Victoria Morgan-Smith
We interviewed Victoria Morgan-Smith at Continuous Lifecycle London conference about her book, Internal Tech Conferences.
Victoria Morgan-Smith is the Director of Delivery for Internal Products at the Financial Times, where she has been helping teams succeed since 2009. Before leading teams she was a developer for 9 years, a background which fuels her interest in finding fun ways to coach, energise and motivate teams into self-organising units. She is passionate about collaboration beyond the team, adopting agile principles to get under the skin of what will deliver measurable business value around the organisation.
Q1. How to get started running an internal tech conference?
If a company is thinking about running an internal tech conference, the first thing I would suggest is that they, of course, buy the book! It is full of all kinds of useful information and advice including a toolkit at the back which will give them a structure for planning the event. That's the first thing.
The second thing, involve your employees in running and organizing it. Don't give it to a senior manager to define and shape and run - involve your employees. It sets the tone from the start that this is an inclusive event that is designed to be what people want and that they shape it.
The third thing would be to allow plenty of time for organizing it! It is not an exaggeration to say that you need three to six months because you need to build up the hype, you need to get the speakers and then you need to give them plenty of time to prepare for it.
“This is not a fire-and-forget event. If you really want to get the benefit from it, there is work to be done afterwards to reinforce messages, keep things fresh in people’s minds and to support and encourage spin-off activities and ideas”
Finally, the fourth tip would be - follow-up. This is not a fire-and-forget event. If you really want to get the benefit from it, there is work to be done afterwards to reinforce messages, keep things fresh in people's minds and to support and encourage spin-off activities and ideas - to help them actually materialize and achieve the goal that you want.
Follow Victoria Morgan-Smith online: @VictoriaJMS