Now I'm not a technology nerd by any stretch of the imagination. I don't have the latest phone, TV, DVD, camera or anything that would be classed 'cutting edge'. I do however love technology. I love reading about it in the Sunday papers (Times of course). I love walking in to a tech shop and looking at the latest gadgets and I love seeing other people getting excited about their latest gadget they've bought. Technology is fun.
Those are the physical devices but the way that technology has really showed me it's value recently is coming to the end of my degree. Firstly, without Google or search engines I never would have researched so much on Information Security as I did. I had a secure connection from home in to the University network so I could work as effectively from home as I could from being sat there.
The second thing that made a huge difference was when we had to do our consultancy project. Four group members that lived in fairly disparate places that had to put together a high level piece of work for a car park company with assets of over 3 billion euros. We weren't presenting our findings to any people in the organisation, but the exec team. This needed to be good, no not good, great.
Organising ourselves was obviously fundamental to the success of the project. We knew that meeting once a week was going to be a challange. We all worked full time, we all had dissertations to write, we all had families complaining of not seeing us enough already. We needed a tool that could help us collaborate effectively without needing to get together all the time. I needed to see when the others had modified or added something. The same for them when I did anything.
A good collaboration tool, that is easy to maintain document control, that is easy to alert the users when things are add / modified, that has granular levels of security so you can allow external people access to some documents but not all your work, that you can have discussion boards on to keep a log of discussions and have them in your own time. In the words of Rolf Harris, "Can you tell what it is yet?"
We used Sharepoint. I knew it well, the others didn't but with 30 minutes overview they were convinced. I won't bore you (more than I have) about the ins and outs of exactly what we did but I will with the end result.
The project was completed two weeks early.
We presented to their Exec board our findings to glowing praise. (One Exec member who hadn't been told who we were actually thought we were a professional team of consultants bought in by the company). Our score when it was marked was 88%. The highest in the Universities history within the business school for a consultancy project. Obviously we were all immensely proud of the work we'd done and the outcome.
Would we have done it without the technology? We don't think so.
Technology. Love it. Use it. Reap the benefits.
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