A quick note to let you know that InnerWorkings will be at SEPG North America 2009 next week — if you’re planning to attend the show, drop by our booth where we’ll be talking about all things related to software process.

SEPG will be a big draw for anyone who gets their kicks from discussing the value of a well planned and executed process methodology within software teams — the show will run the process gamut from CMMI, People CMM, TSP, PSP, Agile, Six Sigma, ITIL and ISO standards, and other performance improvement methods.

We’ll be there throwing about our own unique brand of self-paced learning for development teams new to implementing PSP/TSP. As many of you know, PSP was established to improve software quality by providing individual developers with a set of disciplined practices for software development, and is a prerequisite for developers who join a TSP team.

More specifically, InnerWorkings will be making an announcement about a major partnership in the software process field and what that means for organizations looking to implement PSP/TSP in a scalable and cost effective manner. We’ll also be announcing details of our collaboration with a prominent university in Mexico to streamline the implementation of TSP. This development effort stems from Mexico’s nationwide TSP initiative, which aims to train 57,000 PSP software developers by 2013. No mean feat!

Oh, and we’ll be giving away tons of free stuff at the booth…so don’t forget to stop by if you’re in the vicinity.

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I take it for granted that software development is one of the most knowledge-intensive professions in the world. With new tools, platforms, and technologies being released at breakneck speed, you have to wonder how most developers keep up. Well, in many cases, they simply can’t!

It’s far too easy to pay lip service to the skills and productivity of your software teams — I’d be buying barrels of oil if I had a penny for every time I heard “we only hire the best” or “our lead developers go to XYZ conference every year”.

It’s hardly a sustainable or scalable solution to keeping your software team’s performance at its peak, but many companies seem to believe/hope that sporadic ad-hoc approaches to developer productivity and software quality will be enough to carry them along.

If you’re skeptical about this approach to supporting software development, I encourage you to attend this free 60-minute webinar from InnerWorkings. Our CEO, Fran McKeagney, peppers the session with personal war stories that illustrate the challenges and contrasting approaches to building mission-critical software applications, including:

• Competitive loss of a longstanding multi-million dollar travel software contract due to poor coding skills and recurring code quality issues
• Failure of an ambitious global web platform release due to crushing performance issues, unforeseen bugs, and lack of skills visibility

Drawing on his own experiences as VP of Research & Development in past roles, Fran also tackles the following issues associated with managing complex software organizations:

• The need to create a research and learning culture at the heart of your software organization
• All your software team’s decisions, goals and objectives should be data-driven
• Building empowered teams of problem solvers
• Is it OK to ask software teams to be accountable?

We’ll also share some interesting polling data from the live audience and a spirited exchange of ideas comes through in the Q&A session. Be warned that viewing this archive does require a registration (sorry) but hopefully the presentation and discussion give more than enough value to warrant that intrusion. Enjoy!

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