Rational User Community

The Global Rational User Group (GRUG) Council is comprised of leaders from numerous Rational User Groups worldwide. The council meets on a monthly conference call to work through brainstorm new community initiatives and provide feedback to Rational. In addition, the council meets face-to-face at least once a year at the Rational INNOVATE Conference.

What is our mission?

The mission is to extend the effectiveness of Rational user groups by providing operational feedback for the improvement of Rational's products and services by working proactively with Rational on planning, strategy and development prioritization, as well as expanding Rational user group networking capabilities globally.

What is our scope?

• Condense local user groups' feedback into the underlying fundamental issue(s) regarding Rational products or non-Rational products that Rational integrates with, product certification, support, documentation, training, professional services, sales and marketing. This information will be pro-actively used to influence Rational to improve their products and services, through the Rational Board of Advisors and/or other avenues that may be available.
• Act as a pre-funding/pre-development/pre-deployment operational sounding board for plans Rational has for products, services, sales, etc., and provide input into Rational's overall strategy.
• Extend the networking capabilities of the local users groups to share information and provide a common communication point from Rational to its customers.

 Interested in joining the GRUG Council? Contact Toni Cacioppo to find out how.

  Carson Holmes is a management consultant, methodologist, software engineer, and educator. He is the community leader at Software Development Experts, the Vice President of Service Delivery at Fourth Medium Consulting Inc., and President of the Global Rational User Community. Mr. Holmes started programming over 30 years ago and for the last 16 years has helped numerous Fortune 500 IT enterprises across a variety of industries achieve their strategic goals. He is a specialist in IT governance and process improvement and leverages pragmatic methods, practices, and tools that benefit the enterprise IT value stream.  Mr. Holmes is a natural leader skilled at building great teams and delivering solutions that maximize business value. As a management consultant, he is an agent for change and often works with senior level executives to fine tune their organization for efficiency and effectiveness. Mr. Holmes is a proponent of process enactment and workflow automation and leads a new virtual user group focused on Jazz and CLM. He regularly presents at user groups and software conferences, and holds a degree in computer science and engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Julian Holmes is a co-founder of UPMentors, an alliance of small international consulting companies, which share a common vision for software development process, jointly working in the industry and with clients to improve delivery capability. He has a proven track record in enhancing the software development capability of large and complex IT organizations. These skills stem from the experience of performing many different software development roles over his 20 years working within the industry, providing him recognition as a proven software development leader.  Julian adopted the Rational Unified Process as his approach of choice in 1999, becoming quickly regarded as a leader as to its successful use, and in its implementation for project teams and organizations alike. More recently Julian has been working to expand the use of Agile practices within the UP community, and specifically in the promotion and adoption of OpenUP (an Eclipse project) and Disciplined Agile Delivery working closely with Scott Ambler.  Julian is a VP of the Global Rational User Group board providing support to user groups across Europe and Asia, and leads the UK Group which includes 1,000 members. He has attended and presented at Rational’s annual conference every year since 2002, regularly presents at many IBM regional events, and submits posts to his developerWorks blog.   Julian also became an IBM Champion in 2011, recognizing his outstanding contributions to IBM Rational communities.

 Martina is a Software Configuration Management and Build / Release consultant with extensive automation experience with ReleaseTEAM, Inc.  She has administered IBM Rational ClearCase since 1995, IBM Rational ClearQuest since 2006 and RTC since 2011 and is a Valued Contributor on the developerWorks ClearCase and ClearQuest forums.  She has planned, implemented, deployed and supported SDLC processes and tools for small single-location and big projects located in 5 time zones.  Her paper about installing IBM Rational ClearCase 7.1 and IBM Rational ClearQuest 7.1 in an Enterprise Environment, originally published in 2009 and updated in 2010 has been well received by the user community.  In 2011 and 2012 Martina was named an IBM Champion.  Martina has been a member of the Colorado Rational Users Group since 2006 and the GRUG Council (Global Rational User Community) since June 2008 and has served as the GRUG Communications Director since June 2010.

 Shawn Doyle founded ReleaseTEAM in 1999, a Software Configuration Management consulting firm, specializing in the IBM Rational tool suite, ClearCase, ClearQuest, Build Forge and Rational Team Concert (RTC).