Martin Widlake's Yet Another Oracle Blog

June Management & Infrastructure meeting June 5, 2009

Wednesday this week saw the first UKOUG Management & Infrastructure meeting special interest group meeting (MI SIG) of the year – postponed from April due to a clash with the G20 summit. You can see details of the meeting here where {if you are a member of the UKOUG} you can download some of the papers.

I feel the MI SIG has been struggling a little over the last few meetings – too many sales pitch presentations and numbers hit by travel woes (we just fell unlucky) and then the recession – but this meeting felt better. We had a good mix of strong presentations and numbers were up. The number of expected delegates has been very variable over the last 2 weeks, at one point we were full (50 people) but then some dropped out, others registered late. We ended up with 39.

At the last meeting I asked if people wanted more on the management side and the majority did, so I pitched a presentation about how to be a Manger in IT. It would have been relevant to management in other disciplines but IT does have some unusal aspects, one being that there is a much higher percentage of introvert and logical personality traits amongst IT people. Soft Skills and considerations of personality do tend to get short change in technology environments too.

Not only did I pitch a touchy-feely topic but I also went powerpoint-naked. I put up a half dozen intro slides and then turned off the projector and just talked. I was more than a tad anxious that this could have fallen flat and ended up as me spewing random drivel from the front, but the audience took up the topic and started chipping in. It snowballed and became a general discussion. I managed to keep it flowing and mentioned most of the things I wanted to include and also took a lot of input from the audience. Maybe one or two of the links I made to add my intended points were a bit tenuous but heck, it was the first time I’d done a free-form presentation like that for years and years.

Not only was the session a success {phew} but it seemed to set the pattern for the rest of day. We had had some good questions being asked of John Nangle during his opening presentation on Exadata (I’d really like to get my hands on one of those units) but after the free-form session everyone seemed to be talking to each other more and all presenters had questions and little discussions to deal with during their sessions. They all dealt with them well.

We rounded off the meeting with a drink in a local hostelry for those who were inclined and the discussions kept going. The general feeling was that it had been an excellent day with people being a lot more interactive than normal. I know other SIGs use “speed chatting” and other things to help encourage people to talk to other delegates. They have found that such things might not initially be popular {what! you want me to talk to strangers?} but always give the meetings a greater feeling of interaction and delegate feedback is that they are {sometimes reluctanatly} recognised as helpful.

I think I’ll try and have some sort of interactive or ice-breaking aspect at future meetings as it seems to really help the day be a success.