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September 22, 2005

One Month In

Today marks my one-month anniversary back in Planning. The team has spent our week holed up in an "offsite" meeting. Today is Day Three.

(The reason I use quote marks around "offsite" is that we're not, in fact, off site; instead, we've planted ourselves in one of the 50-person conference rooms on the ground floor of our building. Despite my wish for the "offsite" to be held at the Salish Lodge, replete with morning massage and croissant, evening steam, and some light minigolf, 'twas not to be. Cutbacks, they tell me.)

Despite the absence of massages, et. al., the offsite has been fascinating. Each Planner (or, in some cases, teams of Planners) takes 30, 45 or 60 minutes to talk about the project they've been working on for the past few months, including the problem/opportunity, their methodology, findings, and implications. In practical terms, this means I've spent the last few days watching very smart, very nice people talk about very interesting topics in a very animated way.

(My presentation was yesterday, and it seemed to go fine.)

In addition to being Just Plain Interesting, the offsite has also been nice in terms of getting me up to speed on the scope of our team's investments. We did a similar "offsite" about a week into my internship, and it was invaluable in helping me understand the who, how, and what of Planning.

One thing we're trying during the presentations involves OneNote.

If you're not familiar with OneNote, it's an application that lets you easily capture and store information. It uses a pages/tabs/folders metaphor, and sports a 'blank canvas' user interface. It's one of those apps that, once you get used to it, you can't live without; I use it all the time to track my research and thoughts. (Alas, OneNote is Windows-only, which means I use AquaMinds' NoteTaker at home. NoteTaker's not bad, but it's not OneNote.)

So anyhow. One of OneNote's features lets you share your notebook (or, more properly, one or several pages of your notebook) with other people over the Internet. We've been using this feature to create a shared workspace that all the Planners can post to during the presentations. There are three categories for posts: "Feedback" (for general comments), "Questions" (for questions that might occur to the audience during the preso) and "Tomfoolery" (because we all have a sense of humor, and it needs to get let out from time to time).

The OneNote experiment has been pretty cool, and surprisingly effective at capturing a range of feedback that might not otherwise be heard in a normal, time-sensitive presentation (posts are anonymous, for instance, which means that people can ask awkward questions without fear of embarrassment).

I will confess that it's a little surreal to be doing a presentation in front of 30-some people, each of whom is staring at their laptop, brow furrowed, and typing like mad. But you get used to it. And the feedback is surprisingly good.

OK, we're starting again. Back to it.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at September 22, 2005 12:53 PM. Posted to MSFT.

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