• Home
• Important Dates
• Call For Paper Topics
• Paper Submission
• Presentation Guidelines
• Program
• Keynote Speakers
• Venue
• Registration
• PDUs
• Committees
• Contact us
• Sponsors
• Proceedings

Keynote Speaker - Mr. Pekka Forselius

Acquiring Information Systems in northernSCOPE way

Mr. Pekka Forselius
CEO of 4SUM Partners Ltd, a Senior Advisor of the Finnish Software Measurement Association FiSMA and the Immediate Past President of the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group

 

Abstract:

    Project Scope Management is one of the ten knowledge areas of the Project Management Body of KnowledgeR. Good scope management cannot save a project alone, if there are problems with one or more other areas, but poor scope management can make a project fail, even if all the other knowledge areas were well managed. If you don’t know what you should provide, and how much, you will fail for sure. This is true especially in the software intensive IT industry, where the scope definition practices vary too much from case to case, and over time, and where very few people in the world seem to be capable to vision the future system at any point of the system life-cycle. Even more uncommon is the combination of capabilities to vision and quantify the scope of an Information System to be acquired.

    The northernSCOPE? concept is one well established and equipped approach for professional scope management for software intensive Information System acquisition. It consists of several methods and tools that can help both the product owner (customer) and the developer team (supplier) to manage scope over the system life-cycle. Subsets of the same northernSCOPE? methods and tools can assist the decision makers from the early budgeting and tendering phase, through the design, implementation, testing and system installation activities to system maintenance, and finally to prepare the replacement system acquisition. Professional scope management is equally important at all the management levels, not only at the Project Management as introduced in the PMBOKR, but also in Program and Portfolio Management, and software Product Management. The three corner-stones of northernSCOPE? concept are 1) software size measurement in Function Points (FP), 2) realizing and understanding the unit price (money/FP), and use of an independent measurement expert, Certified Scope Manager (CSM).

    In his keynote presentation Forselius will introduce the most important methods and tools of the northernSCOPE? concept, and summarize some of the best lessons-learned how to organize and apply the concept in practice. One strength of the concept is that the methods and most of the tools are publicly available, based on International Standards (ISO), and the use of this concept is free of charge, without any license fees. Once people get their certifications for CSM, they can apply the concept as often and as long as they want. Most of the recent experiences come from agile (e.g. SCRUM) world, developing multi-tier service oriented systems, for both public and private sector customers, but the concept itself is independent of technologies, business sectors, and project management approaches.

 

Biography:

    Mr. Pekka Forselius is Master of Science (Information systems), eMBA and Certified Scope Manager. He has almost 40 years of experience in software industry, both on the customer and on the vendor side. His current positions are the CEO of 4SUM Partners Ltd, a Senior Advisor of the Finnish Software Measurement Association FiSMA and the Immediate Past President of the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group. Pekka is also the Chairman of the Job Role Committee, Certified SCOPE Manager at European Certification and Qualification Association (ECQA) and represents Finland in ISO/IEC SC7 standardization for software and systems engineering (editor responsibilities in the areas of Software Size Measurement, IT Project Performance Benchmarking, and Tools and Environments). Over his career Pekka has worked across the fields of Banking, Insurance, Government, Education, and Private Consulting. He has developed and implemented the Experience® data-collection concept and is the product owner of Experience® Service software. He is well-known speaker, researcher and developer of several IT project management methods and concepts, including FiSMA Functional Size Measurement method (ISO/IEC 29881) and the northernSCOPE™ concept. He has published several books and dozens of articles about ICT Program Management and IS Acquisition Management.