People & Teams

Global teams are increasingly becoming a reality with advancement in networking and internet technologies. You may have part of your team on west coast, east coast, in Europe or Asia. Although global teams seem to be a great way to bring diverse talent and to improve time-to-market, many projects actually fail to deliver on promises. An exception is the MSN Messenger team. After first setting reasonable goals and roadmaps for each team(s) and selecting projects that were amenable to remote work then hired the right talent or vendor resources that could support long-term project requirements. Samir Shah shares the techniques, especially those related to communications, that they employ at each stage of the effort to help them succeed. Samir describes the data they capture and the set of metrics they use to keep them on track. Find out what it takes to scale your team to be a successful global team.

Lightning Talks are nine five-minute talks in a fifty-minute time period. Lightning Talks represent a much smaller investment of time than track speaking and offer the chance to try conference speaking without the heavy commitment. Lightning Talks are an opportunity to present your single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea quickly. Use this as an opportunity to give a first time talk or to present a new topic for the first time. Maybe you just want to ask a question, invite people to help you with your project, boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up a full track presentation. For more information on how to submit your Lightning Talk, visit
www.sqe.com/lightningtalks.asp

Peer review programs are like parachutes-proper deployment is essential; otherwise, they inevitably will crash. When effectively implemented, peer reviews have a significant return on investment and result in greater product reliability. Lee Sheiner shares the key features for making peer reviews a value-added practice at Georgia Tech Research Institute, including: selecting the proper type of review for each work product, identifying the right reviewers, focusing on early defect detection, using supporting tools, fostering an environment conducive to reviews, managing the review materials, and much more. Learn from Lee the ways they have crosspollinated peer review methods across the organization and how successful peer reviews encourage project groups to "gel" and become highly productive teams.

Our test teams often struggle for so long ... to do so much ... with so little, and they usually manage to just squeak by. In the next cycle when asked to do even more with even less, they are likely to fail. Working harder and smarter isn't enough-the rules of the game must change. Innovation is the currency of success. Using his experiences from several years of success (and a few months of failure) in driving innovation, Heath Newburn will show you how-through innovation-you can drastically increase your team's value and your contributions to your organization. Uncover the secrets to managing change and learn: how to systematically create innovation and foster creativity, how to generate ideas and use your whole team to identify and build on the best of those ideas, how to implement a plan for success, and how to overcome the inevitable obstacles with the six secrets "they" don't want you to know.