I’ve finally admitted to myself that I need a single place to archive online all of my conference presentations, workshops, tutorial materials and such.  So here I am.

And here you are!  Thanks for stopping by!

I have a few upcoming invited talks and a tutorial coming up…

Baltimore

I’ll be speaking remotely in Baltimore, at the CrabbyAdmins Local LOPSA Chapter Meeting, March 5: The Practical Gamemaster: Design & Execution of IT Emergency Operations Drills.

Seattle

I’ll be giving a talk and a tutorial in Seattle, at the CascadiaIT 2014 Conference, March 7-8.

Invited Talk: Establishing IT Project Management Culture

Some IT organizations have well-established project management cultures; other organizations are on the frontier, either without a project management culture or experiencing rapid change. The application of appropriate IT project management principles in such organizations can be challenging, but you will benefit from the experiences of a frontier project-herder, covering basic techniques to allow IT teams to be more efficient and effective, and tips for establishing and fostering project management culture within rapidly changing and growing organizations.

Tutorial: The Practical Gamemaster: Design & Execution of IT Emergency Operation Drills

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 tutorial.

Become a gamemaster worthy of designing and executing drills on likely emergency scenarios and realistic function failures for your organization.

Who should attend:  Technical IT staff, IT supervisors, managers, directors, business continuity/resiliency project managers and IT emergency planners – anyone who may be tasked with planning or facilitating an IT emergency drill for an IT department, business unit or organization. Prior experience in IT disaster recovery or any kind of emergency response will be helpful but is not required.

Take back to work: Practical experience identifying critical business functions, designing emergency operations centers and incident headquarters, and designing, executing and facilitating IT emergency drills.

Outline: Within a broad context of emergency response, emergency operations, business continuity planning/resiliency, disaster recovery and information technology architecture, this tutorial 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 two fictional example organizations, and catalog IT services involved in supporting those business functions. We will then design an appropriate emergency operations center incident headquarters for those organizations. Along the way, we will discuss and brainstorm methods of introducing such concepts to participants’ actual organizations.

During the latter part of this tutorial, participants will walk through a first a basic life-safety and IT emergency operations drill, and then an advanced IT emergency operations drill. We will also evaluate quantifiable success factors for each drill, collect lessons learned, and discuss guru-level additions to advanced drill design.

Boston

And I’ll be speaking in Boston, at the Back Bay Large Installation System Administration (BBLISA) Local LOPSA Chapter Meeting, April 9: The Practical Gamemaster: Design & Execution of IT Emergency Operations Drills.

Other Places?

If you would like for me to speak at your conference or meeting, about IT emergency planning and drill design, project management, advancing women in computing … please let me know (especially if your organization has a real Code of Conduct/Anti-Harassment Policy #CoCPledge — I value and support your efforts to include more diversity in IT).  I’m starting to polish up some additional content around cloud computing concepts as well.