IASA New York Chapter Meeting: Tuesday June 26, 6PM

  • Article

This will be a special joint meeting with The New York Java SIG.

Topic: Why Projects Fail

Speakers: Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene, authors of Applied Software Project Management and Head First PMP: A Brain-Friendly Guide to Passing the Project Management Professional Exam (Head First).l

Speaker’s bios:

Andrew Stellman, despite being raised a New Yorker, has lived in Pittsburgh twice. The first time was when he graduated from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, and then again when he and Jenny were starting their consulting business and writing their first project management book for O’Reilly. When he moved back to his hometown, his first job after college was as a programmer at EMI-Capitol Records—which actually made sense, since he went to LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts to study cello and jazz bass guitar. He met his coauthor, Jennifer Greene, when they worked together at the same financial software company, where he was managing a team of programmers. He’s since managed various teams of software engineers and requirements analysts, and led process improvement efforts. Andrew keeps himself busy eating an enormous amount of string cheese and Middle Eastern desserts, playing music (but video games even more), studying taiji and aikido, having a girlfriend named Lisa, and owning a pomeranian.

Jennifer Greene studied philosophy in college but, like everyone else in the field, couldn’t find a job doing it. Luckily, she’s a great software tester, so she started out doing it at an online service, and that’s the first time she really got a good sense of what project management was. She moved to New York in 1998 to test software at a financial software company. She managed a team of testers at a really cool startup that did artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Since then, she’s managed large teams of programmers, testers, designers, architects, and other engineers on lots of projects, and she’s done a whole bunch of procurement management (you’ll learn all about procurement in Chapter 12!). She loves traveling, watching Bollywood movies, drinking carloads of carbonated beverages, and owning a whippet.

There will be door prizes (a bunch of copies of Head First Java, Head First Design Patterns, Head First Object Oriented Analysis & Design, and Head First PMP).

For security reasons you MUST RSVP to wzack AT microsoft DOT com to attend this meeting.

Location: Microsoft, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, 6th Floor.