Thursday October 29

Themes and Implication of the Latin American Summit

Keynote: Tom DeMarco, Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council

The thing about lessons learned is that they are usually discovered at the end, when they're not easily applied to the project at-hand. In this session, we borrow the Agile Retrospective practice: Tom DeMarco reviews what's been discussed and debated, and reveals his insight into the strategies, themes, and ah-has that have emerged from the previous sessions -- establishing a framework for approaching Friday's sessions and applying those lessons.

Tom DeMarco is a Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council, on the Editorial Board of Cutter IT Journal , and a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Agile Software Development & Project Management, Innovation & Enterprise Agility and Enterprise Risk Management & Governance practices. He has been a frequent keynoter and moderator at Cutter Summits.

Mr. DeMarco is a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild. He was the winner of the 1986 Warnier Prize for "lifetime contribution to the field of computing" and the 1999 Wayne Stevens Prize for "contribution to software methods." His best-selling books include The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management, which is the story of a veteran software manager who bets his life on a delivery date; and Slack: Getting Beyond Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency. He has teamed with Cutter Fellow Tim Lister on the celebrated and classic text Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams; the groundbreaking training video Productive Teams; and the risk management book Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects.

Mr. DeMarco's career began at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he served as part of the now-legendary ESS-1 project. In later years, he managed real-time projects for La CEGOS Informatique in France and was responsible for distributed online banking systems installed in Sweden, Holland, France, and Finland. Mr. DeMarco is a frequent consultant and lecturer throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australia, and the Far East. He can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.