Project Retrospectives:

Improving Team, Organizational and Project Management Performance and Learning

John Suzuki

Wednesday, April 6, 2005

Networking Dinner @ 5:45; Bootcamp @ 6:15; Business @ 6:45; Program @ 7:00 PM

at Countrywide, 2900 Madera, Simi Valley, CA 93065

To build effective and positive learning teams and organizations, self-reflection and improvement must be an integral part of a company's culture. An efficient way of insuring this type of culture exists is to reflect at regular intervals on how to be more effective and then make the corresponding adjustment to its behavior to steer the team or organization in a better direction. One way to reflect is to hold project retrospectives. This presentation will introduce the audience to the process and structure of project retrospectives and will explain the differences between retrospectives and post mortems. Techniques for facilitating retrospectives will also be presented that will allow teams and organizations to discover what they are doing well and what they are not doing as well so that they can determine how to improve in the future. The audience will also hear the speaker's experiences leading project retrospectives for various kinds of projects and will have the opportunity to participate in an abbreviated retrospective simulation.

John Suzuki is the founder and principal consultant of JKS & Associates. With over 20 years of professional experience, he currently provides consulting and facilitation in a wide range of software disciplines including software project retrospectives. He also helps software organizations staff new teams and departments, facilitates team learning, growth and improved productivity through experiential-based team building simulations, provides Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessments for software organizations, and provides mentoring and coaching of development and project management personnel.

John is a member of the International Council On Systems Engineering (ICOSE), ACM, IEEE, ASQ, SOLE, IPSE, AAMI, RAPS, SRE, Gerald Weinberg's SHAPE forum, and the Southern California SPIN. He has presented at several national symposiums, participated on several conference panels, is the author of 16 papers, a contributor to 2 books and holds 3 patents. For the past 3 years, John has served as a paper submission and abstract reviewer for the Software Quality Professional Journal. He is a Certified Software Quality Engineer (CSQE) and Certified Quality Auditor (CQA) through the American Society of Quality, a certified Software Test Engineer (CSTE) through the Quality Assurance Institute and trained by the SEI to perform Software Capability Evaluations (SCE's). He is also qualified to administer the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) instrument through CPP, Inc. John completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California, San Diego and has attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins University.