AlignIT 2011: Real World Strategies for Development Managers and Decision Makers

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The Situation

Every company pursues strategies to differentiate from competitors. Effective software integration and custom applications are essential in providing that competitive differentiation. As a developer, you’re always under pressure to reduce the time it takes to move from concept through design, coding, testing, to deployment, enabling your client to take advantage of an opportunity within a specific window of time.

If you’re also responsible for business aspects of your software development, you have additional challenges in ensuring that:

  • Overall productivity and quality of solutions is maintained at a high level
  • Costs are kept low throughout the application development cycle
  • Reporting on execution and communicating to stakeholders is done in a timely manner
  • Development/test results, decisions, and changes are tracked and adhere to the levels required by clients’ requirements and/or industry regulations
  • Software changes are made as part of a controlled process in order to minimize risk

Approaches to a Solution

Efficiently coordinating all of these activities requires new, collaborative approaches to planning and executing development projects, bringing together the three key ingredients to achieving success – People, Process, and Tools. There are many approaches to how this can be done and as such, we’d like to start a conversation with you on how we can help you address the challenges you face.

Register for AlignIT

Christian Beauclair (@cbeauclair), John Bristowe (@jbristowe), and I (@jrozenblit) will be hosting AlignIT in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. We’ll be exploring these challenges and sharing what’s available to help you overcome them and be a successful development leader. Whether you manage a development team, are involved in development decision making, or are just interested in seeing what’s possible, visit the AligntIT site, review the session details, and register to attend in person or via simulcast.

AlignIT also has a track for infrastructure decision makers. If your responsibilities cross over to the infrastructure world, or you know someone who you think would benefit from the same type of conversation, head over to the AlignIT home page and have a look at the infrastructure sessions.

Prepare for AlignIT

For more information on topics that will be discussed at AlignIT, check out the Canadian Solution Developers blog.  Over the next little while, we’ll be posting articles on new development experiences with Visual Studio, application lifecycle management and how it bridges the gap between team members, and real-world examples of how others are managing application development complexity in their companies.

Discuss Challenges and Share Insights

What challenges in development projects are you facing? What’s are you doing, or what’s being done, if anything, to address them? Share your thoughts in this Ignite Your Coding LinkedIn discussion.