Workshops
We have developed and licensed a set of workshops that have shown to excel at providing participants with the base of best-practice knowledge that is critical in supporting improvement within an organization.
All of our workshops are available onsite at your location.
These are all offered with flexibility to meet your specific needs, and we have facilitated workshops in other topics as well – if you don’t see what you are looking for here, don’t hesitate to contact us.
“The role and size of of our engineering section have both recently expanded. Our projects now have greater scope, are more complex, and involve more participants. As a consequence, we had to introduce more discipline, rigour, and organization into our development process. We called on Jim Brosseau from Clarrus Consulting to provide training to sixteen staff on the topics of requirements analysis and peer review of software.
Jim was able to present the material in a clear, concise, and entertaining fashion. The hands-on workshops helped the participants to fully absorb the lessons. We have begun adopting many of the techniques he presented, and we have already started seeing the benefits. I would recommend this training for any organization that wants to improve the effectiveness of their own project development process.” – Ernest D. De Luca, P.Eng., Government of Canada
Software Teamwork: Taking Ownership for Success
If we really want to improve the way we develop software, we need to start by understanding the team itself – what each participant brings to the table. The context of skills, cultures and attitudes of all the people involved plays a critical role in determining which approach will be most effective for developing software, and how we should deploy the changes with the team. This multi-day workshop covers the breadth of elements that the team must consider as a precursor to change. Broad participation is a critical element for effective adoption of change, and the group must take personal ownership for the success of the initiative… [details]
The role of the Project Manager is often placed on a pedestal, surrounded by certifications and a decreed ‘ownership’ of major initiatives. In reality, though, we are all involved in projects, every day. Indeed, the most effective projects are those where everyone involved works together toward a solution, rather than having one leader drive the masses… [details]
Project Management: The Team Approach
Successful projects are the result of good time and cost control management, and effective relationships with team members and other key players. Both are achieved by using a team approach in planning, monitoring and conducting the work of projects. In this workshop, technical project management tools are combined with the interpersonal team processes needed to ensure that the tools work… [details]
Many organizations find it difficult to explicitly take the step of deriving a size for the elements to be estimated, leaping directly from an overall definition of scope to the final effort or duration estimate.
Sizing is an essential step in the estimation process, significantly improving the insight and fidelity of the resulting estimates. How the practice of sizing fits into the overall estimation process is explored in this interactive workshop… [details]
In Search of Excellent Requirements
Requirements form the foundation for all the software work that follows. Arriving at a shared vision of the product to be developed is one of the greatest challenges facing the software project team, and customer involvement is among the most critical factors in software quality. The objective of this workshop is to give attendees a tool kit of practices, reinforced with practice sessions and group discussions, that they can begin applying to improve the quality of the requirements development and requirements management processes in their organization… [details]
Exploring User Requirements with Use Cases
Use cases are an effective and widely used technique for eliciting software requirements. The use-case approach focuses on the goals that users have with a system, rather than emphasizing system functionality. This one-day workshop presents the use-case approach to requirements elicitation in a practical and straightforward fashion. Many practice sessions give the student opportunities to try some of the techniques described… [details]
This facilitated full day workshop is intended to help people who play a requirements analyst project role become more proficient at writing high-quality software requirements specifications (SRS). The workshop can be tailored to meet the needs of each specific audience. Participants will work with requirements pertinent to their own development project and user community. The “In Search of Excellent Requirements” seminar is a prerequisite… [details]
Effective peer reviews of all types of software work products are essential if software development organizations are to reduce their cost of producing software. Formal inspections of requirements specifications, designs, source code, and other work products are a proven means for finding errors and improving software products… [details]
Relationship Awareness With the SDI
Relationship Intelligence involves gaining an understanding of yourself and others and applying that understanding to build more meaningful, effective relationships. Only you can decide if you are getting what you want in your relationships. The test for this workshop is in real life, and you give yourself the grade… [details]


