News May. 20, 2010 AWC-AA Annual Networking Dinner Annual Networking Dinner at Mediterrano (http://www.mediterrano.com/). This will be a dinner event with a program on ITIL. Melissa Wren is an ITIL expert who will be giving us an overview of ITIL. The fee is $30 for AWC members, $40 for non-members. Cash bar. This event is open to all; members, non-members, women and men! April. 23, 2010 Mary Poppendieck came to Ann Arbor! On Tuesday April 20th, software industry thought leader Mary Poppendieck made a trip to Ann Arbor where she led a group of nearly 50 management and technical representatives from local software companies in an interactive seminar. Working on real software business problems, Ms. Poppendieck helped the participants learn and apply techniques to reduce waste from their processes to become so efficient that they can compete with the pricing offered by offshore vendors. Three-time author, speaker and trainer, Mary Poppendieck has a long, notable career helping companies produce great software. After retiring from 3M in 1998, Ms. Poppendieck started helping software companies around the world adopt the "Lean Patterns" that have been so successfully applied in manufacturing. In 2003, she published her first of three books: Lean Software: An Agile Toolkit. Focusing on the process of developing software, not necessarily on the software code, Ms. Poppendieck gives teams the tools and techniques to analyze, understand and continuously improve delivery. In her third book Leading Lean Software Development (2010), she teaches decision-makers how to continuously improve the ability of their organizations to consistently produce great software. "We were extremely pleased to be able to have such a distinguished speaker in Ann Arbor," said John W. Stout, founder of software industry consulting firm Stout Systems. "Mary's seminar is unique and demonstrates effective techniques for removing waste thereby reducing cost from the software development process. The feedback from the participants was uniformly positive." The event was sponsored by Stout Systems in conjunction with the Ann Arbor Chapter of the Association for Women in Computing (AWC-AA). All proceeds from the event went to benefit AWC-AA's college scholarship program. "We are thrilled that Mary was able to stop in Ann Arbor for our April program," said Lisa Luczek, President of AWC-AA. "The program was sold out, and enabled us to raise $500 for our scholarship. It was an opportunity for almost 50 IT professionals to learn about lean software development and have their processes critiqued by Mary. It is an excellent example of the kind of community and professional development that AWC-AA works to create in the IT space." © 2008 www.awc -aa.org. All Rights Reserved.