Alan Cooper, author of "The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why
High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity", will
be giving a seminar at USC on Friday April 1, 2005.  Time: 4:00 PM.
Place: The Belk Auditorium (Room 005) of the Business Administration
Building, 1705 College Street.  There is no charge and everyone is
invited.
 

The title of his talk is "Ending the Death March"

  

An abstract and biography for Cooper follow.

   

Software construction experts agree: Your software project has a 50
percent chance of failure. The other 50 percent suffer what is
commonly known as a“Death March” where the project can only be
completed on schedule by jettisoning half of the functionality, most
of the flexibility, and all of the user friendliness. What’s more,
the programmers are exhausted, the managers are frustrated, and the
users are reduced to quiet weeping. In Alan Cooper’s latest talk he
will show how executives can take control of their technical efforts
and vanquish the Death March. As usual, his comments will provide you
with insights and techniques that are as effective as they are
unexpected.

    

Alan Cooper is the founder of Cooper, a Palo Alto-based consulting
firm specializing in the design of breakthrough, interactive products
and an outspoken champion of the forgotten person in the product
development process—the customer. Cooper is the father of Visual
Basic and the author of three best-selling books: About Face: The
Essentials of User Interface Design, About Face 2.0: The Essentials of
Interaction Design, and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why
High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. In
1994 Bill Gates presented Cooper with the Windows Pioneer Award for
his invention of the visual programming concept behind Visual Basic,
and in 1998 he received the prestigious Software Visionary Award from
the Software Developer’s Forum.