For the 2nd Round of competition, the students are given a case briefing on a company–essentially a starting place for their research. The company the teams have been assigned is ADT—yes, the security company.
The Itinerary for the event was the same as round 1.
Itinerary: March 29th
9:00 am Arrival & Check In, Room 117
9:30 am Presentation 1
10:00 am Presentation 2
10:30 am Presentation 3
11:00 am Presentation 4
11:30 am Presentation 5
12:00 pm Debrief/Lunch
I heard five presentations’ that tackled different perspectives from a company. One was focused on working with another company such as a pet security to a merger with a bigger home security provider.
On Saturday March 23rd at 1:00 p.m. was the University of Nebraska-Omaha Association for Computing Machinery-Women (ACM-W)
student group. The theme of the visit was to do a “Sprint, in a hour”. A traditional design spring is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. We are going to break the 5 days into one hour.
Planning
In December of 2018 I contacted ACM-W via email about sponsoring a 2019 meeting.
Through corresponding via email the date of March 23rd at 1:00 p.m. a topic wasn’t yet confirmed, but this was a Saturday. I found out the group meets on a Tuesday and Saturday through out the year. I also let them know I would sponsor some type of snacks or lunch for the meeting.
Topic
During the ACDC All Career Fair the president of the ACM-W stopped by the booth. I pitched the idea of doing a “Design Sprint” in an hour. At first she was under the impression that this would be more of a white boarding exercise, but I expressed this would be a interactive session which has some non technical aspects like white boarding.
When I returned from a career fair I asked the two business analyst Stacey Fletcher and Jeneen Sagonon my team if they would help with this idea. The reason is as a team they booth have gone through this process. Their were some concerns about doing this process in an hour, but through some persuading and talking it through they were booth on board. I also did reach out to the floor to see if anyone would want to help. Remember you can’t do anything awesome by yourself.
Teammates
This is where I am grateful for having teammates who believe in my vision to go above and beyond to help me out. Leading up to the meeting we practiced three times on what a “Sprint” would look like. Here is a PowerPoint that would be our guide in the presentation. .
Advertising
The ACM-W has a Social/Public Marketing Officer who reached out for attached photo and company logo. The final product looked like this.
I did question if I should I be on this poster. The goal of the meeting is to talk about the sprint process from my Teammates (women colleagues) to acm-w. The acm-w felt Just like motivational events that show the person’s face and making it the focus point was OK.
Day of Event
The morning of the event I picked up chips and Quesa from Qdoba’s. I also picked up wings, popcorn, M&M’s, and pop for snacks. I arrived about 12:45 to bring everything up.
The meeting kicked off right at 1:00 p.m. Stacey Fletcher, Jeneen Sagon, and Angle Raffety joined myself to help with the Event.
The ACM-W starts the meeting with announcements. Then they gave us the floor. Stacey, Jeneen and Angel helped get the room setup.
The flow worked great. All the students were engaged and we finished on time.
Toward the end I talked a little about prototyping, but I hurried through it to save time. We finished right about 2:15 p.m.
I stayed around to network. I think this was the most interactive student meeting I had ever been part of. This also provided a nice changed of pace for the group since they have mostly guest lecturers.
The social media manger made some social network posts.
Then a video to recap the event. This is a great example of knowing how important social media is to student organizations. Another great interaction with UNO students in the books.
Round 1 of the University of Nebraska-Omaha College of Business Administration Spring 2019 Capstone Cup! took place on Friday, March 8th 2019. I was a judge in all 3 rounds in the Fall of 2018.
I posted on Likened and Twitter that I was a judge of the contest.
Itinerary Morning Session
9:00 am Arrival & Check In, Room 117
9:30 am Presentation 1
10:00 am Presentation 2
10:30 am Presentation 3
11:00 am Presentation 4
11:30 am Debrief/Lunch
12:00 pm Reset for afternoon
Judging
The case the teams presented on for the first round was GameStop. The teams are given only the information in the case – some teams will likely do some outside research to assist in their analysis, but for the most part the students are told to focus on the information presented in the case.
Each group had 12 minutes to present, with warning times given for 2 minutes, and 1 minute. This is followed by approximately 10 minutes of Q&A with the judges.
As a judge, I was acting as board member for GameStop in the case. The students are acting as a consulting group hired to identify and tackle a strategic problem GameStop is facing.
At the Nullify Student Meeting and UNO All Career Fair. I told all students about a chance to win a free ticket to a upcoming conference Connectaha that Farm Credit Services of America was sponsoring. Anyone who submitted info with the Office 365 Form I would put in a drawing.
The email looked like this:
About 10 students took the time to reply. Three students were chosen almost at random. The day before the conference I purchased three tickets for three UNO students. I waited a longer just incase one had to cancel. I had worked out a deal with ConnectHa to get students in for a discounted price. All together $295.86 total.
The three UNO students were all students I had multiple contact points with.
The morning of the conference, I showed up Connectaha to get a picture by the FCSAmerica booth with them. Connectaha has agreed to send a social thank you to Farm Credit Services of America for sponsoring UNO students. I believe it is more meaningful when it’s originated by the organization hosting the event FCSAmerica is sponsoring as opposed to self-promotion.
I heard from the afternoon group booth Srishty and Kim both stopped by the booth and were a pleasure to talk too. This sponsorship for students is a great way to build relationships with relationships with the University of Nebraska-Omaha and the student population.
The College of Business Administration (CBA) was the second University of Nebraska-Omaha (UNO) career fair for the 2019 Spring School year. The timing of the career fair compared to the other UNO fair in spring was about a week apart.
I am always interested in finding UNO Alumni who could help out at a career fair. I put a message on our Yammer in February that I was looking for help for the CBA Career Fair.
Carol Brush, ODL Specialist volunteered to help out. This was good since Carol was a UNO Alumni. She also could be a new perspective on how I do things and provide feedback.
The day of the Fair
I always make sure to post on Twitter and LinkedIn.
I arrived at fair about 10:00 a.m. to setup. I setup the TV to show the Careers page. I also had some cups left over from Technology Works Here. I had the iPad with the Office 365 Form to capture student information. I keep hand sanitizer in my digital toolbox.
I had a spot right when you walked in. so I was able to multiple ways to setup the table.
The one that seemed to fit our space was to setup the display on the side of the table. This allowed anyone walking down in to see the banner.
Student started stopping by after 11:00 a.m. The amount of students who stopped by because of a class room visit is a great story to tell. This means students are seeing Farm Credit Services of America as a first class employer. This also means a student stopping by had a previous touch point and I don’t have to explain who Farm Credit Services of America is. There were students who attended the Class Room Visit on Wednesday night stopped by the booth because I came to the class. There where students who attended the Innovation Works Here on February 15th.
The fair ended about 2:00 p.m. I went to the front desk to ask a simple question. How many students actually checked in. The unofficial count I heard was under 150. This was the same number as in the FALL of 2018 I think this was a very low number. When I got back to the office I looked at the inputs from the Office 365 Form. We had 24students give us contact information which was 6 lower than last time. . Even though the numbers were not high. The multiple touch point is a big deal in the long run of recruiting.
Follow up
In all 24students filled out the form. I followed up with this email.
In February at the Nullify Capture the Flag I meet a professor Dr. Matt Hale. Dr. Hale teaches a mobile applications with emphasis on native mobile development in Android for IoT applications. During the event I inquired about interest doing a class room visit to talk about mobile development. He gave me his business card. We back and fourth on some dates landing on March 6th.
Day of Presentation
March 6th finally arrived. The class was a evening class on UNO campus at PKI. I had scheduled the visit to be right after another class room presentation being done the same evening.
I was given a 50 minute time block. The Students in the class were just getting into native mobile development in Android. They’ve just finished labs and other content focused on hybrid mobile apps written with Cordova and a few introductory labs on native app development in Android.
I decided the goal of my presentation should be on was to prototyping and application security.
Prototyping
I decided to talk about prototyping app I talked about a recent experience I had with prototyping new features to the Agdirect Mobile application using the https://marvelapp.com/. How prototyping reduced development time and costs. I was also able to share the prototype with our end users to improve quality, think of user experience and make these are the requirements needed. When I was done sharing and answering questions. Dr. Hale told the class that the discussion was not pre-arranged. I found out the class had just spent a few weeks prototyping their mobile application. I was basically re-enforcing what the professor had been spending time on.
The last 15 minutes I shared the the same securing mobile applications presentation I did at the Nullify student group. Dr. Hale like this because I was showing iOS which he does not cover in the class room.
The next day I followed up with a email.
Dr. Hale, said yes. Please reach out in the future for us to collaborate again. I plan to reach out for the Fall of 2019 this summer.
ISQA 8210 is a graduate level project management course at UNO taught by Dr. George Royce. I feel I have built a good relationship with Dr. Royce. We have attended Meetups together. Dr. Royce reached out in January before I did about having us talk to his class room.
We confirmed for February 19th but we were snowed out. We moved the date to March 6th
Looking back on this visit. This is the sixth time we have done a in class room visit. That means for three years since I meet Dr. Royce we have done a class room visit each semester.
In this class room presentation Nate Ryan and Stacey Fletcher presented on “Fries R UP” at PKI. Fries R Up is the software project methodology used by Team Mojo. Take any methodology and you will be asked questions such as timeline for project? How do you respond? How do you handle change? This is the process to help those conversations. They also updated images to reflect how things have changed in the past few months when the presentation was done in the fall of 2018. I did talk about Mob programming which was something we did the day of presentation.
We had good discussion from the participants who were engaged the whole time. Many of the students in the class I had meet at the
I was not able to to stay around to hear about questions since I had another class room presentation to get to. Which is the next blog post on my list.
Dr. Royce sent a thank you the next day. He asked if I would be able to discuss analysis and design. which of course I said yes.
I did do a internal post on giving praise to Nate and Stacey for such a great job.
This months AIM IT Leadership Academy session was on Servant Leadership & Communication Skills held at CSG International.
The schedule for the day was to work on Communications and Servant Leadership. The main concept behind Servant Leadership is a leader challenging teams to go farther, reach higher, innovate and have fun doing it. As we learn concepts of being a servant leader, different communication skills will be introduced to support the various leadership styles of individuals.
Communication
The morning started off with the concept of Communication is a simple thing. In a organization it is how you communicate up and down that maters.
On the table were Agile Transformations Workbook and work sheet. This is the first time through the AIM program that we had a workbook to guide us along with the day of learning.
Communicate by vision and strategy is Servant Leadership. The facilitator asked the question “What makes your investment today worthwhile?” “What is your focus today?”If we do “X” then we achieve “Y” The same level of tasks are communicated each direction in an organization just communication is different.
Why do Strategic Initiatives fail?
No buy-in from teams
Not well defined
Too large – not sized correctly
Acceptive to change
The goal of leadership in an organization is to communicate in a way:
Vision
Strategy
Execution
Conceptual Thinker are Dot Connectors. If you dig deeper in opportunities.
My Strategic Challenge/ opportunity: If I have someone to explain my problem then I understood my problems in the vision. The group did a exercise were we went to the hall way and told there people in 3 minutes our problem.
How do I become a strategic planner? A way to start a vision is doing a exercise called Force Field Analysis.
Force Field Analysis
Communicating Up
When you communicate up how much is said. Who has a leader that wants details? Summary Form. C Suite Communications is a thing. Communications across the peers:
Present with Confidence
Tone and Actions on how you would want to be presented with.
Great Companies = Great Teams = Great Leaders
Reflection Time: What are the traits of influential change leaders?
Attitude
Positive Energy
Listen to Understand the response
Appreciate of what you are told
Story of doing it for themselves
Am I influential person?
Organizations are changing: Does Big Eat Small? No, Fast beats Slow. Which really mean Innovation plus Creativity will equal Fast!
What is Inspiring for the Team you could lead. Is it a leader who get in the trenches? People want to know what Impact they have on company. For what I am doing, does matter?
Does my communication strategy builds better relationships with the team? There are verbal, visual boards, and communication strategy for peers. Should a person give Specific Feedback or as a group. How does a leader talk non technical to technical and not feel bad.
When you receive new information. Learn how to listen. Recap Conversation to confirm discussion. Verbal into information in some kind of document. If you got something wrong in a conversation then we have something to agree with what’s wrong.
There is always a story that not everyone one is part of or know about. Is your engagement authentic? Is there something else I can help manage?
Saying “Thank you for telling me, but it help me understand” start the process of how to ask questions without Assumptions? Keep asking questions to find out what people are thinking? The reason being is building trust with someone:
Speed to Trust
Trust is a business enabler
Faster Efficiency is base on TrustWhen we trust our team or other people, it is actually acknowledging that we know what’s wrong and working on it. Trust is earned through actions of those conversations. Always value trust over command and control.
Toward the end of the communication section we watched this video Conscious Leadership Group
Also doing the break one of the students talked about a book he is reading called Radical Candor.
Servant Leadership
Unhealthy Leader vs Healthy Leader Exercise
This exercise was breaking out into groups. One group did Unhealthy and the the other did healthy.
A term used during this time was plant seeds to grow. If you plant weeds then you are spread out to thin.
Influencer
Best Leaders say ” I have so much more to learn!”
Focus on Value
Recognize Others
Foster Teamwork
Feedback
Learning to give feedback takes time and is a skill. When ever giving feedback identify 3 things going well, and 1 not going well.
A person is hired to be a talented team member. Leaders provide guidance to those team members and let team do what is best. This is when our leadership style matter?
How do you go from solving problems to facilitator coach. How do you break cycle to be a coach? Are you a great contributor or Coach/Facilitator?
What does success look like this week?
Outcome vs Output of a team or person.
Success is to measure!
What does Done look like?
What do we do well?
Learn to Listen genuinely
Create a safe environment
Give team credit before yourself in this coaching
Stories are filled in what makes sense at a point of time.
Focus on Growth of People
This was a mentally challenging session. I believe I learned the most of this session in regards on what I need to work on for my leadership style.
