Dave Harvey and Pete Marks ran something a bit different at SPA 2009 last month.

The idea was that, working in groups, people would pitch the idea of using agile development methods to a group of industry veterans hand-picked for their ability to ask awkward questions.

In the scenario, each of the veterans worked for the same hypothetical big bank with a vision of ‘One Bank’ and each took the role of a senior exec – CEO John Nolan, COO John Daniels, CFO Dave Cleal & CTO Rob James.

Each of the four teams started by preparing an initial two minute  pitch based on two slides. This was then presented to one of the veterans who was given three minutes to probe our plans. This process was then repeated with a couple of the other veterans selected randomly. The veterans conferred while the teams updated the pitch for the next round.

At the end of three rounds the veterans had a ‘board meeting’ and our team emerged victorious, possibly helped by us having a few veterans of our own. We presented our pitch to the whole group and then as a whole we created some learning points from the whole session.

Here are the session outputs if you’re interested in more details (including photos).

This session is eminently plagiarisable so expect to see various ‘Pitching ???’ sessions coming from me in the future…

Since I’m in the Bristol area next week for the Embedded Masterclass I suggested that Monday 11th May might be a nice night for an ACCU South-West meet-up.

The plan is to meet at the Old India curry house around 18:30 – 19:00. Drop me a line if you’re coming so we can reserve a seat for you. Non-ACCU members welcome.

March’s Software East event will focus on Technology Product Management. The event will take place at Downing College, Cambridge on the evening of Thursday 19th March.

The event will include a goldfish bowl session and I’m rounding up some subject-matter experts to act as goldfish. I’ve already approached a few people but anyone who thinks they’d make a good goldfish for this session should get in touch.

Ivan Moore is heading from England to Germany by bike to raise funds for the National Autistic Society.

Ivan has spoken at SPA Cambridge a couple of times and is also heavily involved in the SPA group and conference.

Ivan is also giving up a day of his time to any company that wants to make a reasonable donation to this cause. This could be assistance with continuous integration or test-driven development for example, two of his areas of expertise. You can find out more about the trip and how to donate here.

Apologies to regular readers for the lack of blog activity recently, this isn’t a lack of inspiration, just a lack of time.

A quick count shows I have 67 posts in draft form (and several ideas in my head). However, I’ve been quite busy on a consultancy project recently while juggling all the usual work activities.

Several events, including Code Generation 2009, have been filling my ‘spare’ time leaving little time for blogging. Hopefully normal service will be resumed in 2009.

January’s Software East event will have ‘Building a Software Business’ as its theme.

Event details are being firmed up at the moment but the focus of the event will be a panel session considering questions such as:

• Do you need a ‘big’ idea?
• How to find customers
• Building the ‘right’ product
• How to fund the business
• Scaling up
• Problems of success
• Are software businesses ‘different’?

If you have questions you’d like to see answered by the panel then please bring them along or send them to me in advance.

I’ll be leading the panel and Neil Davidson and Allan Kelly have already agreed to share their experiences so it should be a very interesting session. As with other Software East events there will also be plenty of time scheduled for chatting to other participants.

I noticed a few weeks ago that Markus Voelter is a fan of Marillion. This took me back to the Eighties when a girl I liked was going out with one of the band members – no chance she was going to drop him for someone who spent their nights in the basement of the Computer Lab though

Anyway, today I notice that Angelo Hulshout is also something of a prog rock fan.

Given my liking of Rush this got me thinking – is there some correlation between liking prog rock and being attracted to Code Generation?

Computing notes a silver lining among all the recent clouds in the financial services sector.

Apparently CIOs with “extensive systems integration and due diligence expertise have a golden opportunity to show their mettle” due to increased merger and acquisition activity.

So it’s not all bad news then.

Next Sunday I’ll be taking part with 1500 or so people in the annual Oxford to Cambridge cycle ride in aid of the British Heart Foundation.

The ride is over 89 miles (143 kilometres) of the rolling English countryside and I have an approximate target time of 7 hours based on not very much analysis to be honest

If you’d like to sponsor me for this event then you can donate by credit card at my fundraising page or sponsor me on a per mile basis by contacting me through Software Acumen.

Thanks in advance.

I encountered a new problem recently when an anonymous non-spam comment was made on a blog post I made.

The commenter was asking a sensible question but had chosen to conceal their identity – this made me suspect their motives, which may have been honest, and so I deleted the comment.

If you do comment on anything I post here please bear this in mind.