Faster, Better, Cheaper - Together

Reflections on the craft and science of managing software projects

Why Project Management matters

While companies rightly spend a lot of time thinking about their business goals and technology choices, they often ignore how best to combine them effectively into a successful software delivery operation. We can all recount being in a software project that failed despite having good ideas and technology choices behind it, leaving everyone miserable in its aftermath: “Is it the team’s fault?.. But didn’t we hire the best? What could have gone wrong?” Join us in this series as we explore such questions and more...

The current schedule of talks

Here are the first three talks in this series:

  1. Nov 3, Friday: A bird’s eye view of software project management - a conversation with Ranjan Sakalley
  2. Nov 29, Wed: Software Delivery: Prioritizing and optimizing for impact - by Gaurav Lochan
  3. Dec 21, Thu: When Quality Matters: Transcending resource barriers during software delivery - by Deepti Agrawal

What is the tech community saying about software projects these days?

Below is a selective snapshot of some major recent community conversations regarding how software projects are being run:

Who should participate; who should attend

  • Software Developers: Participate to stay aware of current and future trends in how software projects are run
  • Tech leads and Engineering Managers: You should find this series extremely relevant. You are the current and future practitioners of all these skills.
  • VPs of Engineering or CEOs who are new to their role: Learn from experienced people how they run projects, and also their thoughts about what may/may not work in a context, rather than adopting practices blindly.

About the curators

Pramod Biligiri is founder and CEO at Bitken Technologies. He works as a consultant for data engineering and data infrastructure related projects.

Mayankk Banerjee is CTO and founder. He views himself as builder of all things tech.

Format

This project consists of a series of talks. The first three talks - from October to December 2023 - are lined up. View the schedule here. If you wish to speak on this forum, leave a comment.
The talks will be held offline and online. RSVP to stay updated.

Membership support

This series of talks is made possible by contributions from Rootconf members. You can support similar activities by picking up a membership here.

Contact information

Join the Rootconf Telegram group at https://t.me/rootconf or follow @rootconf on Twitter.
For inquiries, contact Rootconf at +91-7676332020.

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Rootconf is a community-funded platform for activities and discussions on the following topics: Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Infrastructure costs, including Cloud Costs - and optimization. Security - including Cloud Security. more
Pramod Biligiri

Pramod Biligiri

@pramodbiligiri

Mayankk Banerjee

@mrmbanerjee

Curated by our speakers: Further reading and viewing

Submitted Nov 4, 2023

As part of this series, we are sourcing further resources about project management from each of our speakers. You can find them below:

Recommended by Ranjan Sakalley

  1. Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald Reinertsen
    To understand why queues, slack and in general value stream mapping is important for product delivery

  2. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization (and the fieldbook)
    You just need to read the 11 laws of the 5th discipline and you may understand why I recommend:

    1. Today’s problems come from yesterday’s “solutions.”
    2. The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
    3. Behavior grows better before it grows worse.
    4. The easy way out usually leads back in.
    5. The cure can be worse than the disease.
    6. Faster is slower.
    7. Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
    8. Small changes can produce big results...but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious
    9. You can have your cake and eat it too ---but not all at once.
    10. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
    11. There is no blame.

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Hosted by

Rootconf is a community-funded platform for activities and discussions on the following topics: Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Infrastructure costs, including Cloud Costs - and optimization. Security - including Cloud Security. more