BCS Berkshire Branch newsletter – January 2012
Welcome
The new year has just begun and your committee has made its resolutions. We will keep up all the usual stuff: talks at Oracle and the Copa Bar in Reading, virtual meetings in Second Life, and trips to places that have a special interest for computing professionals. In addition, we are going to try some new things. At the end of the year we are planning a Winter School on Social Media. This will be a linked series of presentations, workshops and case studies on the use of social media – concentrating on how these are used by organisations in Berkshire. There will be a charge for attendance to fund a donation of cash or equipment to a Berkshire charity. We would love to hear from you if you have good, or horrible, stories about social media. We would like to hear, too, of any charities in Berkshire that you think would benefit from our support. In late spring we will support an event in Basingstoke. If you would like us to support events in your area then do tell us what is going on or what you would like us to organise for you. Mind you, Basingstoke isn’t the limit of our ambition. We are planning to reach out to the developing world to enable our volunteers to teach in foreign schools via Skype. Now there is an application of social media!
For more, check out the BCS Berkshire Branch website
News
New Website – WordPress to press our words home
If you have visited the Berkshire Branch website recently you will see that we have moved over to WordPress. This will allow more of our committee to update the website to bring you exciting news of what is happening in Berkshire – and not so exciting news of how we made some of it happen. If you have journalistic talents why not get involved in putting up pictures and stories on the website or in the newsletter? The more we work together; the more we get out of membership.
Forthcoming events
Developer Free Development – Tuesday 17th January
Robin Oldman will be looking in to how you can develop systems, create specifications and eventually profit from a very different way of thinking about development. Taking an interesting story through the history of development, through first generation languages and user interfaces, Robin will highlight the fall of specification, the rise of Prince 2 project management, and the ability to throw out the usual design, build and test stages for just one specification and delivery mechanism that reduces maintenance costs and provides a better, quicker and error-free development. Will this put business information system developers out of work? Come join us to find out!!
PRINCE 2: Structured Common Sense Becomes Common Practice – Tuesday 21st February
This is a joint event with the Thames Valley Branch of the Association of Project Management. On-line booking is
essential so do check out the website.
PRINCE2 is often described as, ‘just structured common sense’ – but how do we take it out of the text book, and embed it as common practice in our organisations and our projects…?
The 2009 edition of PRINCE2 is broadly recognised as a significant improvement over earlier iterations of the methodology. The concept of the ‘Principles of a PRINCE2 Project,’ coupled with an emphasis on Tailoring the application of PRINCE2 to suit the project context, strengthen the assertion that the methodology can be used, ‘in any organisation, on any project of any size.’
This talk will review some of the fundamental concepts of why and how PRINCE2 is recommended for use, and consider the PRINCE2 Principles in the context of ‘Real World Projects’ – what do the principles mean, how might they manifest themselves in projects, and can Tailoring help to overcome issues with embedding PRINCE2 in the workplace?
More…
All of our events and bookings are now handled by a database.
Check out the imminent events on our Home page
Check out the later events on our Events page