Course Overview
You are an experienced information technology professional. Regardless of your position, role or title, you may find yourself managing projects. You know the mechanics of project management—initiating, planning, scheduling, staffing, executing, monitoring, controlling, and closing projects. Now you want to strengthen your leadership skills—skills that enable you to work effectively with customers, bosses, peers, staff, and vendors as well as help them work effectively with one another.

This workshop will help you balance your needs and expectations as a leader, the needs and expectations of other project individuals, and the realities of your project’s context. This workshop addresses directly human relationship situations that can put your project at risk—when stresses emerge, tempers flare, and uncertainties and self-doubts arise.

Adapted from the book Powerful Project Leadership by Wayne Strider, this workshop can benefit anyone whose work involves managing relationships among project team members, sponsors, committees, functional users, customers and vendors.

For more details on the Powerful Project Leadership Skills course, please see the PPLS Course Details page.

Registration
Early bird registration of $1625.00 per person will be offered to Satir Global Network members and $1699 to non members until January 31, 2012. Starting February 1st registrations will be $1925.00 per person to Satir members and $1999.00 to non members. Fees include training materials, lunch, and refreshments. Participants will also receive a copy of the Powerful Project Leadership book. Please note there is a maximum of 28 spots available.

Register Now »

Interested in knowning more about the Satir Global Network? Visit http://satirglobal.org/about/ for more information and to join.

Do not miss this great opportunity! We look forward to seeing you at the course. Should you have any questions or concerns, please contact Lynn or Nancy.

My gut response to all the advice I was reading was interesting to me, particularly the advice on using pectin. After reading much advice on simply using pectin to make canning quicker and easier, I was convinced NOT to use it. Subconsciously the advice made me want to try the more challenging technique even more. For those who have not canned before I will elaborate on the pectin debate. Pectin is naturally occurring in fruit although some fruits contain very low amounts and this can affect how well the jam “jells”. To increase the chances of ensuring your jam “jells” every time, many recipes simply use a pectin additive which is extracted from apples. Many folks debate whether the pectin affects the flavour of the jam and whether the old fashion approach to making jams is more natural.

Despite all of the advice that pectin would make my canning experience more enjoyable, I ended up determined to try making my jam without the pectin additive. I was delighted to find my jam “jelled” just perfectly and the end result was fantastic! Mmmmm homemade jam.

Next I moved onto raspberry-blueberry, raspberry-rhubarb, and strawberry recipes. Along the way I found I stumbled into several traps and challenges that I had read about in my early preparation. The strawberry jam was the most challenging. From early on it foamed up like crazy, something I read about and heard you should use butter to prevent. Did I do that though? Nope, I wanted to see what would happen for myself. Next, I had to boil it for a very long time to achieve the “jelling”. Yep, there were lots of warnings about this too and recommendations to just use pectin with this particular fruit. Of course I skipped that “sage old advice” and stuck to my goal of using no additives.

Stubborn you might say? Perhaps, I was being stubborn but I think it is a more a matter of needing to learn things first hand. Seeing something for yourself is very different than trying to glean the insight from someone else. As children we are the same way. How many times do you tell your child not to do something and they just can’t stop themselves from doing it anyways! There is so much to be gained from the experience of trying something even if the end result is not what you were hoping for.

The same message is true in software testing. However, I often find that courses, conferences, coaching sessions, and even collegial conversations to be filled with advice on how to avoid pitfalls, traps and difficult situations. While this advice is valuable insight, at the end of the day many people are likely to employ the very approaches, techniques and tools they may have been cautioned to avoid.

A recent experience rings very true to this for me. Over 10 years of my experience in IT has been on traditional software projects with several of those being large, enterprise wide initiatives. When a good friend of mine accepted a role on a very large project, my head filled with warnings and mine fields to share. As the project got underway my friend and I shared numerous conversations, discussing insight based on my experience on similar projects. However, as the months passed my friend found herself in many of the mine fields as I had warned her of, and as can be expected, had stumbled across a fair number of new ones too.

We have talked about how the project unfolded many times and it has been interesting discussing the insights that can only be gained by experiencing something for yourself. Sometimes in the moment of success or failure you hear a distant voice reminding you that things might happen this way. I had this exact moment when my strawberry jam began foaming like crazy! My memory was triggered and I tried to recall all the tips and tricks I had read about. In the end I tried a few different ideas, a combination of sage advice and my own ideas, and the jam turned out wonderfully. Along the way I gained insight into the advice I had read about but more importantly gained first hand experience into why “this works” and “this doesn’t work”.

“If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” – Mark Twain

• Nancy Kelln, Programme Director
• Al-Noor Pardhan, Outreach & Logistics Director
• Lynn McKee, Communications Director

In June we were busy with the 2010/2011 Season Survey which provided very positive feedback for us as we head into the next season. With the first session of the upcoming season to be held in September, we are busy putting together the schedule and lining up the topics and presenters. A first glimpse of the 2011/2012 schedule is targeted for release in early August.

If you are interested in presenting for the SQDG, we are currently accepting abstracts for the upcoming 2011/2012 season and would like to hear from you. Check out the Be a Speaker page for more details on speaking for the SQDG.

I look forward to seeing many familiar faces in the upcoming September session and meeting new people passionate about software quality. Hope to see you there!

It has been a great experience working with the NEC process and I am really excited about the upcoming election. This is the second time the AST has had more nominees than spots available and we have five excellent candidates this year. There are three open spots on the board this election and the candidates include:

• Matthew Heusser
• Cem Kaner
• Michael Larsen
• Catherine Powell
• Peter Walen

This year’s candidates have been very active in sharing their interest in participating on the AST Board of Directors including providing online bios w/photos, hosting a live ‘Ask the Candidates‘ event on Twitter, and creating the ‘Great AST Board of Directors Debate‘ podcast series. AST members have a wealth of information available to help guide them in making an informed vote in the upcoming election.

AST members will be voting electronically on August 7th at 12:00 am (GMT) – August 9th at 12:00 am (GMT). The results of the election will be announced during the Annual Members Meeting to be held on August 9th from 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm (PDT), 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm (GMT), during the CAST Conference.

For more information regarding this year’s election, please refer to AST’s 2011 Nominations and Elections webpage.

I hope this year’s election has a very strong voter turnout. All the best to each of the candidates!

As noted on the AST website, “This year’s conference promises to be the most unique to date, it will be the first Context-Driven Testing conference to ever be held. This year’s program features some most outspoken context-driven testers in the world. This international gathering will span three days in August and offer attendees the opportunity to discuss, debate, question, and learn about Context-Driven Testing.” I am an advocate of the context-driven approach and am keen to see the direction some of the sessions take. I think the talk I am looking forward to the most is the tutorial Context-Driven Test Leadership by James Bach. This will be my first time seeing James present on the topic of leadership and I am looking forward to his perspective on many aspects.

As much as I am looking forward to the conference content, I am just as excited for the opportunity to reconnect with friends and meet new people passionate about software testing. The conference schedule includes a diverse group of international presenters, some of whom I have been looking forward to meeting for several years now.

I plan to tweet like crazy and hope to to crank out a couple of blog posts as I am going as an AST board member and attendee but I am not presenting. I am looking forward to focusing on attending some great sessions and participating in all of the facilitated and non-facilitated (hallway) “conferring” that makes CAST so unique.