Simon Rumble’s blog

I'm leaving Telstra Media this Friday for an exciting new job.  I'm going to be Head of Data at Datalicious, a company doing cool stuff at the intersection of web analytics, big data and marketing. I'm really looking forward to it!  Lots of new challenges and at a time when Australian companies seem to finally be waking up to the value of the data they're collecting.

Given next week I'll be in consultant mode, today's Savage Chickens is quite timely (as was this one when the job came up).

And no mention of consulting would be complete without a motivational poster:

I've come up with some tips on how to run these kinds of sessions.

We use WebEx to share a screen, just because it's supported internally. It's functional, though the user interface is annoyingly non-standard and confusing for some users. There are other tools out there that I'm sure are just as good, and probably cheaper. In corporate environments you need something that can automatically work out proxy settings on the Windows platform.  We initially tried using Microsoft NetMeeting and Office Communicator, also supported internally, but both tools crapped out with any real number of participants.

I'd strongly recommend using a phone conference bridge for audio rather than expecting people to have headsets or working audio. It's just asking for trouble.

I switch between a slide presentation done in Google Docs and a Firefox browser to demo. I have considered switching to a solely slide-based presentation, because Omniture is so slow, but I want people to see the real thing.

Your invitation is important. In our case we decided to run our beginner class every two weeks, so we go to some lengths to point out that people can come as often as they like and get a refresher of the basics. Knowing the session is going to be repeated helps people schedule it in, too.  We also run an "in detail" session in the weeks where there's no beginner class.

It's important to make your invitation include clear benefits: what will the person learn, how can they apply that knowledge in their job?

I've got half an hour booked in my calendar before each training session. I use it to make sure I've got a printout of the slides, go to the loo and fill my water bottle. I can't stress the loo and water part enough! You will need both, so don't skip them.

In my half hour of preparation, I slowly go through my slides and make sure I'm prepared. The beginner course requires me to have deleted some things created in the last training session, and be logged out.

It's really hard to deliver good training. You want to go at a slow enough pace for everyone to keep up, and while you're training it's very hard to know if you're going slowly enough. In my experience, whatever speed you think you're going, you can go slower without any problem.  See if you can get a colleague to wave at you when you're going to fast or something.

The other thing you should concentrate on avoiding is "um", "errr" and other verbal pauses. Some people have more trouble with these when delivering talks than others. If you're one of those, concentrate on not saying it. Only confidence and practise will help here. I was lucky enough to be pretty good at debating and did a lot of it in school, which got me out of the habit.

If your audience is engaged, you'll be interrupted and asked questions. Always acknowledge the question, and repeat it in your own language to ensure everyone gets the context.  Often the question will be something you cover later, so you can just say you'll cover it later, but make a mental note to link it back to the question when you do cover it.

Delivering a beginners class you'll sometimes get really detailed, complex questions. Again, make sure everyone understands the question but you can always suggest the person talk to you afterwards, or you can run a session on that specific area later. Don't get bogged down with complex, unrelated questions. You'll lose your main audience and possibly even confuse them by having to introduce more advanced concepts.

But don't just disregard questions. Often they'll provide helpful context for you to make the training relevant to your audience. If you're good at thinking and delivering on the fly, which is something you get good at after delivering the same class over and over, you can really make your class relevant by incorporating the same examples used by questioners into your class.

I'd like to make our sessions more interactive, with users expected to perform a task. WebEx doesn't make switching between screen sharers easy though, so I'm not sure how you could see what people have done on their own PCs.

We've found people in this large organisation really appreciative of the training sessions we run, and we've started to see a lot more usage of web analytics. We're getting more interesting, complicated questions, which indicates people understand the basics and want to dig deeper into our data. That can only be good, and ends up with the tool being used for the right reasons, which makes our job more satisfying.

The effortless way we work across borders these days has kind of crept up on me, but actually I've been doing it for years.  In London I worked with clients across Europe, North America and Australia.  My last job had developers in Graz, Austria.  My current job has developers all over the world.  Living in Australia you get used to scheduling meetings for 08:30 or 18:00 to catch people in other timezones.

There's always far too many intermediaries in the kind of companies I work with these days, so weeks of to-and-fro emails can be short circuited by a five minute conversation with the actual person doing the work.  Working across timezones also gives lazy developers the opportunity to spent a day futzing around by asking a roadblocker question when they know we've left the office.  One way to avoid that is to occasionally check your work email before you go to bed and surprise them with a "get to work" answer.

One of the indispensable tools for working across timezones is timeanddate.com. On that one you'll see my current timezones of interest. Paris has the developers of the set-top-box project we're working on, San Francisco and New York because I'm always interacting with people in the US. Salt Lake City is where Omniture are based, and Dallas is the data centre for our Omniture implementation. London still has loads of my mates, Stockholm has Justine.