It’s going to be quiet around here (again)

Just a quick note to say that it’s Best Practices Conference season again and this means I am a very busy boy. No doubt many other presenters are too because this is a conference that takes a disproportionally large amount of time to prepare and deliver compared to most conferences. As a result, blogging takes a back seat when preparing for such an event.

Why is this?

Well, for a start, we all don’t just get up there and rattle off a bunch of “oh, isn’t this cool” product features (that’s for Vegas ;-). On the contrary, the Best Practice Conferences are all about the real-life world of IT trying to empower business through tough, competitive and fast-moving times. To deliver at such a conference, you need to be at your best, and with top-notch, tried and tested solutions to what are often people as much as they are technical challenges.

Best Practices is about quality, resilience and adaptability in the face of constant change and competing priorities. The Best Practices Conference is where you’ll find great ideas, activities and techniques to apply in your organisation. You will come away with many new kung-fu skills, allowing you to:

Last time I was at a BPC, I met some brilliant people and we are now working together in a collaborative and commercial sense. We are all back again, and this time have decided to align all of our sessions and topics in such a way that we may offer a great end-to-end advice. If you attend this conference, look out for a group of related sessions by myself, Dux, Ruven and Andrew.

My first topic, co-presenting with Ruven Gotz is called “Governance, the other 90%”. This, in a way, serves as an umbrella session for our other talks. In this particular session, Ruven and I have found a way to frame governance in a manner that seems to resonate with people and demystify the topic in a manner that we have not seen elsewhere. From the synopsis

This session dissects the broader challenges of SharePoint governance, far beyond service delivery and assurance. It demystifies the grey fog of "people" issues and highlights the real factors that will make or break a SharePoint project.

The next session in this series of talks is called “Wicked problems and SharePoint – The one best practice to rule them all”. Presumably regular readers of this blog will have a fair idea of what I am going to talk about 🙂

Andrew Woodward is up next with his “Agile SharePoint Development – Is it Wicked?” session. This session continues the examination of why traditional approaches to SharePoint projects often result in failures or delivery of solutions that attain only a fraction of what is possible. This session looks at how adoption of agile development techniques helps deal with the wicked problems presented in SharePoint projects. We look at the thinking behind and trends in agile development and at the challenges companies face when adopting agile development.

Next in the series is “7 Ways to Leverage SharePoint for Project Management Success” by Dux Sy. In this presentation, Dux provides a practical approach to using SharePoint to address the challenges of inefficient communication among stakeholders, poor document management practices and undefined project collaboration standards.

Ruven then takes the stage with his “Content Types and Site Columns – Working with stakeholders to build the taxonomy” session. This session is centred around stakeholder understanding of the concepts of metadata, a process that is iterative in nature. Ruven will introduce various tools and methods that have proven to be successful for explaining these concepts and then organizing an information architecture.

There are of course, a whole raft of brilliant speakers from all over the world converging for this talk and this promises to be the best BPC yet

Hope to see you there!

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au