OC CIO Minutes July 8, 2010

1993-2010
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
July 8, 2010 meeting

Present: David Mann, Jennifer Curlee, Sean Brown, Jim Sutter, Jeff Hecht, Hicham Semaan, Dave Phillips

RJTCompuquest are moving their offices to a new building near the airport at the end of August. We will let you know the location as soon as we know the moving date – the August 12th meeting will still be at their old office.

The following have volunteered to introduce topics through October 2010:

8/12/10 What’s new at the desktop Tina Haines
9/9/10 Microsoft road map Hicham Semaan
10/14/10 Next generation WAN Jim Sutter

We still need topics and speakers for November and December.

Topic: Agile Methodology

David Mann opened with the declaration that people were more important than whatever process or methodology you select. However it is good to have a process of choice. Examples of System Development Life Cycle process groups are Agile (MSF for Agile, Scrum) for adaptive processes, and Waterfall for more predictive processes. Agile is more suitable for new product development where the scope gradually emerges and evolves. Waterfall is more suitable for maintaining mature systems with mature business models. Agile means flexibility, not about rushing things, an initial vision and ROM, followed by a number of short sprints (iterations), full customer involvement, frequent check points and releases, multi-track (not sequential assemble line phases), focusing on delivery. It does not mean chaos – many micro-waterfalls, less formal change control after every sprint, and good documentation. Agile is about changing scope and requirements to improve ROI, changing plan and processes to reduce costs, changing solutions for design and performance, changing QA to improve quality, changing deployment to enhance SLA, and adjusting to external changes. Agile is about embracing change. Jim expressed concern about the effect of changes on deployment, especially if it changed the user interface and implied major training changes. David’s handout contains slides showing the difference between the Waterfall approach and the Agile flexible multi short sprint approach. Agile does require a mind-shift. It is more about fixing the budget, developing the scope within that budget, with strict control over adding features, and more flexibility over deadlines. It does imply a change culture, and an environment that accepts occasional failure. Jennifer said that they are downsizing with budget cuts so Agile is very attractive – allowing them to deliver product changes within a strict budget environment. David’s slides contain definitions of roles and responsibilities within the MSF for Agile methodology, and I recommend that you spend some time reading the details.

This was another great presentation and very active discussion – so much so that we ran out of time for the usual round table exchange. Dave's slides are at:
http://www.slideshare.net/occio .