Multi-location brainstorming

 Technology  5 Responses »
Nov 122008
 

In my cur­rent pro­ject at Sun, I’m pro­gram manager/project lead­er for a team that is spread over sev­er­al loc­a­tions. Up till now we’ve man­aged with phone calls and email and wikis and occa­sion­al phys­ic­al meet­ings, but with travel budgets being cut, I’d like to explore oth­er ways of col­lab­or­at­ing that give more of the “group clustered around a white­board” feel when we need it. It is often the case that group dis­cus­sions lead to bet­ter designs and bet­ter ideas than indi­vidu­als alone tend to come up with; how do we make those group dis­cus­sions work bet­ter when we can­’t all attend one phys­ic­al meet­ing? What tools, or books, or best prac­tices exist that I haven’t heard of yet? Wikis have many uses in multi-loc­a­tion soft­ware devel­op­ment, but they don’t give that spark that I’m look­ing for. What does?

EWF 2008

 Conference  1 Response »
Nov 122008
 

The Exec­ut­ive Women’s For­um is a con­fer­ence put on for women involved in inform­a­tion secur­ity at a leadership/executive level, and I had the chance to go for the first time this year. I’ve nev­er been to an all-women con­fer­ence before and although I have mixed feel­ings (it is, after all, inher­ently dis­crim­in­at­ory to exclude men) I found it worth­while. I met some very inter­est­ing people and had a chance to think about some issues that I don’t often run across in my daily pro­ject work, as well as a dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive on some issues such as risk man­age­ment that are rel­ev­ant to my daily work. I also got the chance to try out play­ing golf for the first time as part of a net­work­ing event pre-con­fer­ence, which was an exper­i­ence that left my right upper arm/shoulder sore for a couple of days after­wards! Oh well, all par for the course as a golf new­bie, I expect.

One not­able dif­fer­ence to many oth­er con­fer­ences I’ve atten­ded: the lack of pos­tur­ing. Most people there were genu­inely inter­ested in dis­cuss­ing the issues at hand rather than prov­ing how good they were (yes, there were excep­tions, but they were few). That made the event more valu­able, and a lot more fun.

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