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!

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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

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Welcome to the fifth article in my series on fostering mutual love and respect between those know-it-all smartarse technical geeks and the guys who do their taxes!  This is the final SharePoint scenario that I will cover in this series, but there will be some more articles coming later, as we further look at the financial side of things.

To recap, the first article introduced the financial concept of discount cash flow, net present value and internal rate of return. Next, we discussed how I came up with the three scenarios and the assumptions and methodology behind valuing the scenarios, which placed a specific emphasis on costing the holistic view of governance. The last two articles, here and here, covered the first two scenarios, where we showed the circumstances where the project had a good outcome, and a not so good outcome.

So, for the last time around, we are going to take on a difficult SharePoint scenario. This is the scenario where SharePoint is used as the platform to build a custom web application.

Continue reading “Learn to talk to your CFO: Web Application Scenario – Part 5″

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Welcome to the fourth article in my series that attempts to bridge the cultural divide between nerds and accountants. Unfortunately there are more differences to these two strange species than just fashion sense and whether a pocket calculator is in their possession. But despite being poles apart about what pushes their buttons, at the end of the day they are both trying to achieve a positive result.

The first article introduced the financial concept of discount cash flow, net present value and internal rate of return. Next, we discussed how I came up with the three scenarios and the assumptions and methodology behind valuing the scenarios, which placed a specific emphasis on costing the holistic view of governance. .

The previous article to this one was the first of these three identified scenarios, internal corporate collaboration. This time, we are going to take on a popular SharePoint scenario centered around web content management (WCM).

Continue reading “Learn to talk to your CFO: WCM scenario – Part 4″

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Hi. This is the third article in a series that attempts to explain some financial analysis techniques to non financial oriented IT people. My first two articles in this series were theory and background and this is the first of three scenarios that illustrates an example.

This first scenario is an example of SharePoint as a collaborative solution. It also happens to be the scenario that for my money, carries with it the most risk. But at the same time, SharePoint is well suited to this sort of solution if you follow my branding and document management wisdom

Continue reading “Learn to talk to your CFO : Collaboration scenario – Part 3″

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Hi, there.

It’s been a while since my last post but the whole issue of having a life and earning money kind of got in the way. In addition I have been procrastinating a little, because writing about technical and programming type issues for me are a lot easier to write, compared to governance, strategy and financial matters.

To recap on my last post, I wrote about a common technique used to assess the value of an investment. I discussed the time effect on money, the concept discount cash-flow and some of the related calculations like Net Present Value (NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR). If you have not read that article, I strongly suggest that you do so before continuing.

Continue reading “Learn to talk to your CFO in their language – Part 2″

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Nerds and CFO’s. If there is ever a group of people who don’t know how to talk to each other, it would be those two. Perhaps, I should write a book and call it “Nerds are From Mars, CFO’s are from Venus” (ok for those of you who did not get that little joke go here).

Now, not so long ago, I was a serious nerd. Not in a ‘have the latest gadget and bash Microsoft ‘cos it’s cool’ sense, but I got very deeply involved in the guts of the technology. I was heavy into infrastructure and security. Got a few certs to make my business cards and CV look good, etc. In addition, I *thought* that I understood business. I wrote reports and memos that used all the right ‘business sounding’ cliches. In my security work I wrote lovely risk assessments, good security policies, etc. I wrote technical architectures in loving detail, outlining the technical vision and strategy for the company going forward.

Continue reading “Learn to talk to your CFO in their language – Part 1″

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