DorjeM

For my CV I just tried to document when I started the Kiwi Intranets group. It was a little harder than I thought but thanks to the Way Back Machine I found out the date. http://web.archive.org/web/20050623011812/http://www.brightstar.co.nz/calendar_conferences.htm For 5 years I'd been slaving away working on an intranet and then I suddenly discovered there was a conference about the topic! Eureka. And even better it was in Auckland rather than overseas. Yeah! And even better my boss at the time had enough training money for me to be able to go, as long as I stayed with my sister. So on August 15th 2005 I turned up at the venue in down town Auckland, tried the coffee and ran round the block to get something was coffee rather than just having a coffee label. The day blew me away, literally. I remember seeing Dan Randow and Mia Morrish speak about their respective recent activities. By the end of the day I was really buzzing and so when I left the after event drinks, I walke...

From :  https://flic.kr/p/inW8ZS I ran a team of application developers at a New Zealand University for over a year. One of the aspects of that role which I really enjoyed was working with each team member on their personal development. With the people I was working with we found that individual mentoring was very effective. Traditionally organisations have training budgets. The training budget is often used to send technical folks on a one, two or more day training course. In some cases the money is used to send people to a vendor or practitioner focused conference. In my experience the training courses are given by either the technically gifted or those new to the field. Neither tend to be good trainers or teachers. In my own experience and from the results I saw within my team there is a better way. We agreed as a group that where possible we would forgo the poor quality training and the questionable conferences and use the money to get a specialist / consultant in...

Photo by mbiebusch Do you have the option for your staff to receive notifications via email from the intranet ? If you do these notifications may be stopping your staff from getting a good nights sleep and working at their best the next day. Christopher Barnes on the Harvard Business Review blog, in his article "workers disengaged" ,  provides evidence of how damaging late night phone/device checking can be on performance the next day. So if you're running an intranet and you allow staff to sign up for notifications or updates when changes are made have you optimised the scheduled tasks and cron jobs so that they don't send the notifications out in the middle of the night ? Sharepoint has this feature allowing people to setup notifications when changes are made to libraries folders and lists they are interested in. Do you modify the jobs so that emails don't go out and disturb everyone's sleep ? How else do the systems you have setup, which run w...