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

Be one of the first in Australia to understand and implement SharePoint 2010 the way the experts do.

 Click here for more information on these courses.

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.

More on this project to come.

Fortunately for Seven Sigma, we have not been affected. Paul, Chris and Peter have been in constant demand, our clients keeping them busy on their toes throughout the year. Mike,stationed at Chevron, also equally busy.

This is Seven Sigma’s second year in operation. And it has been a successful year. To thank our clients we took the opportunity to celebrate Christmas 2009 with them mid last week at the Broken Hill Hotel. Due to the lateness of our invitation, we were not able to share a few drinks with everyone.

The event was a very relaxed and informal affair. All appeared to leave thoughts of work behind them at the office while they mingled with each other.

To those who took the time out of their busy schedule to come and join us in our very first Christmas celebration, we are honoured by your presence.

To those who were unable to attend, we hope to see you next year.

From Seven Sigma, we wish you and yours a wonderful and joyous holiday.

We look forward to seeing you again next year.

This is one of the most complex yet critical problems facing humanity, and Chris hit upon the idea of utilising his sensemaking skills in making the dialogue and discourse from the summit available to a wider audience.

Chris realised that this could not be done alone, so he called in the assistance of his colleagues at Seven Sigma as well as his mentor, and inventor of Dialogue Mapping, Jeff Conklin of the Cognexus Institute for help. Jeff loved the idea, and put the word out to his small army of sense makers to mobilise.

Chris then contacted David Price of Debategraph, who also jumped at the plan. Debategraph is a terrific argument visualisation tool that allows rich global collaboration on difficult issues, presented in a way that is accessible and clear. This is a true collaborative effort that will allow the world to examine the deeper threads of the various, complex and interrelated issues forming the climate change challenge.

Our intention is to build a rich map of information taken from a variety of sources including live/delayed web casts of the conference and any other materials made available from the conference. The process of building the maps aims to be unbiased and all information is considered suitable content for the maps.

If you are interested in finding out more about this site, contributing and/or any other information please contact us.