In March, I spoke remotely in Baltimore, at the CrabbyAdmins Local LOPSA Chapter Meeting, March 5: The Practical Gamemaster: Design & Execution of IT Emergency Operations Drills.
And yes, d10s were provided.
Slides: Adele Shakal Crabby Admins 2014 Gamemaster Talk
I presented a Guru Is In session at USENIX LISA 2013 in Washington, DC: Project Management: Establishing and Fostering the Basics.
Some IT organizations have established project management cultures. Some do not. If you’re in the latter camp and are interested in the potential for project management practices to increase productivity within your organization, please stop by and visit with Adele Shakal.
Adele believes in the genuine value of project management, yet understands that the application of appropriate project management principles can be challenging. She is happy to share her best practices for applying non-invasive techniques that allow IT teams to be more efficient and effective. She’ll also share tips for establishing and fostering project management culture within rapidly changing and growing organizations.
Adele currently heads up project and knowledge management at Metacloud, Inc., a cloud solutions company providing Private Cloud as a Service based on OpenStack.
She has nearly two decades of experience with IT project management, business process analysis and design, knowledge management, emergency operations and drill planning, business continuity, service management, system administration, and web technologies.
She has been a presenter, roundtable facilitator and panelist on IT emergency preparedness, Google Apps For Education, project management and technical documentation, and advancing women in computing; at CENIC, EDUCAUSE, APRU, USENIX LISA and CascadiaIT conferences.
I presented an invited talk at USENIX LISA 2013 in Washington, DC: Becoming a Gamemaster: Designing IT Emergency Operations and Drills
Bring emergency response and operations, business continuity, disaster recovery, and IT architecture together into practical drill design… and prepare your organization for whatever zombie apocalypse it may face.
Learn key concepts in emergency operations center and incident headquarters design, methods of introducing such concepts to your organization, and a sequence of basic-to-advanced drill designs.
Keeping IT folks engaged in a drill simulation can be very challenging. Become a gamemaster worthy of designing and executing drills on likely emergency scenarios and realistic function failures for your organization.
Hard-hats and D10s not included.
(I did actually bring d10s.)
The slides, audio and video of this invited talk are available via the USENIX LISA 2013 website.
I led a workshop at USENIX LISA 2013 in Washington, DC: The Practical Gamemaster: Hands-On Design and Execution of IT Emergency Operations Drills
Within a broad context of emergency response, emergency operations, business continuity planning/resiliency, disaster recovery, and information technology architecture, this workshop will provide participants with hands-on experience to design and execute IT emergency drills.
Participants will collaboratively identify critical business functions and continuity/resiliency objectives for a fictional organization, and catalog IT services involved in supporting those business functions. We will then design an emergency operations center or incident headquarters for that fictional organization. Along the way, we will discuss and brainstorm methods of introducing such concepts to participants’ actual organizations.
During the latter part of this workshop, participants will split into groups to accomplish first a basic life-safety and IT emergency operations drill, and then an advanced IT emergency operations drill. As workshop participants execute each of these drill plans, we will evaluate quantifiable success factors of each drill, collect lessons learned, and discuss guru-level additions to advanced drill design.
Keeping IT folks engaged in a drill simulation can be very challenging. The skills necessary to design, execute, and facilitate IT emergency drills are practical, perfectly suited to the hands-on, participatory environment of a technical workshop.
Become a gamemaster worthy of designing and executing drills on likely emergency scenarios and realistic function failures for your organization. You are hereby summoned to actively (with good humor) learn to engage your team in emergency operations planning and drill facilitation! Hard hats and D10’s included.
(I did not actually bring hard hats to this workshop; they would not fit into my suitcase.)
Adele: Rolling in the Geeks 