Hi all

Just a quick note to let you know that I will be speaking at the Perth leg of the BusinessAnalystWorld conference this week. My topic is called “IBIS: The one best practice for managing wicked problems" and I will be talking about the characteristics of wicked problems and how IBIS and Issue Mapping can help to manage them. I will also cover off some other sense-making tools in this talk like debategraph.

The BA World conference is the only one of its kind in Australia and will cover all sorts of interesting topics such as requirements elicitation, change management, business process modelling, Agile, stakeholder management and BABOK. The theme for the event is “Work Smarter. Plan Harder” and will allow BA leaders to ensure that projects are clearly defined and flawlessly executed, enabling them to make the right decisions at every level in the organisation and increase project success.

I am really looking forward to participating and it will be interesting to see what sort of feedback I get from a non SharePoint audience. As you may have gathered, this is not a SharePoint event and although I will still be talking about SharePoint as a collaborative platform to support working smarter, the main focus is on the power of IBIS and issue Mapping to help elicit real and tacit requirements and fast-track the path to shared understanding.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

It’s been quite some time since I have blogged, and the months of July/August were really pretty full-on professionally. High work demands and preparation for the Best Practices Conference meant that blogging and any sort of public work really took a back-seat.

So now that it is over and I am sitting here in an airport lounge reflecting, I have one word to say about the BPC 09 in DC that I just attended.

Segways rock!

You have not lived until you have ridden a segway – and I mean the new ones where you lean to control it. Even better than riding a segway is to ride it through DC, a city that blew me away with its amazing campus-like vibe. Never before has a city really pushed my buttons like this place. As you can see above, Ruven Gotz, Andrew Woodward and I visited some of the amazing DC sights and this photo in particular of Capitol Hill behind us, looking out toward the Lincoln memorial is something I’ll never forget. One thing is for sure, I am definitely coming back here for at least 2-3 weeks with the family just to absorb everything – sooner rather than later.

These best-practices events are really the conference where the material goes beyond the tech-stuff and caters additionally for an audience of consultants, business analysts, project managers and CIO’s. Some sessions are completely strategic, yet some delve deep into the guts of tech. In short, there is something for everyone.

Since the San Diego event back in Feb 09, my fellow kindred spirits, Ruven Gotz, Andrew Woodward, Dux Sy and I have been collaborating to bring our respective messages together and put a cohesiveness around what we have to say. This conference was the first peek of the fruit of that collaborative effort and as far as audience feedback went, it went down really well. In my last session of the conference I had a little Jerry Springer moment, when describing a particular slide that was a part of all of our respective talks, when I asked the audience to describe the slide and they all answered in perfect unison – hehe the message was heard 🙂

I presented 3 sessions, one on my own, and two co-presented with Ruven Gotz and Peter Serzo respectively. Ruven and I have been unhappy with the current (mis)understanding of governance around SharePoint and the culmination of our efforts over the last new months was a talk called “Governance – the other 90%”, although next time I will rename it to “Zen and the art of SharePoint Governance”. This was an umbrella talk to introduce our concepts and thinking, and then it was followed up later in the conference by talks by Ruven, myself and Andrew Woodward. Andrew took out the best overall speaker award too for the conference and we are all super-excited by the fruits of this collaboration so far, and I *know* that bigger and better things are to come from it.

For what its worth, if you want to be “one with SharePoint governance”, remember the key takeaway – beer is the best governance tool you’ve got. 🙂

The session with Peter Serzo was also such fun – we hit upon the idea of doing a Zoolander themed talk to introduce SQL Reporting Services to people who had not seen it. SSRS is one of those tools and technologies where even some well known SharePoint practitioners have not used it. With a title of “Reporting Services for the Really Really Good Looking”, we attracted a good turnout and managed to create and publish a report in 5 minutes, explain the architecture by getting members of the audience to stand up, wear aprons and “model” the various components and show how with no code, information workers could include drill down reports as well as personalised reports via parameters and filter web parts. The very awesome Brett Lonsdale (the guru behind BDC Meta Man), interrupted proceedings, claiming that the BDC was a better option and there was only one way to settle it – he and I had to do a BDC vs SSRS “walk off” which I *of course*, won easily :-).

Brett was a great sport, and I think for a minute audience members actually thought he was serious 🙂

(Now here comes the gushing love people..)

Also this time around, I’ve gotten to know more people and the rare opportunity to hook up again and spend some quality time with various friends was really the thing that makes the 36hr transit from Perth worth it. From the BBQ at Dux Sy’s house, to some great dialogue with Ben Curry of Mindsharp, Judy Cowan of Microsoft, Evan Burfield and the Synteractive people and my SamePage amigo’s (Dux, Ruven and Andrew Woodward). Ben Curry is an out and out genius, and our CV’s seem to read from the same script and I wish I had more opportunity to work with him. Evan Burfield is so scary smart that he automatically become my hero with his amazing understanding of stuff that I am interested in, yet only scratching the surface of the surface 🙂

Special callout to Laura Rogers (aka @wonderlaura). I had to look up what a muse was after she told me I was hers (I am a little sheltered over in Perth 🙂 ). Love her work – in fact, it is *her* work at endusersharepoint.com that inspired me to get back into more end-user content and try this whole screencasting thing. Laura, we are going to have to do something on EUSP together if you’d be up for it – it was a lot of fun hanging out and I think Peter Serzo would be up for something fun as well.

To the people who sat around the bar/restaurant/lobby table and supplied great laughs and great conversation. Zlatan Dzinic is utterly brilliant but is genetically programmed to be unable to whisper in someone else’s session 🙂 ). Mike Ferarra from SharePointReviews.com, Dan Usher, Lori Gowin, Ben Curry for messing with my head constantly, Paul Kolasky (the self-confessed poster boy for wicked problems who Laura eventually discovered *is* harmless 🙂 ) and special mention to Paul Stork – who was labelled as “that nerd who always has to jump ahead” during the Zoolander session.

Final thanks – Peter Serzo and his wife, Stacey. Peter is the most “Australian Amercian” who I have ever met. I think he must have been an Aussie in a former life. He is a tireless worker who’s imagination and inventiveness always sets off sparks of inspiration for me. I am going to try and find a way to get him over to Perth for a local training workshop or user group thing – they’d love his sense of humour.

Sorry if I missed anybody, I apologise. Also, please send me any photos, as many were taken, but I really was quite unsure about who’s camera was clicking at the time 🙂

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

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

Ah, lots of beers, staying out ‘til 3am, taking an aspirin at 7am, breaking my 3 week coffee embargo…

Oh yeah – and there is this SharePoint conference on as well! 😉

In case you have been living under a rock, a bunch of us have been at the New Zealand SharePoint Community Conference for the last two days. This has been a fantastic experience for me for several reasons:

1. I come from Perth, an isolated city of around 1.8 million people. New Zealand cities are a bit smaller than this, but nevertheless, the sort of scale of what is “enterprise” versus small to medium is much closer here to my reality. When I talk to people, I have a real affinity for the challenges they face and the resources that they have available.
2. Many of the speakers were locals, from local organisations that have put SharePoint in. They had the opportunity to present via the “voice of the customer” session track. This was terrific and important because this was SharePoint reality TV. While I pontificate about concepts like “Wicked problems”, you get to see detailed case studies on the challenges faced by organisations, successes, missteps and lessons learned. I absolutely love these sessions, because it’s wonderful to see the various methods used to drive buy-in and success and how varied they were. As I said in my recent governance post, provided you drive buy-in and help your organisation get from a present state to a desirable future state, you are “governing”.
3. Being Australian, my laptop plugs into the power outlets with no adapters
4. My travel time was much less than Joel (A leisurely 11 hour transit versus 25+).

This event has been brilliantly organised and Chan, Mark and Debbie have put in a monumental effort and my heartfelt congratulations to them for its success. The turnout has been terrific as well. The mix of attendees was nice and varied too. Many, many business oriented people and many more who were technically inclined.

My talk was on the concept of wicked problems, why SharePoint falls victim and the approaches that have worked for me to manage them. Feedback was great, hugely appreciated, and it was immensely gratifying to find people saying things like “You know, I had always felt this way and could never put my finger on it until your session”. That was exactly my intent and I’m glad that some attendees liked it.

It was brilliant to find like minded people who had travelled a similar path too. Erica Toelle – remember her name. Her bright future in the SharePoint community is assured. Lulu Pachuau – reads the same sort of books as me and had a really engaging conversation at the speakers dinner. She was a revelation in her presentation and I hope that her angle on design methods and information architecture gains traction around the world. We need more like her.

Joel was in excellent form with his keynote, and gets better and better. Brilliant slide deck, wonderful metaphors and expertly presented (and my project manager baby made an appearance! Wohoo!)

I participated in an experts panel and dodged some smelly sea urchin juice that Joel spilled when they made him eat one. (Two seconds later and he would have dripped it all over me – ewwww). But the reality of the expert panel is that I’d rather have the people who presented the case-studies up there and me sit in the audience. As I said before, I sat in on almost all of the “voice of the customer” sessions. I love to listen to the real life, down in the trenches, grass-roots implementation strategies and I learnt a tremendous amount from them and find so many areas that I can do much better on. I was super impressed by Pete Sayers at the South Taranaki District Council tackle the minefield of collaboration and records management, and the standout was the “Key success factors for implementing MOSS2007 as an ECM – Telecom’s solution” by Helen Rayner, Ruth Miles and Nadine Burnett.

The conference highlight for me was Erica’s session. “SharePoint User Adoption: Fostering Shared Understanding throughout your Company”. Comprehensive, yet simple. Full of practical steps and templates to use and above all, thought provoking, practical and very wise. Erica has identified a big gap in the SharePoint realm of competencies and has some great answers to fill it.

On a more cultural note, the Te Papa Museum was great fun, and Wellington is a great city with a wonderful vibe about it. Tomorrow its a full-day “Lord of the Rings” tour and then I am homeward bound.

Overall this was a brilliant event, and I look forward to coming back – potentially to some user group sessions if can be pulled off!

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

A quick bit of background. My last 2 trips to the USA were particularly fruitful in meeting many like-minded SharePoint pros, all of which are well known and highly regarded. Some close friendships were made and what was really cool was that some people I met, despite having very different skills and experience (and physical locations!), seemed to connect on a level that gave us the desire and impetus to to work together very closely idealistically and commercially. More on that soon enough… 🙂

So who are the members of this global group of SharePoint mystery men?

• Andrew (Agile Boy) Woodward – Agile extraordinaire. So damn agile in fact that blink and you’d never know he was there. Able to demolish long SharePoint projects into bite sized chunks in a single bound
• Ruven (Magneto) Gotz. Mind mapping maestro with the ability to bend information architecture to his will, and able to know what you want before you even have formed the question
• Dux (Mr Myagi) Sy. A sensei project Manager who will teach you the wax-on/wax-off approach to successful SharePoint delivery. He might even get you to paint his fence if you are lucky

and me (aka Dr Wicked) round it off – pushing the boundaries of pop-culture metaphors for cheap laughs and the odd bit of work on shared understanding, ROI and SharePoint governance.

So why does any of this matter?

It just so happens that all four of us are soon to be in the same place at the same time. This is actually a frustratingly rare occasion, given that Andrew is in the UK, I am in Western Australia, Dux is in DC and Ruven is in Toronto. But in August, we will all be presenting at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in DC. We are all tremendously honoured to be presenters at this event and this time around, we have been collaborating together to try and really deliver some great sessions that capture the essence of our common philosophical approaches.

It takes me around 30 hours of transit to get to the east coast, and Andrew also has to travel a fair distance too. Therefore when these sorts of opportunities present themselves, we like to make the most of it – and we are *not* just talking beer! (ok well that’s not strictly true – beer is a significant motivation :-D)

Accordingly, we are planning a special “SharePoint Governance Mentoring” workshop that will run over a period of 3 days (August 19-21, 2009), prior to the conference itself. It will be a unique, one-off event and numbers will be strictly limited. We think that our combined skills cover the broad spectrum of the SharePoint universe very well, with a particularly strong governance underpinning. Participants will be able to delve into topics such as how to manage a SharePoint project, practical techniques in gathering requirements, achieving shared understanding and buy-in, information architecture, team dynamics and the root causes of organisational chaos that make SharePoint an attractive proposition in the first place. We will also cover making a great business case and understanding return on investment, how to approach application development on the SharePoint platform and above all, learning what governance is really all about, and applying the right sort of governance at the right time. 

Additionally, plenty of time will be allocated for participants to discuss their SharePoint challenges in an open forum, so if you bring your SharePoint baggage, we will lend a sympathetic ear and then arm you with some new kung-fu skills to take back to your organisation.

Does this event sound like your cup of tea? If so, we need to hear from you! We will publish the workshop details and outline in mid-July but we need to gauge interest now. The cost for this three day event will be $1750 per attendee, although anyone who is registered for SharePoint Best Practices Conference will be entitled to a 10% discount.

So if this sounds good to you, then please register your interest at Dux’s site below:

http://sp.meetdux.com/workshop_interest.aspx

Thanks for reading (and we hope to see you there!)

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

It looks like they know how to throw a conference in Australia’s ‘other’ state (just kidding, Kiwis).

I will be speaking at the New Zealand Community SharePoint Conference in July 2009 and I’m really looking forward to it. This will be the New Zealand conference to learn about SharePoint 2007 with a whole bunch of expert local and international speakers. Some big international names are joining in the fun, including Joel “Governance Man” Oleson himself so we can continue our buzzword battles in the flesh! But to whet your appetite, we have Ben Curry, Erica Toelle, Michael Sampson, Paul Stork, Steve Smith and Adam Cogan, to name a few.

There are a wide variety of topics that are on offer, and the session that I am most looking forward to is Erica Toelle’s session entitled “SharePoint User Adoption: Fostering Shared Understanding throughout your Company”. Unfortunately, with the current schedule, it clashes with mine, but I hope that it gets rearranged as I know there are some great synergies there. Here is her synopsis

SharePoint projects usually involve some kind of organizational change related to culture, process, or structure.  The change process is something that must be carefully managed, approached methodically and tailored to your organization’s culture.
In this session you will learn how to ensure your SharePoint project’s success by using frameworks to manage the change process, resulting in higher user adoption of the end solution.  This is done by gaining leadership and stakeholder commitment, creating a strategic communication plan and planning a learning strategy.  You will walk away with templates and checklists to help you with your SharePoint project.

I am also especially looking forward to Pete Sayers’ talk on South Taranaki District Council as an EDRMS solution as I work with local government here in Perth myself and sometimes have to grapple with the conflicting requirements of the state records act, the web team hating the records management team, and the IT team hating them both :-).

Also looking tempting is Lulu Pachuau’s Information Architecture session, and Patrick van Rinsvelt’s session on organisational cultural considerations for SharePoint deployments. I think I’ll also go deep (level 300), and listen to Chandima Kulathilake dive into the depths of SQL Server administration for SharePoint as well as sit in on Joel’s Infrastructure and Administration Fundamentals just to heckle 😉 .

It all happens in Wellington, 2nd and 3rd July, 2009. I’ve never been to New Zealand before, but have heard that it’s picturesque, so I am really looking forward to it.

See you there!

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

p.s I could make some Lord of the Rings inspired comment, but for me the pinnacle of New Zealand film making was Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead!

Hot off the press (okay – well SlideShare magic),  I’ve just posted by Best Practices Conference slide deck for the "speak to your CFO" session, along with the ROI spreadsheet for the PMIS scenario that I used during the demonstration. Like the "wicked problems" slide deck, slideshare conversion isn’t quite there, so just contact me if you want a pptx version.

…and the spreadsheet. Just remember you scary MBA and finance types. I *know* this is a simple sheet and you can pick all sorts of holes in it. It is really for training and guidance purposes only. (Therefore see the obligatory "don’t come crying to me if this gets you into trouble" disclaimer below).

THIS CODE IS PROVIDED UNDER THIS LICENSE ON AN “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES THAT THE COVERED CODE IS FREE OF DEFECTS, MERCHANTABLE, FIT FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR NON-INFRINGING. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE COVERED CODE IS WITH YOU. SHOULD ANY COVERED CODE PROVE DEFECTIVE IN ANY RESPECT, YOU (NOT THE INITIAL DEVELOPER OR ANY OTHER CONTRIBUTOR) ASSUME THE COST OF ANY NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION. THIS DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY CONSTITUTES AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THIS LICENSE. NO USE OF ANY COVERED CODE IS AUTHORIZED HEREUNDER EXCEPT UNDER THIS DISCLAIMER

Use at your own risk!

Hi all. I’ve just posted my Best Practices Conference slide deck for the Wicked Problems session, along with the maps that I used during the demonstration. Expect a typically long post really soon now, to delve into much more detail about all of this 🙂

For what it’s worth the conversion to slideshare was a bit wonky, so just contact me if you want a pptx version.

Iframe below too small? Then go here for the demo issue maps

[iframe /BPCMaps/Best_Practices_Share_192168511229769555699.html 800 600]

To quote the brilliant singer Kate Bush, "wow wow wow unbelievable!"

Well, it is all over, and boy what an experience! For those of you who were not aware, I had the honour of attending as well as presenting at the San Diego SharePoint Best Practices conference. I had two topics, but I’ll post a report about those in another post. This post is going to sound like one of those long acceptance speeches at the academy awards as I have to give out kudos’ to all the people who I hung out with.

I sat in on as many sessions as I could, particularly the ones around requirements gathering, information architecture and strategy. It was fascinating that each person who spoke on or around this topic, such as Paul Galvin, Ruven Gotz, myself and Peter, all had varying approaches and I learned something from all of them. Some amazing talent – truly brilliant minds, wonderful speakers and great topics.

Some of the speakers – guys like Robert Bogue and Evan Burfield (above) just leave me in awe. There is not a damn thing that they say that I disagree with. Pretty much any good idea that I have had, Rob has thought of it first and developed it far, far further than I ever have. Just wait until you see his upcoming governance DVD – I’ve seen the mind map and holy freakin’ crap!, the length and breadth of what he has put together will make it an absolute *must have*. I had been working on similar material, but after seeing how far he has taken it, trust me and just buy his DVD – I’m hoping to be a reseller :-). Forget "Sharepoint Shepherd", I humbly bow to the "Governance Godfather – Robert Bogue" (you can license that title from me Rob 🙂 )

Also Rob, if you are reading this I went looking for you at SharePint to jump on your lap and do a fanboy photo (and I was going to risk messing with your hair). Lucky for you I guess, you had left by then and my evil plan was foiled – but Joel wasn’t so lucky 🙂

Mr Oleson – what can I say? I owe him a heck of a lot, as if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have been a presenter at this conference. Joel mate, you were on the phone when I came to say my heartfelt thanks for vouching for me and making this happen. I never crossed your path after that and I feel bad that I never got to. I’m going to get the SharePint photos from Ruven, although Joel, I am sure that your legal people will send me a cease and desist letter for that fanboy photo that I took with you. Mind you, I think there are other photos that you should be more worried about! But hey, what happens on tour, stays on tour right? 🙂

Ben Curry from Mindsharp – you I owe the biggest thanks of all. Conceiver of it all and the heart and soul behind this event. Visionary guy, worked his arse off, willing to risk bringing in several untried and untested relative unknowns like myself. He nailed *exactly* how a best-practice conference needs to be. Although sessions and topics were technical or development centric at times, make no mistake. This was all about headspace and critical thinking, so I was like a kid lost in a candy store.

Gary Lapointe is another person who left a big impression on me. I am well aware of his awesome capabilities and I found him a really down to earth, genuine and humble guy and I really, really wanted to have a beer with and chat to some more. I am totally buying you beers next time.

Paul Galvin. Spent the whole conference saying hello but never really crossing paths properly until the last hour or so. Loved your presentation and enjoyed your insights, regret not having more time to download your brain.

I also enjoyed hanging out with the poms, who seem to deal with satirical aussie humour a little better than the Americans. Andrew Woodward, Phill Duffy, Brett Lonsdale all were great company and good fun. Brett – I look forward to doing good things with Lightningtools and Combined Knowledge.

Then there were the metalheads. Todd Klindt was a riot and its obvious that he was put on this earth to loiter around SharePoint conferences. He had everyone near him in complete stitches. I was not aware of his metal leanings which raised his stock big-time in my book. Therefore, I have made it my personal mission to convert him to Opeth. Todd is actually a bit of a wuss when it comes to the the death vocals, so it’s a little like a Microsoft guy saying they like Linux but have never used anything but Ubuntu. But rest assured, I think I can bring him around 🙂

Also Mike Watson and attendees Anders Rask and Paul Kolasky demonstrated their exquisite taste in music. When pontificating various aspects of SharePoint became tiresome, the conversation seemed to turn to metal music. It’s amazing how much creativity can come out of a conversation like that too. After a few beers, Anders, Mike and I had a great idea for a new educational SharePoint site, and I still kinda liked it in the cold light of day when I was sober again. But I haven’t asked the other two whether they still think its a good idea or whether it was just the beer talking.

But fun and frivolity aside, what was the most satisfying (and exciting) was those moments where you discover your kindred spirits – both speakers and attendees. People who think alike, who’s philosophies and outlook are absolutely aligned in the same "zone" as your own. They may address problems in different ways, and may even be in different SharePoint sub-disciplines. But you just *know* that there is something special there – it is like you all collectively "see" though the same eyes, and the whole is so much greater than the sum of the parts.

So to Ruven Gotz and Peter Serzo, it was an honour to be able to meet with you, watch your presentations and I valued the dialogue very much. Ruven for the record had the best impromptu one-liner of the entire conference. When an audience member suggested an alternative software package to what he used, he replied by saying he’d been married to his wife for 27 years and he was pretty happy with her as well – had the audience in stitches. Peter Serzo dragged a freakin’ piano from the lobby to his session room at 2am and spent another hour practicing. Then the next day he presented half of his conference seated at the piano playing various ditties. Brilliant stuff.

Both of your presentations set off all sorts of light globes in my head, and set the creative juices flowing. I really believe there is the nucleus of something special there and I feel some future collaboration in the very near future.  Andrew Woodward will definitely be a part of it (although he doesn’t know it yet – hehe).

So, who knows? If the feedback from my sessions is good, I might manage to wrangle an appearance at the UK one?

Hi all

I have been extremely quiet on the blogging front lately, because I have been extremely busy, splitting my time between working on my two presentations for the up-coming Best Practices SharePoint Conference, as well as wearing my undies on the outside (ala superman), deep in the bowels of some unhealthy SharePoint farms, nailing various technical and governance issues and helping organisations regain some lost assurance. On top of that, I’ve also been doing a lot of non IT related work in a group facilitation discipline.

I thought it’s about time I emerged from this big mushroom I find myself under to let you know more about what I will be speaking about, as well as some of the other speakers and topics that I really looking forward to. Seriously, we are in the company of giants with this conference. The caliber and quality of the speakers has me wondering what the hell I am doing there!

I mean we have all the "A list" big kids of the SharePoint world there. Gary Lapointe is a freakin’ bona fide superstar! – via his STSADM extensions, he has saved the asses of more SharePoint admins and developers than even Joel has. Robert Bogue is an even better all-rounder than Andrew Symonds (sorry non cricketing countries you won’t get that analogy) and touches on a wider variety of topics than anyone else I have ever come across. Then there the likes of Andrew Woodward, Ben Curry, Bob Mixon, Eric Shupps, fellow metalhead Mike Watson, Ruven Gotz and Todd Bleeker just to name a few!

Somehow I have to squeeze in a beer with all of them yet stay sober enough to present. That’s a tough ask!

Anyway, both of my sessions are in the CIO stream and I think are rather topical given the current financial crisis crap that is happening around the world.

My first session is called "How to avoid SharePoint becoming a wicked problem". This is a pet topic of mine – something that I have spent a lot of time on, and developing new skills in (hence the aforementioned facilitation work). For the record, I didn’t make up the term "wicked problem" – its been a subject of academic research since the term was first coined in the early 1970’s. This session is going to cover a lot of what I have learned on this topic including how to spot SharePoint wickedness early, recognise it for what it is, and apply the *right* sort of tools and techniques to mitigate it.

I do worry that people will find some of my stuff a little too left field, but I do have the results to attest to the value and power of these techniques and I am really looking forward to sharing my methods and comparing with what has worked for other presenters and attendees.

The second topic is on the topic of good old SharePoint Return on Investment (ROI). I’m one of these people that believe most things can be measured or quantified. I’ve always wanted to return to my series on "How to Speak to your CFO" and continue down that road. Given we have entered once in a lifetime era of falling profit, plummeting asset prices, reduced budgets, costlier finance and great uncertainty, my quest for bringing a lasting peace to the cold war between managers and geeks moves to San Diego 🙂

My aim for this session is to allow non SharePoint people to understand where some of the hidden costs are SharePoint, as well as show SharePoint people the basic financial tools for ROI modelling and secondly, I will explain how to build an ROI decision model and provide a scenario that we will try out some different assumptions with.

As for the rest of the veritable *buffet* of topics – where do you start? First up, I am torn between Bill’s "Aligning your Information and Findability Architectures using SharePoint Server 2007 Technologies" and Yoda Bogue’s "Selling Governance in your Organization". If I go to Bill’s session, then I’ll definitely be attending Robert’s Governing Development in SharePoint session.

In the afternoon, it gets even harder! You have "Transform the My Site into an Information Hub" by Mark Eichenberger, Bob Mixon’s "Learn why Taxonomies are the Most Important Part of any Document or Information Asset Management System, How to Facilitate the Government out of Governance by Virgin Carrol and Nuts and Bolts Governance- Practical Application of the Concepts

.. and that’s just day one!

Seriously people, no matter that sort of SharePoint sub disciplines push your buttons, you are going to get extreme value for money here. You will come away with an amazing amount of material that will result in real and tangible cost savings across various areas of the SharePoint realm.

If you live in California or anywhere in the US – there is no excuse 🙂 If *I* have to spend 25+ hours cooped up in  plane just to get there and survive the jet-lag to present, then you should come on down and join the fun.

Hope to see you there!

Paul Culmsee