After two years of hard work, Seven Sigma are proud to announce that Paul’s book, “The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices” is now available for purchase. This book would not have been possible if it were not for Seven Sigma’s wonderful clients who have provided some amazing opportunities and case studies.

“Paul has written the book I wish I had: The Heretic’s Guide explains why IT/software (and other) projects go sideways using wit, humour and solid facts that identify the real reason for failure – we, the people, and our cognitive biases.

If you are a project manager, business analyst or general agitator and fomentor of trouble you need to read this book. It will challenge your assumptions, make you uncomfortable, smack you upside the head and then pick you up, dust you off and tell you why you’re feeling a lot like Neo in The Matrix.” – Chris Chapman

With the assistance of the legendary, not to mention intelligent Erica Toelle, of Fpweb.net, Seven Sigma has delivered another sold out SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class, this time in beautiful Seattle.

Although this is aimed at SharePoint crowd, the common feedback theme is the request to allocate much more time on Issue Mapping. Issue Mapping is one of many tools we at Seven Sigma have gained expertise over the years and one of many tools covered within the 2-day course. And yet, attendees continue to want to spend more time on that than SharePoint-related content

This class is not to teach attendees Issue Mapping; it only provides attendees with a very basic introduction on its effectiveness in gaining shared understanding amongst participants. For those who want to learn this technique in order to use it effectively, we offer a two-day Issue Mapping Master Class.

Overall feedback for the #spiasea was fantastic, scoring a 4.6 out of 5! Timing was the common factor that brought the score down. If you don’t already know, this class was originally a 4-dayer. From the 4-dayer, certain labs were removed and the content condensed to its current form. Admittedly, it is still very intense for 2 days, however Paul, wanting to give attendees value for their money, decided to keep it intense rather than cutting back on content, knowing that you all can handle the pace

For those interested to know thoughts of those who attended the #spiasea class, read below for Twitter comments..

jayincalgary

OMG. #spiasea was incredible! @paulculmsee is a legend. @ericatoelle is fantastic. @ruveng is awesome. Class is a winner!

SPSherm

Thanks @PaulCulmsee, great stuff, can’t wait to learn more & practice

benmcmann

thanks @paulculmsee @EricaToelle @ruveng for a great #SPIASEA. excellent course

ekcalder

just finished #SPIASEA awesome course! thanks @paulculmsee and @Ericatoelle

Read linkedin comments… more

Michal Pisarek

I think its by far the best course that I have been to on SharePoint or Project Management. To give you an example of how much of an impact it made on myself and the other guys from Habanero, the term “Shared Understanding” has already started to make an appearance in the vocabulary here. 4 copies of Dialogue Mapping have been bought with a few of the BA’s sitting in on internal meetings to practice the technique.

Bart Louwagie

From a non profit it seemed like a risky investment before I got there. I could not have been more wrong. Paul used every minute of the day to add the next great thought, tool, and idea, not holding anything back. Leaps and ounds of progress in understanding for me.

Ben McMann

The course was fantastic. Several of the concepts were confirmation of the work I have been doing over the last 5 years. My biggest takeway comes from a better understanding of the toolstack to help companies utilize SharePoint in a more effective manner, and the research behind why and when to utilize them.

The process to get groups of people to come to an agreed understanding on what they really want to accomplish – and then steer them down a road to effectively implementing solutions to accomplish that – is something I will take with me for the rest of my career.

Thank you all for the great feedback. Keep spreading the word for the next #spia.

Cheers to all

Contact: Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au/contactus/

+61 8 9474 2601

Launching SamePage Alliance  with 2-day SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class

London, 22th – 23th November, 2010

PERTH, Western Australia – Seven Sigma Business Solutions and 21apps announced today that they have come together to form SamePage Alliance to offer their clients the benefits of both companies’ expertise globally.

This move will enable 21apps to bring Seven Sigma designed and developed training services to the UK and broader EU, covering SharePoint 2010 Governance and Information Architecture, as well as sensemaking tools and techniques.  21apps gains the benefits of Seven Sigma’s partner network, making world class project management, facilitation and community engagement skills available to its clients.

Seven Sigma will leverage 21apps’ tools, methodologies and extensive experience in the delivery of true quality development on the SharePoint platform and provide training and advisory services for all 21apps’ tools and courseware.

Andrew Woodward, Founder and CEO of 21apps, stated that this alliance has been in discussion for a while with finer details recently being consolidated. This alliance will benefit both Seven Sigma and 21apps’ clients as they can tap into the key strengths of both organisations.

To launch this collaboration, SamePage Alliance will be running a 2-day SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class, in London 22nd and 23rd November, 2010. This will be an abridged version of the course offered for the Microsoft NZ Elite Program, run by 3grow, and focussing mainly on SharePoint Governance f-Laws. This Master Class is perfectly suited to Business Analysts, Project and Program Managers, Enterprise and Information Architects,  IT Managers and those in strategic roles that have to bridge the gap between organisational aspirations and the effective delivery of SharePoint solutions.

For more information, please visit:

 www.samepage.co

www.21apps.co.uk 

Download the  SamePage Alliance press release.

Session: SharePoint 2010 Killer App: Who let the content out?

“Despite its integration and collaboration ascendency, SharePoint lives in an Enterprise ecosystem where the effort to expose and integrate with the many existing content silos is still just too great. Well, help is at hand. I will cover what form this help takes in SharePoint 2010, how to prepare for it, how to beat your recalcitrant suppliers over the head, what it delivers and what it doesn’t.

I’ll do this while avoiding many of the boring technical bits and trying not to use the word ‘standard’ too many times.”

Target Audience: IT Pros, Decision Makers and Architects (only the one trekkie badge).

Seven Sigma specializes in the “people” side of SharePoint, using tools and methods that help a diverse group develop the shared understanding and commitment to seeing their investment succeed.

Teaming up with our partners at DebateGraph, Seven Sigma’s DebateGraph WebPart is a free tool that represents an experiment in meeting the goal of truly “living” document that tries to demystify SharePoint governance in a novel way.

Place the web part on any SharePoint site and view our latest group-thinking on this critical, yet misunderstood topic.

Key features and benefits of the Seven Sigma DebateGraph webpart:

• Unique method to explore complex, interrelated topics in an intuitive way.
• Leverage the DebateGraph argument rating and visualisation engine to validate arguments on merit
• Promotes shared understanding of SharePoint governance among all participants of your project.
• Augment your own governance planning within your organisation.
• Simple to install, deploy and configure.
• Display any of the hundreds of excellent maps on the Debategraph site inside your portal
• Never stale every time your site loads, the latest “thinking” is displayed.
• Directly contribute to the governance map for the benefit of all.
• Create your own Debategraph maps and render them inside SharePoint.

More on this project to come.