The workshops were very well received. We are proud to say that Paul received a well deserved round of applause at the end of his workshop. One attendee in Wellington informed Paul that it was not what he had expected but much more than he had expected.

Attendees were introduced to f-Laws, "truths about organisations that we might wish to deny or ignore—simple and  more reliable guides to everyday behaviour than the complex truths proposed by scientists, economists,  sociologists, politicians and philosophers,” (Russell Ackoff) and practical tools to implement a more successful SharePoint outcome.

The take home messages of this governance workshop were not limited only to SharePoint but were rather pertinent to a large range of projects.

The Seven Sigma SharePoint Governance f-Laws will be part of the Information Architecture course, which Paul will present on 9th August, 2010 in New Zealand.

Our half-day f-Laws internal workshop will be held on request. Open half-day and full-day workshops will be advertised soon so stay tune to this space.

For more information on the Seven Sigma SharePoint Governance f-Laws workshop, please download the course information below.

Friday will be SharePoint Workshop day and Seven Sigma’s Paul Culmsee will be conducting his SharePoint Governance workshop. Be sure to register for this session quickly as places are filling up.

Paul will also be holding the same Workshop the week after at the Sydney conference. This workshop looks like it will be a sellout as places are also filling up.

Seven Sigma is also one of the Silver Sponsors at the Sydney conference. Paul and Chris will be the booth babes for the two days so be sure to drop by our booth for a friendly but informative chat. The boys will be holding live demonstrations on the wonders of IBIS.

So catch you all at the Seven Sigma booth.

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).

Contact:
Paul Culmsee
http://www.sevensigma.com.au/contact-us.html

Phone: +61 8 94742601

Seven Sigma’s unique sensemaking methods continue to impress in the public sector. Most recently we have been engaged by the WA Department of Transport to provide strategic advisory, envisioning, problem structuring and goal alignment services for a long term, key ICT project. By applying a unique combination of the principles of Breakthrough Thinking with the craft of Dialogue Mapping and Seven Sigma’s own problem structuring techniques, we provide a rigorous, systematic process that allows the project team and stakeholders to rapidly converge to a shared understanding of a complex, multifaceted project.

Breakthrough Thinking is a systematic problem structuring method that aligns particularly well with traditional project management methodologies. It is described by its authors (Nadler and Hibino) as “extending the creating process to determine the right purposes to be accomplished, generate a large number of imaginative and useful options and develop the systems you need to implement effective solutions”.

Dialogue Mapping is a novel facilitation method, practiced exclusively by Seven Sigma, that allows groups to better deal with the sort of tricky, complex problems that typically cause a group stress, chaos and pullback. This is achieved by a trained dialogue mapper, facilitating the conversation, while capturing the various threads of an issue and then expressing it visually in the form of an argument ‘map’. This visual map represents the collected rationale in a simple, easy to understand form that allows participants to see all of the points of view in a cohesive fashion. The ultimate purpose of the map is to capture and share the collective knowledge of all the participants without prejudice. The map is presented in a format that can be easily understood by all observers.

Come join Paul and demystify wicked problems within your SharePoint world.

Seven Sigma Business Solutions is a Perth, West Australian, strategic advisory and sensemaking practice, specialising in SharePoint and Dialogue Mapping. Seven Sigma is uniquely skilled in the discipline of Dialogue Mapping, the only recognised Cognexus Designated Partner in the world. This partnership will now be open to New Zealand through Knowledge Cue. Seven Sigma director Paul Culmsee is a well-known figure in SharePoint planning and governance via his Cleverworkarounds.com web site. Knowledge Cue will provide introductory Issue Mapping Courses and Training in New Zealand in the coming months.

Knowledge Cue specialises in SharePoint planning, architecture and training in New Zealand and with their training partnership with Combined Knowledge Asia Pacific provide end to end SharePoint training solutions in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore , Hong Kong  and Malaysia.

For more information please contact sharepoint@knowledgecue.co.nz

After the success of the SharePoint Saturdays in the US, the free educational SharePoint Saturday event has finally arrived in sunny Perth. Seven Sigma has sponsored the production of the showbags for this event.

It will be a full day with speakers from US and interstate as well as local and ending with the famous SharePint. Free breakfast and lunch will be provided for the day. A Speaker Dinner has also been organised.

The event contains 24 sessions divided into 3 streams:

• 200 – IT Pro
• 300 – Information Worker
• 400 – Developer

Seven Sigma’s experienced Peter Chow and Paul Culmsee will be up on the podium to impart pearls of wisdom to all.

Peter will be presenting Integrating SharePoint With Real Time Performance Data in the IT Pro stream. Peter will present an approach to integrating real-time performance data from OSIsoft’s PI system with an ITIL inspired IT Portal using SQL Server Reporting Services.

Paul’s presentation will be in the Information Worker stream and is titled Wicked Problems & SharePoint. This session introduces the concept and characteristics of wicked problems, why SharePoint projects are predisposed to falling foul of them and why traditional project management and governance approaches can in fact make the situation far worse. The session will also reveal the *one* best-practice that should be adopted before any other best-practice, with a simple, yet practical method to do so.

Courtesy of Seven Sigma, Paul and Peter will be giving away spot prizes during their presentation. So make sure you attend.

Special thanks to:

• Dux Raymond Sy and O’Reilly for donating 10 ‘SharePoint for Project Management’ books as giveaway prizes
• Michael Sampson and Apress for donating 10 ‘SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration” books as giveaway prizes and discount vouchers for the book and workshop
• Brett Lonsdale and Manning Publications for donating 5 ‘Developers Guide to the Business Data Catalog’ and discount vouchers for all Lightning Tools’ products
• Bjorn Furuknap for his first issue of SP2010, a compilation of a series of 6 issues, FREE.

For more information on SharePoint Saturday Perth check out http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/perth

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.

•  Event: New Zealand SharePoint Conference
• Date: 9th – 10th June, 2010
• Venue: Duxton Hotel, 170 Wakefield Street, Wellington, 6110, New Zealand
• Cost: $600 + GST (I think this is in $NZ!)

This will be New Zealand’s biggest SharePoint event for 2010 so register fast! You will learn about SP 2007 as well as the 2010 version.

There will be local New Zealand and international speakers, including Seven Sigma’s own PAUL CULMSEE. This will be Paul’s second time round at the NZ SP conference as a speaker. He wowed attendees with his talk last year and this time Paul plans to have more to add to keep things interesting.

Sessions will be grouped into three different streams:

• Business
• Technical
• Voice of the Customer

and further grouped into experience level:

• No previous experience expected
• Some previous experience or knowledge of concepts expected
• Technical experience expected

This Conference will contain SharePoint information for all and some of the roles covered are:

• Business Roles: For examples End Users, Business Champions, Power Users and Business Managers
• Information Architects, Record and Information Managers
• IT Managers, CIO and Decision Makers
• Technical Roles including Developers, IT Pro, Systems Administration and DBA’s

Technologies to be covered will include:

• WSS 3.0 (Windows SharePoint Services)
• MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server)
• SharePoint Foundation 2010
• SharePoint Server 2010
• SSharePoint Designer 2007 and 2010
• Intergration with Office 2007 and 2010, including InfoPath, Excel, Access and Visio
• Intergration with 3rd Party products enhancing SharePoint functionality

Visit http://www.sharepointconference.co.nz for more information and registrationn.