Skip to main content

Mentoring intranet folks


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 for a day or half day a month to work over the course of six months or more with a person.

The goals for each day's visit had to be defined prior to the specialist / consultant turning up so that they I could see we were getting value from the visit, so the specialist / consultant could prepare and so that the staff member being visited had concrete value they could demonstrate to the wider team.

Generally each visit consisted of some time having hard to solve problems talked through and possible solutions outlined. The other part of the visit would involve project / professional development activities. The professional development was directed so that it was of value to our organisation.

This arrangement was very well received by my team. From my perspective I got difficult issues resolved rather than left behind as well as up skilling my team. Other benefits were that my team found out about other ways of working from the visiting specialist / consultant, and discovered other organisations and individuals who do what they do. Often the peer relationships provided free advice and help when times were tight.

For intranet folks in New Zealand, and I believe around the world this mentoring model is a great solution to the problem of working a field which is relatively new, has little or no training, and few obvious career development opportunities.

So my challenge to you is . . . . 

Comment below and let me know things you taught your fellow intranet folks that they thought were SUPER AWESOME. They can be in your organisation, working across the road or somewhere else around the world.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To setup rails on IIS and enable it for multiple Applications. START Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1 IIS 6 RUBY Install ruby 185_22_rc2.exe You don't have to put it in c:\ruby I created the following folder c:\webdata\ruby, then ran the install. Run install into c:\webdata and say "YES" to deleting the existing ruby directory. During the install I ticked SciTE and Enable RubyGems Took 10mins 1000s of files Ruby GEMS Install Ruby Gems 0.9.1 (don't change it from the defaults) Extract zip file to temp directory, then double click setup.rb, does the default install (about 5mins) Then run at the command line gem pristine --all c:\> gem pristine --all I tried to install Ruby Gems in a particular directory, but couldn't get it working because if you use the command line SET command to put a value into GEM_HOME when the ruby gems installer setup.rb reads the registry it doesn't account for the fact that values in the registry contain double b...
4 comments
Read more

Yammer and puddles

Recently I was asked " What are the top 10 points you think are important to get across to staff at all levels in an organisation about Yammer? " My initial reaction was "Tough ask", mainly because I've seen great write ups on what organisations get out of Yammer but very few that talk directly to the user benefits. Many articles give the usual cop out "users can't see the point, until they get it" I admit I was in that boat when I started using Twitter, a public micro blogging platform. But just like they said "once I used it I got it". What they didn't say was that it took a while and it suits certain people better than others. So as with all things in the social media space, be aware that culture change not the technology may be your biggest challenge. So what does Yammer, a microblogging platform for organisational use , do for real employees that is compelling enough for them to spend the time to "Get it" ? First off Y...
6 comments
Read more

Role Title on profiles

Today one of the people I follow on Twitter asked the following question. @ChristySeason Asking all #intranet tweeps: Does your company publish employees' titles on your employee directory/look up/phone book? In following Intranets Live I've been lucky enough to see some great intranets. As such I was able to reply to Christy with the following Nokia do Deloitte do (see the end of the post) Christy's question also prompted me to document my own intranet's profile page. The following image is from the view other's get of my profile. When I look at my profile I see every item that is recorded. I'll save you from that, another post perhaps, if you're interested. DorjeM PS a couple of Vendors I've been reminded of, thanks Crhis and Carolyn, also have screen shots of their profile pages on the web: ThoughtFarmer - intranet software - slideshow of screen shots and Intranet connections - software solution
2 comments
Read more