DorjeM

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...

SA Hotel Trat, Thailand Online services for those who are travelling tend to be all about the supplier, or middle man, and not really for the person who will actually use the service. For 8 months now my family and I have been travelling from the UK back across the world to New Zealand. Every few days we have been looking for a new hotel. And the hotel sites , and the cheap room sites all have their flaws. So when we found the website for the SA Hotel in Trat Thailand we exclaimed loud and long how good it was. http://www.sahotel.in.th/ I'll warn you now it isn't pretty - but if like us you've looked at a lot of pretty hotel websites and still not really been able to make up your mind if it is the right place to stay I feel for you. The best online presences for hotels are invariably those run by people who own and live at their own properties, and who are doing something different. A case in point is Les Manguiers  http://www.mangokampot.com/  which again isn...

After three years and six months at Lincoln University I am now officially unemployed and heading away on a gap year for grown ups with my family. I started at Lincoln University in the position of Online Services Manager in October 2009. In April 2012 I became the Applications group manager as well as the online services manager. A friend in the US said “a Mexican promotion – two jobs, one salary”, which it was but it was more than that as well. I became responsible for a team of six people who helped me and whom I hope I helped. It is them and the other people I worked with at Lincoln University that I really tried to express my thanks to in my leaving speech. I’m blogging my speech because my dad asked for a copy and several people were unable to attend. It starts using the Maori language and ends using the Tibetan language. ---------------- Te whare tipuna e tu nei Te University e takoto nei Tena korua Nga hau e wha Nga iwi e tau nei Tena koutou katoa Thank you...

Wow - it's rolled around again. Intranets 2013 registrations are about to open and this year you can bring the intranet / digital workplace love into your personal life [which I'm sure you all do because you live and breathe intranets 24/7] via the Intranets2013 FaceBook page https://www.facebook.com/Intranets2013 15th - 17th of May in Sydney you'll be able to experience the best Intranet conference in Australia, Austral asia, the world - that I've ever been too. http://www.steptwo.com.au/conference This year Sam Marshall (Clearbox consulting) , Matthew Phillips (Intranetizen) and Kim Sbarcea are presenting. Looking forward to it.

Just one of the many great slides used during the team presentations. Today each team presented their case studies to the Faculty members (those running and presenting the conference) and to the other attendees. Five teams with five very different approaches to presenting the same material. Each of the teams during the week had perceived different aspects of the material we have had presented to us. And so Carrie's presentation, which went into Rashomon effect , played out in large. The material that resonated with each group, they reflected back through their presentations. So we ended up with five different views of the past five days, through the presentations. All were funny, some were inspired and a couple were wonderful. Prior to lunch and heading home, the summing up included a couple of great end of event exercises. The first provided the opportunity to set goals and have them followed up on. The later one gave every person a chance to express themselves in the cont...

Hot damn I finally got a swim. By the end of the day to day my team, team sky, was pretty burnt out so Andrew, Abbey, Yasna and I plus a couple of others did the pools. There are three. We should all probably have been working but we probably aren't ever going to get the chance to talk and swim at the same time again. Three very interesting (for me) and different sessions today Carrie Regenstein of Carnegie Mellon - took us through successful influencing. Marnie Hughes-Warrington of ANU - gave us a tour de-force of what a great presentation can be. Passionate, direct and inspiring. It covered a Deuputy Vice-Chancellor's view of senior managers issues and design principles for a modern university. She also answered some curly questions from the attendees. Judy Stokker provided a building block for all attendees - how to actively manage your career. The Caudit cocktail - thanks to Nimrod / Karina and team green Active and Reflect have been two common themes ...