Student Blogs
Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read along as our students chronicle their journey through the MS in Software Management program.
Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Software Management Blog
Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read along as our students chronicle their journey through the MS in Software Management program.
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Rene is a first-year grad student, a manager of operations and program manager in Cisco's software development organization, the mother of two daughters and a performing arts fan. |
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Chandra is a second-year grad student, a Director, Product Strategy at Oracle, a dedicated father and husband, and he plays a mean game of Wii Tennis. Check back often to read his new insights! |
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Dan is an IT Systems Architect at Boeing and a first-year grad student in the MS Software Management program. He loves reading , biking, and hanging out with friends over a cup of coffee. Most importantly though, he loves education! And thinks the ability to learn is one of the greatest things about people. His favorite quote is “A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.”
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Friday, May 1, 2009
Project and Process Management - Wrapping it Up!
For our final assignment in the Project and Process Management class, our team was called on to consider our response to a scenario in which the fictional company described in the second assignment had started down the project execution path and had encountered some difficulties. We assessed the project status, revised the resource, cost and schedule estimates, and recommended actions to improve the project’s chances of success.
Key elements of this assignment including recognizing the project issues and their impact, determining their cause, considering the lessons learned, and formulating recommendations. Among the lessons we learned were that hiring and getting a new project team up and running can take longer than expected.
Much of our learning and in-depth analysis on this assignment came near the end of the week in which it was due. We had to get to the point of fully characterizing the whole set of issues in order to craft a response that tied together. Building on the collaborative strengths we developed on the second assignment, team members could comfortably ask each other for help and benefit from the various perspectives that each one of us offered. The report went through multiple stages of refinement before we were satisfied with it. This project incorporated significant contributions from each team member and reinforced both our learning to work as a team and our application of the course’s core principles in a business setting.
posted by Rene Newton @ 12:19 PM
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Project and Process Management - Midway through
For the next assignment in our Project and Process Management class, our team delivered a presentation recommending a specific software methodology to the Vice President of Engineering of a fictional company. Included in the presentation were the evaluation method for selecting the methodology, refinements to the process, estimates of schedule, budget and resource, assessment of risks, and recommended action.
Our team worked on the underlying content for this presentation over several weeks. We allocated the work among ourselves in order to work in parallel and provide opportunity for in-depth research. We explored alternative approaches and collaborated through frequent meetings and shared documents. In this period, our coach offered valuable insights about effectively positioning our content for senior management. In the third week of this assignment, we organized our conclusions into slides. Finally, we presented our findings to the senior management of this fictional company.
During this period, our team members learned from each other. Our team meetings gradually became more effective, and we leveraged each others’ strengths to organize a high quality presentation. The learning that took place on this task came from our growing as a team, from applying the academic principles in a business setting, and from framing our findings for a senior management audience.
posted by Rene Newton @ 3:13 PM
Friday, February 20, 2009
Project and Process Management Class
The third course in the Software Management program is the Project and Process Management class. This course addresses software development processes in the context of Agile and traditional methods.
In the first three weeks, each team in the class researched and reported on a different process within the software development lifecycle. The teams then shared their conclusions with the other teams and responded to questions.
Learning was enabled in many ways. As individuals, students researched their designated areas, provided input to their team’s report, and shared in the authorship of the final deliverable. Within a given team, the process of collaborative research and writing created the environment in which team members learned from each other about the various aspects of the software process about which the team was writing. The sharing of conclusions across the teams enabled all of the teams to understand the end-to-end software development lifecycle. The feedback cycle of questions and answers among the teams allowed all of us to see how others viewed our work.
Our next assignment called on teams to apply the newly gained software development process knowledge in the context of the needs of a specific company’s development opportunity. I’ll discuss that in my next entry.
posted by Rene Newton @ 10:42 AM
Friday, January 23, 2009
Finishing Up Metrics for Software Managers
In this entry, I’ll explain my reflections on the Metrics for Software Managers class.
The Masters in Software Management Program is built on the principles of problem-based learning. In the Metrics for Software Managers class, teams apply these principles by using academic concepts to address business problems. Through this experience, we learn to work as a team.
In the process of developing multiple team deliverables, team members begin to recognize that we bring in different perspectives and need to work out approaches for creating a unified deliverable. We are called on to utilize listening and communication skills in order to ensure that each team member’s ideas are considered.
When we give feedback on the proposals of other teams, and when we receive their feedback, we often learn that we have characterized the problems and solutions in very different ways. Similarly, our formal presentations of our proposals may differ significantly and represent a diverse set of approaches. The lessons learned from the experiences of working both as a team and across teams enable us to reframe our approach to problem solving.
Finally, the principles of change management that form the foundation of the final major assignment are directly applicable to many aspects of our work now and in the future. In the dynamic workplaces of today, change is the norm. A thoughtful understanding of change management principles will enable us to help our organization respond to the evolving context.
posted by Rene Newton @ 11:47 AM
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
The Team's Learning Processes
In this entry, I’ll explain our team’s learning processes in the Metrics for Software Managers class.
The primary course deliverables were developed in the context of our assigned teams. Early in the course our team learned to build on each others’ strengths, while also establishing a structure that enabled a rotation of key roles among team members for the various tasks. To complete our team deliverables required that we learn about team problem solving. This involved developing a shared understanding of both the stated problems and the associated principles of metrics, software management and change management.
Each of us had an opportunity to formally present part of our team’s proposal to our class. In some cases these presentations encompassed independent research that provided additional insight into core principles. Attending and discussing the presentations gave all of us the opportunity to learn from other teams’ approaches to the assignment and to hear other teams’ reactions to our proposals.
One aspect of the feedback loop entailed each student providing written feedback on the proposals of two other teams for each major assignment. This was a new experience for some of us and called on us to characterize these proposals in ways that would help the other teams learn. We also learned from the feedback given to us.
In my final entry, I’ll share my own learning reflections on this class.
posted by Rene Newton @ 11:05 AM
Friday, December 19, 2008
Metrics for Software Managers - First Impressions
In this entry I will explain my initial impressions of the Metrics for Software Managers class. This course addresses software metrics initiatives, fundamentals of certain software management approaches and high-performing team practices.
We discovered in our first week that the students in the class brought a variety of experience levels to this content. Some were new either to the principles underlying software metrics initiatives or to the software management approaches being discussed, while others had direct experience in these areas. We quickly started to broaden our knowledge base through assigned readings and outside research.
The main assignments in this course entailed developing software metrics initiatives for two different fictional companies. The second of these assignments included an in-depth exploration of multiple change management frameworks and identification of a specific framework to provide the foundation for the team’s metrics proposal. Additional assignments involved identifying measurable learning objectives and subsequently reflecting on what was learned.
In my next entry, I’ll explain more about our team’s learning processes.
posted by Rene Newton @ 1:33 PM
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Wrapping up Elements of Software Management
In this entry I will discuss the last two weeks of the 7-week Elements of Software Management class. Our final assignment called on us to make a presentation about the software business prognosis of our assigned companies. This would draw on different skill sets. We needed to work with our teams to agree on a common approach to assessing the prognosis for each of our companies. We then needed to synthesize the key points from all of our earlier assignments, especially drawing on the market analysis, business strategy and financial analysis, and to determine where we believed our companies would be at a time in the future.
The task required that we organize our findings in a coherent presentation format suitable for communication in a short amount of time. We presented our findings to faculty and other students, fielding questions that called on more in-depth knowledge. These presentations gave us the opportunity to get feedback from faculty on our content and presentation styles as well as to observe our classmates and to learn from their characterizations of their own companies.
Reflecting on the entirety of the course, I have discovered how to work within the framework of the program, including team collaboration and learning by doing, while also considering my longer-term learning plan and how the current assignments relate to that plan. I better understand the larger software industry that is the subject of this course and of others that are coming later in the program. I have also
become an active member of the Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley community, and look forward to the learning opportunities to come.
I will return soon to share experiences related to the second class in the program.
posted by Rene Newton @ 11:54 AM
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