Austin SPIN Meet - A Risk Workshop - April 12, 2007

Monthly Austin SPIN Meeting
April 12, 6:30 Networking, 7:00PM Meeting, 8:30PM Q&A
Applied Research Laboratories, UT Austin, 10000 Burnet Rd.

A Workshop:
Software Acquisition Risk: Be very worried, but be prepared!
Dr. Joyce Statz
Workshop Objectives:
As a result of participating in this workshop, attendees will be able to:
- Identify key risk factors to outsourcing or acquisition of software and services
- Maintain a catalog of commonly occurring risks in acquisition
- Leverage knowledge about risks to minimize problems that occur with acquisition

Workshop Description:
Over the last several years, the numbers and types of outsourcing arrangements made by organizations has accelerated dramatically. Along with that growth, we have seen spectacular instances of increased productivity and reduced cost. However, we have also seen phenomenal failures, leading to retrenchment and "insourcing" of the work back to the acquiring organization. In some cases, the supplier has gone out of business; in other cases, it was the acquirer who left the marketplace.

Lessons learned from these experiences are being captured in various ways - one of which is a catalog of acquisition risk factors. In this session, we will briefly discuss a proactive risk management process, then focus our interactive group efforts on examining a current catalog of about 90 risk factors. Based on the group discussions, we are likely to evolve that catalog to reflect the experience of participants. In a similar way, organizations which use the risk factor tables continuously improve their chances of success by maintaining a current list of reminders to them of problems they need to avoid. Attendees will each be provided a copy of the presentation, and an electronic version of the updated risk factor list.

Presenter:
Dr. Joyce Statz focuses her consulting practice on enabling software organizations to maximize their productivity and competitiveness. With more than 30 years of experience as an IT professional, her consulting activities of the last 15 years have met needs of people ranging from CIO to individual developer. Examples include
- developing measures for the CIO of General Motors, to enable their Third Generation Outsourcing of IT
- providing guidance on best practices for process improvement for Gartner Research
- analyzing PMO performance for the City of Los Angeles CIO
- mentoring the work of process groups at Ericsson, Texas Instruments, Sony, General Motors, Intel, and many others
- building and teaching a curriculum of 30 courses on project management, process improvement, and software development practices, used for more than 2500 days of client-site training
- developing a project management certificate program for the Software Quality Institute at the University of Texas
- leading the Process Improvement Working Group for Practical Software and Systems Measurement (PSM), the foremost software industry measurement organization

She recently served as a Vice President in the Worldwide Services organization at Borland, integrating process offerings into Borland's software businesses. That work followed on from the acquisition of TeraQuest, the software process improvement company that Joyce co-led for 12 years. In addition, Joyce managed various levels of software development over a period of 15 years at Texas Instruments, as well as being an early proponent of software process improvement.

Official Website: http://www.austin-spin.org