It caught our eye to attend based on some of the speakers and topics that were being discussed.

Building a sustainable workforce strategy – Jyoti Sharma @JyotiSharma20

The concept of this talk was based on some key factors when building a team or a workforce to achieve something. These consist of:

• What Challenges
• What is sustainable
• How to measure
• Decipher the what
• Explore the how

During this session I was furiosly taking notes so I hope they make sense to all.

Challenge

• Over reliance of engagement plus retention strategies on competition
• Segmentation of workforce
• Talent of development
• Leadership Commitment in strategy and execution

Sustainability

We first have to look at the sustainability length are we talking 3-6 month, 1 year, 3 years, 5 years or longer. Longer probably doesn’t work as we do not know the future but depends on the nature of the workforce and the tasks in hand but beyond 5 it’s an unknown.

• Flexibility
• Creative
• Connected
• Compliance
• Sector Specific
• Performance orientated

Measure

• Higher resource utilisation
• Retention through multiple personas

There was a really good slide used by Jyoti here but I was unable to get a picture or a copy of the deck to show here.

What

• Game changing leadership
• Continous improvements and invesment
• Constant review

How

• Right talent in the right roles and the right time.
• Priorities
• Inspire as a collective

The final point was quite interesting for me as the team I am in are completely remote and we are based in all areas of the world, challenges around timezones and face to face interactions so we have to make sure that final point is 100% focused on the outcome.

Revisiting the notes I took through the event back in June and looking back through some of the other concepts has got me thinking about a few things on how to better use your time. But also just because something is working doesn’t mean it cannot be evolved to be more efficient.

Another thing to add here is around “Digital Transformation” last week I attended a Cloud Camp event in London again and they were asking the audience their description of the buzzword. Some marketing people may not like it being coined a buzzword but what is your opinion on it and why do we use it?

My short take on the term is that as we continue to evolve our lives through data and technology, process and workflows are going to be advanced to make better decisions and drive better outcomes because of the insights we glean from data. All in all my take on Digital Transformation is one of improving things through process by leveraging that data and technology.

The event was useful to look at things in a different manner to the usual technical bubble and events I usually attend. I will be looking for other thought leadership events to pick up more aspects of the business in the future.

It caught our eye to attend based on some of the speakers and topics that were being discussed.

If it isn’t easy, I won’t use it – Nick King – AutoTrader

This session I was really interested in, I knew Nick coming from AutoTrader was probably going to be talking about how making a simple easy to use website would be the key to success but I wanted to hear the terminology used here because one of the things that we have in heaps at Veeam is the simplicity of being able to protect workloads within the smallest of environments to the largest distributed IT infrastructures all using the same software.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” – Da Vinci

It was also interested to hear from Nick in his space regarding any impact on their website could damage them forever, he said as we know as consumers and as IT Professionals that a reputation can be made or lost within seconds.

He then went on to talk about “negative emotion” and that this negative emotion has a greater impact over performance, the analysis he used but I didn’t get the source was based on 4 negatives will over power 1 postive and then 5 positives to change 1 negative.

Gartner Hype Cycle of emerging technologies

The Hype Cycle is a report that looks at a range of technologies and concepts and tries to plot their maturity against the hype they are receiving.

This was where the session went next, it was something I was aware of and only really recently have I paid more attention to this and actually since the event there has been an update to the document.

You will need to have a Gartner account to access the full document but there are lots of spin off analysis that can be found over the internet with a simple google search.

However even from this page from Gartner, you can see the on the rise technologies to list a few:

Flying Autonomous Vehicles
Exoskeleton
Smart Dust

Then we see the at the peak of those emerging technolgies, this is what I believe to be in the now:

IoT Platform
Smart Robots
Blockchain

Nick then went on to speak about the “trough of disillusionment” I found this article quite interesting regarding Autonomous vehicles that have plunged into the trough.

It was very interesting to hear from Nick in regards to the AutoTrader model but then how that expands and overlaps all worlds within the IT industry.

It caught our eye to attend based on some of the speakers and topics that were being discussed. The reason for sharing this in the form of a blog post is really to refresh my memory but also for anyone that is looking outside the box from our day to day IT worlds,

The next 3 posts are going to touch on various different aspects with this one looking at the way we spend our time and the common misconception that if we put more hours in we are working harder, but working longer doesn’t always mean that.

The other two posts that will follow will touch on a different angle of simplicity and how much that simple approach needs to be included when we do anything because if it’s not easy we wont use it. The final post touches on some notes I took during the session based on building a sustainable workforce.

Lots of notes taken, but I hope the concept and thoughts are easy to see from the three posts.

The new work manifesto – Bruce Daisley – Twitter – @brucedaisley

Bruce’s session was very much focused on helping achieve that work/life balance. It’s around improving work. “New Work Manifesto is a programme of small changes that any of us can bring to our workplaces to make work more fun.”

The manifesto that has been created by Bruce Daisley and Sue Todd can be found here. You will also find a very interesting podcast from Bruce, can be found on Apple Podcasts but here is the site for reference also – https://eatsleepworkrepeat.fm/podcast/ this is really focusing on how to be better with time, creativity what other successful people are doing in and around the industry.

Bruce also mentioned a few books, a more detailed list can be found on that link I posted above. The ones mentioned were:

Daniel Levitin – The Organized Mind
Matthew Walker – Why We Sleep

Bruce also said a few other things that got me thinking and that was around, you should:

Sleep
Get Happier Friends – Not drains more radiators
Progress – On something meaningful

“Distraction is the enemy of vision” – Kanye West

“Never stand when you can sit. Never sit when you lay down.” – Chris Hoy

Charles Dickens used to work till lunch time and then go for a 6 to 10 mile walk and look what he achieved!

Positive

Bruce mentioned two people to maybe listen to on TED talks or read their content but two people mentioned that could maybe could get more positivity into your life:

Teresa Amabile – is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School.

Alex Paul “Sandy” Pentland – is an American computer scientist, the
Toshiba Professor at MIT, and serial entrepreneur. He is one of the most cited authors in computer science, and helped create the MIT Media Lab.

Creativeness

Face to face meetings is where the creativeness comes from.

Final thoughts from this session was 4 things to implement into and change in your day.

#1 Turn of notifications on your phone
#2 Make sure you take lunch
#3 No e-mail at the weekend
#4 Laughing is important

70 hours = 56 hours – same output the 70 just think they are working hardware which just increases stress.

Sustainability is key as with everything, I have actually been really reading into this in regards to a diet, a crash diet is not going to be sustained so you just go from losing a little bit for a week or two then you go straight back you have to make sure you can sustain and build into your routine, work is the same.

The final thing I noted was the “Monk mode Mornings” No email, No slack, this was also very interesting for me as I love to have many things on at once and I might not be the best at prioritising the right task up the list. I think I am very good at procrastination, one thing I have consciously worked on since hearing from Bruce is taking certain times during the day to completely switch off from the world of notifications and chatter.

IP Expo is one of them events that each year you should try and attend either the one in London or the one in Manchester, it’s a free event but with lots and lots of potential to bump into some great people. There are also some great speaking sessions that are worth listening to.

This year I will only be going for one day, I wanted to cram as much content into my day as possible and wanted to share that with you here.

I will get to what I put in my own agenda shortly but just the event in general is very focused it seems around GDPR, AI, Data Analytics, DevOps and Security.

I for one am pretty interested in all these areas some more than others so my agenda below should follow that nicely.

Agenda

I did pick out sessions for both days and will share them here even though I won’t be able to make the second day.

DAY ONE – 25th April

——————————————————

When: 10:00am – 10:40am

Where: Keynote Theatre

Who: Robert Hannigan

What: Securing digital networks in an unstable world

——————————————————

When: 11:00am – 11:30am

Where: Keynote Theatre

Who: Ian Massingham

What: AI & Machine Learning at Amazon

——————————————————

When: 11:40am – 12:10pm

Where: Cyber Threat Intelligence Theatre

Who: Zeki Turedi

What: Hacking Exposed: Stories from the battlefield: lessons learnt in responding to the most advanced cyber attacks

——————————————————

When: 12:20pm – 1:20pm

Where: Keynote Theatre

Who: Angie Ma , James Allerton Austin , Joe Baguley , Lorna Mitchell , Manek Dubash

What: PANEL: IP EXPO Bytesize Panel: Future Trends – Blockchain, Serverless, Machine Learning & Edge Computing

——————————————————

When: 2:20pm – 2:50pm

Where: DevOps & Serverless Theatre

Who: Owain Lewis , Thom Leggett

What: Kubernetes “as a service” & Serverless. What this means to DevOps movement?

——————————————————

When: 3:00pm – 3:30pm

Where: Cyber Threat Protection Theatre

Who: Dave Palmer

What: The New Era of Cyber-Threats: The Shift to Self-Learning, Self-Defending Networks

DAY TWO – 26th April

——————————————————

When: 11:00am – 11:30am

Where: DevOps & Serverless Theatre

Who: Simon Fisher

What: Do change with Continuous Automation for your infrastructure, applications and compliance

——————————————————

When: 11:40am – 12:10pm

Where: IOT, analytics & AI Theatre

Who:

What: Brought to you by Pure Storage

——————————————————

When: 12:20pm – 1:20pm

Where: Keynote Theatre

Who: Patrick Laverty

What: Confessions of a Hacker

——————————————————

When: 1:00pm – 1:30pm

Where: Cyber Threat Intelligence Theatre

Who: Jeremy Hendy

What: Data Breach Detection: Are you ready for GDPR?

——————————————————

When: 3:00pm – 3:30pm

Where: DevOps & Serverless Theatre

Who: Mete Atamel

What: Containers, Kubernetes and Cloud

As you can see I have a good mix of sessions to try and attend, the good thing about this event though is there are lots of people that I won’t have seen for a while and then breaks and meet ups the ability to have a coffee and a chat is also a great use of time here.

If you are heading to Manchester for the event then let me know and we can grab a coffee.