Come meet for drinks and engage with fellow professionals in a relaxed social setting to exchange stories, career advice, and make new connections in the local industry. All positions in the IT and Technology worlds are welcome, including project managers, systems engineers, desktop support, dba's, developers, security analysts, business analysts, enterprise architects, design experts, IT/Technology managers, and all other associated fields.

Please note, this event is at Kell's new 2nd location in the Pearl District. It is a wonderful establishment with a great back room tailor-made for events like this. Come join us!!

Sponsored by Portland Job Group. www.jobgroup.org

Level up your skills, network with peers, and learn to deliver better products, services, and solutions with this unique workshop from nuCognitive.

Developing solutions to customer problems is complex balancing act. Some products fail due to a flawed business model while others are neither desirable nor useful. This workshop invites teams to shift their thinking from developing a product or service to delivering a holistic solution that balances business, usage, and technology.

The Three-Circle Model is both a descriptive and a prescriptive approach to develop holistic solutions. It is based on the three fundamental perspectives needed for a balanced and compelling solution; Business, Usage, and Technology. -The Business circle represents the economic viewpoint. A solution must be marketable, profitable, and affordable. -The Usage circle represents the conceptual viewpoint. A solution must be desirable, usable, and useful. -The Technology circle represents the implementation viewpoint. A solution must be manufacturable, functional, and consumable (by the industry and associated ecosystems).

These three circles can be arranged in a Venn diagram with overlaps for Value, Capability, and Ingredients.

The Three-Circle Model forms a cohesive and consistent taxonomy that can be used by organizations as the basis of a shared vocabulary, thereby reducing misinterpretations and wasteful communication churn. The model is also the underlying architecture for a solution life cycle. Unlike other life cycles with phases that are based on activities (e.g. exploration, planning, development), the solution life cycle’s phases are based on the state of the solution itself. This makes the life cycle activity and method agnostic, so it works with Agile, Lean, traditional, and hybrid approaches.

Learning Outcomes: -Describe the three fundamental perspectives of a solutions: Business, Usage, and Technology -Describe the three two-circle overlaps in the model: Value, Capability, and Ingredient -Understand what a balanced solution means -Evaluate a product, service, or solution using the model to locate weaknesses and knowledge gaps -Apply the Three-Circle Model to a solution life cycle -Improve communication among teams using a common vocabulary and taxonomy for solution development -Use the model to diagnose and improve issues in solution development

Who should attend: Product management, product owners, product developers, service designers, architects, product managers, engineers, business development, business strategy, marketing, planners, project managers, software developers

Level up your skills, network with peers, and learn to accelerate stakeholder value delivery with this unique workshop from nuCognitive.

The first Agile principle is "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software." However, in practice this does not seem to be true nearly as often as it should be. Teams often fail to provide early, frequent delivery of stakeholder value. Instead, they focused on spikes, class libraries, infrastructure, and other inward-focused work, without an understanding of their stakeholders and what they value. As a result, many teams start with what is most familiar, easiest, or most convenient for them rather than what stakeholders value most.

Why do teams often become focused on (or even obsessed with) feature development and maximizing development velocity? Without explicit focus on value, the association between velocity, feature development, and value-delivery is weak - perhaps even non-existent. At best, these projects are conducted sub-optimally. Frequently, they fail when stakeholders remove funding because they perceive a lack of value add.

Value-driven delivery is achieved using the answers to three simple, but not at all easy, questions: 1. Who are your stakeholders? 2. What do they value? 3. What are you doing in the next two weeks or less to provide value to them?

Teams often have many more stakeholders than they first realize. Value-driven Delivery ensures those stakeholders are made explicit, and that the list of stakeholders is kept current throughout the project.

Value-driven delivery captures and maintains stakeholder values in a quantified, verifiable way. This ensures that teams can know the real effects of each stakeholder value delivery, and prevents work based on an outdated understanding of value.

Value-driven Delivery also challenges teams to sequence deliveries so that they deliver the most valuable things first. This can have tremendous benefits, generating early business results and reducing the time required for the team to get into a positive Return on Investment for the project.

Value-driven delivery makes a natural overlay for Scrum, but does not require Scrum's use to be effective. Value-driven delivery does not ignore features and velocity, but it explicitly places value delivery above those things as the top priority.

Two other advantages to Value-driven Delivery worth mentioning: First, it is not limited to software, but applies to all aspects of an organization, including the executive suite, human resources, finance, IT, and product teams. Second, it is not focused on or limited to any particular scale. In fact, it is scale-free, working on small teams and teams of more than 500 engineers in a 100K-person company.

Learning Outcomes: -The definition and nature of value -The principles and practices of Value-driven Delivery -How to use Evolutionary Delivery to manage value-driven work, alone or in concert with Scrum -Fundamentals of several disciplines and models that aid value-driven work, including the Kano Model, elements from Diffusion of Innovations, UX Proof Points, and the HEART Framework -Attendees will gain enough understanding to begin using Value-driven Delivery in their own work if they desire. -Additional sources of information will be provided for continued learning.

Who should attend: Product management, product owners, product developers, service designers, architects, product managers, engineers, business development, business strategy, marketing, planners, project managers, software developers