roles.   

Six years ago, Ron began training teams in agile and a year ago training managers in the nuances of managing software people and teams, whether in waterfall environments, or iterative or agile ones.  

 If you would like to become an effective agile team member then you’ll want to attend this presentation. We’ll look at agile trends, software team pain points, product team solutions, and how every team member contributes to making teams excel.  

Drawing from his experience with dozens of product development organizations, Ron will walk through the steps needed to assess your organization’s workings, define success, and pull together the elements that will bring order and increased productivity for your business. 

Speaker Bio

Ron Lichty has been managing and more recently consulting with software development and product organizations for over 25 years, engaged in untangling the knots in software development and transforming chaos to clarity. Originally a programmer, where he earned several patents and wrote two popular programming books, he was hired into his first management role by Apple Computer, which nurtured his managerial growth in both development and product management. 

Principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting, Inc. ( www.RonLichty.com), he has trained teams in scrum, transitioned teams from waterfall and iterative methodologies to agile, and coached teams using agile, iterative and waterfall approaches alike to make their software development “hum”. In his continued search for effective best practices, Ron co-authors the annual Study of Product Team Performance. 

Ron’s most recent book is Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams – http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net – co-authored with Pixar, Broderbund and Gracenote CTO Mickey W. Mantle. Published by Addison Wesley, it has been compared by reviewers to software development classics, The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware. 

Ron has repeatedly been brought in as an acting CTO and interim vice president of engineering to solve development team challenges ( www.ronlichty.com). Earlier, at Charles Schwab, he led software development of the first investor tools on Schwab.com, playing a role in transforming the bricks-and-mortar discount brokerage into a premier name in online financial services. He was promoted to Schwab vice president while leading his CIO’s three-year technology initiative to migrate software development from any-language-goes to a single, cost-effective platform company-wide and nurturing Schwab’s nascent efforts to leverage early Agile approaches. He has led products and development across a wide range of domains for companies of all sizes, from startups to the Fortune 500, including Fujitsu, Razorfish, Stanford, and Apple. 

Ron’s developer conference and professional group talks and webinars include managing software people and teams; transforming software development from chaos to clarity; facing down the challenges of implementing agile and scrum; the critical roles managers play in agile teams; what it takes for product managers to bond with developers; and the importance of collaboration, teamwork and community in software development.

Event page provided by ACM

https://www.sfbayacm.org/event/transforming-chaos-clarity-making-your-software-development-hum