Agile Project Management Event at the Bay Campus – in association with APM

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Please see details below for an exciting event the University is hosting in association with the Association for Project Management (APM), with guest speakers from both Swansea University and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).

By holding these events, we are aiming to make APM events more accessible (both by topic and location) and to build a project management community across South Wales that is inclusive of all sectors.


Date:

Wednesday 30th November 2016

Time:

6pm - Registration, networking and refreshments

6.30pm - Presentation

8pm - Close

Venue: 

School of Management, Bay Campus, Swansea University, SA1 8EN


Presented by:

  • Rob Saddler, Head of Solutions Architecture and Development, Swansea University
  • Neil Todd, Solution Architect, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA)

The event is free for Swansea University employees. As Swansea University is an APM Corporate Member, employees can attend for free. When you register on the site choose the registration route that states I am an employee of a Corporate Member.

There will be a buffet.


Agile Project Management is an iterative process that focuses on customer value first, team interaction over tasks, and adapting to current business reality rather than following a prescriptive plan.

The main benefit of agile project management is its ability to respond to issues as they arise throughout the course of the project. Making a necessary change to a project at the right time can save resources and, ultimately, help deliver a successful project on time and within budget. Agile Project Management is how you deliver high value and technical quality within your time and budget constraints. However, the principles go beyond software development – it is also a mindset for people who need a management approach that builds consensus quickly in a fast-paced environment.

There are several methodologies that can be used to manage an agile project; two of the best known being Scrum and Lean. An agile project's defining characteristic is that it produces and delivers work in short bursts (or sprints) of anything up to a few weeks. These are repeated to refine the working deliverable until it meets the client's requirements.


Neil Todd is currently a solutions architect at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). He has worked in the IT industry since 1991 and has worked for small independent software houses and large multinational suppliers and specialises in software intensive systems.  

Neil has encountered almost as many different ideas about what Agile is as I have people claiming to be working ‘on an Agile project’. He therefore believes that Agile suffers from being profoundly misunderstood and superficially applied. In 2015 Neil authored a paper attempting to get behind the superficial interpretations and myths about Agile which won the company’s UK Professional award in the Project Management category and was runner up in the Global Awards in Tokyo.

Neil will be sharing his thoughts about Agile, in particular how to get to a clear understanding of Agile aiming to dispel the many myths that still, surround Agile.


Rob Saddler is the Head of Solutions Architecture and Development at Swansea University where he is responsible for the strategic direction and delivery of all the University’s corporate information systems. He has over 20 years of experience in the field of software engineering and has been practising Scrum since 2010. 

Rob is a Scrum Alliance certified Scrum Product Owner and a TOGAF certified Enterprise Architect and leads the continuous improvement and change management initiatives in his area.  Prior to joining the University, Rob was a Software Engineer for De La Rue International for 5 years where he contracted in Angola, Africa and before that was a Business Risk Analyst in Ernst & Young’s Business Risk Consultancy division.

Rob will be presenting on the work of the Business Software Development team at Swansea University focusing on why and how they operate the scrum methodology.  The talk will cover why project management should be approached first as a people management problem and will also describe how Rob used organisational patterns to optimise the team’s innovation ratio and embed a culture of continuous learning.