We’re excited to announce our first Expert Talks event in New York this September. And we’re doubly excited to announce that our first speaker will be Dan Vacanti – author of ‘Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability’.

Dan is a very well-known, well-regarded software industry veteran who has spent most of his career focusing on Lean and Agile practices. In 2007, he helped to develop the Kanban Method for knowledge work, and managed the world’s first project implementation of Kanban that year.

We’re running this event at WeWork (near Penn Station) on September 8th, following a similar approach to Expert Talks events we’ve held in London, Manchester and Portugal. So, expect free food and drink, ample chance to network with members of the local software community, and interesting talks to stimulate debate among the group. Here’s the line-up for our first New York event:

How an Expedite Request Sunk the Titanic
Dan Vacanti – Actionable Agile

Most people know that RMS Titanic was a British passenger ship that struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic on the morning of April 15, 1912, resulting in the loss of over 1,500 lives. What most people don’t know, however, is that during the final stages of construction of Titanic, an expedite request caused a delay in completion – triggering a chain of events that led directly to the sinking of the ill-fated vessel.

If this sounds all too familiar, that’s because delays due to expedite requests are sinking your process as well.

This talk will be an exploration of how disruptive interrupt requests (like expedites) can be to the normal flow of development work. Most people see these interrupts as innocuous, status quo, or even a necessary part of the product development process. Few people realize how negatively impactful these disruptions can be. In fact, for most teams, these interrupts are the number one cause for unpredictability.

Using the Titanic disaster as a backdrop, this presentation will look at the negative consequences of expedite work. It will explore objective data from real teams that demonstrates how expedites actually make things take more time – not less – to complete. Chances are you have always intuitively known that interrupts are what makes your process unpredictable. This talk will give you to tools you need to quantify that impact – and give you strategies on how minimize their negative effects.

Architecting For Change
Brian Blignaut – Partner, Equal Experts

Architecting applications in today’s fast-changing world requires a different approach to system design. Applications must scale to meet the ever-increasing demands of users, and they must also be able to shift to meet changes in the business’ direction – without requiring wholesale rewrites of the platform.

Whether you’re an experienced software professional yourself, or simply interested in how you can help make digital projects run more smoothly within your organisation, we’d love to see you at Expert Talks NYC to learn more about our approach and contribute to the conversation. To attend, just join the Expert Talks NYC Meetup group and put your name down for the event.

See you in a few weeks.