EndUserSharePoint.com Online Study Group with Michael Sampson: Important Update
The time for Week 2 of the Seamless Teamwork Live Study Group is rapidly approaching, but with the overwhelming number of people wanting in, Mark and I have been brainstorming about the best way to deliver the sessions to the entire the group at no charge, not just a small subset of paying participants.
The original format vs the new format
The original idea of the Study Group was to present a live virtual conference call and webinar format, with live Q&A at the end. There was also going to be a charge to attend the session from Week 2 … it was $10 a week, so $120 for the whole course.
What we are planning now is to open the gates to participation, albeit with a few differences from before.
- First up, there will be no charge to participate. All 13 weeks of the Live Study Group will be made available for viewing … at no charge.
- Second, there will be a “live” component to it, but the session won’t be held live at Wednesday 3pm … it will be published then, and recorded earlier in the week.
- Third, if you want to be involved in the live component, you may just get an invitation on a week-by-week basis.
How it works…
Here’s how the third part works.
In advance of each weekly session, you need to review the corresponding chapter. So for this coming week, that’s Chapter 1. Read it over, think it through, and then if you have a question or a discussion point to raise, type that out as a comment on this post.
Mark and I will review the comments in advance of the recording time, and will extend an invitation to come to the live recording to those who have the best / most interesting / most fruitful discussion points or questions.
So if you had the 3pm Wednesday slot in your calendar for this week, we’ll still be there, but as a recording. To come live to the live session on Tuesday, get reading and get typing. Mark and I are recording the session at Tuesday 3pm EST for this week … so that means you have about 24 hours …
Looking forward to hearing from you below.
Michael Sampson, author, Seamless Teamwork
Mark Miller, Founder and Editor, EndUserSharePoint.com
So after reading Chapter 1 it appears that it is wise to not only have allies but also a stakeholder presence of a “enemy”. That sounds a bit scary. It makes sense as you need that point of view to demonstrate the capabilites of SharePoint as a solution. I am interested to find out what clues can be had when you are getting through to that type of stakeholder. More importantly is if there is ever a point we you lose his interest completely.
“So why do we work in teams anyway?” This is a question that is somewhat like a double-edged sword. The advantages of bringing people together in a room to “create” can bring out the best of some people and the worst of others, causing what is commonly know as “analysis paralysis”. Strong team members may want the floor all the time making it difficult for others to contribute. More timid team members might be hesitant about sharing their ideas. I see this idea of using Sharepoint as a way to offer both personalities the ability to share their ideas on a more level playing field. However, I say this with some reservation,in that the written word also has the ability to cause that same “analysis paralysis”. In either case, the organizational skills of the team leader are very import. This brings me to my real question. How does a team leader avoid having SharePoint serve as a platform for the strong orator who now just uses the written work vs. the spoken word? I’m looking forward to the next session.
Nice job of making this available to more people yet still offering a way for us to participate!
I can certainly relate to Roger being told to use SharePoint when he had little idea what it was. That’s largely what happened at my organization, of course we were supposed to figure out how to use it, report back, and fit it in between our other work.
I’m on a support team, so at least there are long term benefits to using SharePoint for us, but there has been a lot more push back from project teams. They feel like they’re duplicating work between SharePoint and regular intranet publishing. On larger initiatives, there is no one to take the time to push for maximizing SharePoint use and you often see the LAN reconstructed in SharePoint Libraries.
I guess that’s where things like endusersharepoint and Seamless Teamwork come in handy. You can use some of the suggestions in here to help show where SharePoint can be more than document storage on a web site.
The best part has been being able to point everyone to one document out on the SharePoint site and work from there. Though sometimes getting an alert and email from someone letting me know that they made some updates or added a discussion item add some amusement.
I never received the email with the link from last weeks session, where are those located?
Earl – Here you go:
http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1294
A couple examples that illustrate the benefit of wiki collaboration vs email
Wikis in Plain English http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english
Email vs Wiki Collaboration
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_B_zarvE7sNg/SAVXsm3Kf4I/AAAAAAAAAGU/qUzQnacHSsM/s1600-h/wiki+vs+email.jpg
Looking forward to tomorrow’s session.
My challenge is twofold; I must champion SharePoint while simultaneously learning to use it. Potential “enemy” stakeholders demand proven sucess stories before wanting to commit their time toward creation of solutions that may or may not result in more work for them. Meanwhile, the technology is so new here, there aren’t proven success stories yet. And even if there were, when it comes to SharePoint, one person sees as a “success” may have zero value to the other. In addition, my company’s tams are so entrenched in their ways they fall back on old methods in spite of themselves. I build it and they won’t come, all the while praising my work. Then I hear them complain about “not getting that last status report.” Sob.
I share Nancy’s dilemma of not being able to find a problem that The Powers That Be will permit me to solve.
In addition, I’ve been tasked with duplicating the same architecture that made the move to Sharepoint necesary.
“Make the new one look like the old one”.
Oh, and anything with a Web Part is ‘Not Sharepoint.’ — go fight that.
I’m a Project Manager (indepedent consultant) and use Sharepoint team sites on all my applications IT projects now. Each new company I go to has its own challenges in accepting and adopting Sharepoint for its projects, including:
- fear of the technology or being overwhelmed with all the “parts” (documents, issues, tasks)
- uncertainty how and when to update the Sharepoint site or perception that it is extra work
- lack of access to the site by 3rd party team members
- overwhelming “Outook” culture, too married to email to evolve, won’t take the time to learn
With persistence (and sometimes logging others’ items for them) I finally get success but it’s hard to get the whole team adoption needed for really achieving the benefits.
Hi all, I don’t promise to do this every week, but I have shared some ideas and thoughts on many of the questions above over on my blog, at http://currents.michaelsampson.net/2009/02/studygroupwk2q.html.
Looking forward to hearing from you re Chapter 2 … there will be a post here on EndUserSharePoint.com about that soon.
My best,
M.