October is normally a heads-down month. In addition to being in the home stretch of meeting our yearly objectives, we must dedicate cycles to shaping, communicating and justifying our plans for next year.
October is also a busy month for information sharing. The thoughts and ideas that have percolated through the year reach their maturity about this time, and we want to share them before everybody goes on their winter holidays. ThoughtWorks has no shortage of events coming up, and I am privileged to be a part of many of them.
If you’re in Chicago on Tuesday October 20, ThoughtWorks is hosting a panel discussion on the Budgeting and Financial Implications of Agile. On the panel are experienced IT leaders who head strategy, portfolio management and application development for their respective businesses. They've come to terms with balancing short-term operational flexibility with long-range budget forecasting. Stop by the Aon Center at noon if you can, but please register before you do.
Our first webinar in the Agile PMO series, Real Time Metrics, was very well received. We’re pleased to present Real Time Governance, a follow-on webinar that extends the concepts to their next stage of evolution. I’ve had the opportunity to present the Governance material with my ThoughtWorks colleagues Jane Robarts and David Leigh-Fellows in Calgary, Toronto (which was recorded and is available on InfoQ) and San Francisco. We’re broadcasting this next as a webinar with a full Q&A session on Thursday, October 22nd. The response has again been very enthusiastic, but with virtual seating at a webinar there are unlimited spaces, so please feel free to register and attend.
Members of the Project Portfolio Management Professionals association attended our Real Time Governance presentation in San Francisco last month and invited us to present it to their membership. I’ll be presenting to the PPMP via webinar on Friday, 23 October. If you are an IT leader with project portfolio management responsibility today, I strongly encourage you to look into this association. Take a look at their website or reach out directly to them for an invitation.
If you’re in Dallas on the 27th, I’m hosting an executive roundtable on Financing and Budgeting Agile projects. ThoughtWorks hosted a similar event in Chicago back in August. The people who attended that event have self-organized a micro-community. We’ve had a follow-on event and lots of peer-to-peer conversations as we mutually educate and collaborate on the unique funding and forecasting challenges and opportunities presented by Agile. Reach out to me directly if you're interested in attending the Dallas roundtable.
Finally, ThoughtWorks is sponsoring Agile East at the end of October in Philadelphia on the 29th and New York on the 30th. We have a powerhouse lineup of experienced, thoughtful practitioners, including Martin Fowler, Graham Brooks, Premanand Chandrasekharan, Carl Ververs, Joe Zenevitch, Shyam Mohan, Greg Reiser, Andy Slocum, Tiffany Lentz, Manu Tandon and Alla Zollers. This is an outstanding group of people and I’m humbled to be a presenter among them. I’ll be giving the noon keynote on Budgeting and Financial implications of Agile. Specifically, I'll be looking at how Lean and Agile allow us to maximize capex but require us to be extraordinarily diligent to prevent the perfect storm that can create an IT liquidity - and potentially IT solvency - crisis. I can’t stress enough what a stacked lineup of people this is. Make plans to be in Philadelphia or New York at the end of the month, just be sure to register.
