I’m posting the introductory video here, but we’ll be posting (and indexing) the entire series in the EMC Proven Professional Community. The videos will come out monthly, and will be covering topics such as server virtualization, optimized storage and networks for a virtual environment, closed looped automated configuration management and monitoringVDI, and Private Cloud. So if that sort of stuff interests you, or you are just intersted in finding common ground with your IT folks, stay tuned and follow the index on the Proven Professional Community.

Here’s my recap of how the day went for me:

Opening Remarks

In addition to the leaders of Simmons School of Management, leaders from the primary corporate sponsors gave the opening remarks. Bill Teuber, Vice Chairman of EMC, represented EMC. I really appreciated that he explained why he had a reason to be at a women’s conference. He talked about the strong women who have influenced him at home and in his career. He also talked about his understanding of this Chinese proverb:

Women hold up half the sky

He explained that organizations can’t get where they need to be if only half the sky is being held up. He spoke about how inclusion requires an unwavering focus from the top down, and tactically that requires programs, accountability, and patience. He also said that inclusion is an absolute priority at EMC.

Opening Plenary Session

The opening plenary session was given by Maxine Clark, Founder and CEO (actually CEB – Chief Executive Bear) of Build-a-Bear Workshops. Her idea to create Build-a-Bear was based on her childhood, her retail experience, and a coversation with her daughter. Her advice:

• Dream big, no matter what your business may be
• Do what you love and find the connections that bring innovation
• Create an environment so great things can happen
• If you try and fail but learn, it really isn’t a “mistake”
• One important skill she looks for in interviews in curiosity

Morning Concurrent Sessions

During the morning, there were five sessions to choose from. I chose a Leadership Seminar with Annie McKee. Overall, the session was good. Her message was to be a good, whole person if you want to be a good leader. I am going to write an entire post about things she said because I believe some of what she advises is quite dangerous to innovation. Her advice would would work if we actually lived in a flat world, where the culture was entirely homogenized. But we don’t, and actually our differences are what spark innovations. But more on that in another post…

Afternoon Plenary Session

After lunch, Charlayne Hunter-Gault spoke. She talked about her work working with the victims of violence against women in Africa. She began and ended by saying:

There has never been a time like this

She spoke several times about the suit of armour crafted for her by her grandparents and her community. She was given a first class sense of self, so that she had a form of protection when she had to walk through an angry mob to her dorm as one of the first African American women to attend the University of Georgia.

Afternoon Concurrent Sessions

Again in the afternoon there were five different sessions to choose from. I attended the Negotiation Workshop given by Mimi Donaldson. I was also lucky enough to be at the same lunch table with Mimi. She is very funny, and uses that humor to help you think about yourself in the topics she is discussing. She went over the six steps of negotation:

1. Prepare
2. Set Limits
3. Push the Pause Button
4. Listen
5. Be Clear
6. Close the deal

Closing Plenary Session

Diane Keaton gave the closing session. I really liked her session – she spoke about her career and how lucky she has been, and how all the big breaks were connected to each other. And how the first lucky thing that happened to her was to have had such a wonderful mother.

It made me think of my mom, and then made me wonder what kind of mother I have been for my children, and hope that I have given them a good start so that they can be very lucky.

There were other bloggers from EMC at the conference, I’ll post links once they post.

As you can probably tell from the coverage, this release is a very big deal for EMC. Until today, information about the V-Max system was tightly guarded. So you have to wonder, how do you train the folks who need to be ready for such a big, secret release?

To find the answer to that question, I sat down with Nancy Gessler, who is the Director of New Product Readiness for EMC Education Services. She gave some great insight into what it takes to design and deliver education inside a big technical corporation. Here’s what she had to say:

Nancy, tell us a little about your responsibilities

My team develops and delivers technical training for our field employees and partners who are responsible for Presales, Installation/Integration, and Support for hardware and software across EMC’s product lines. Specifically we prepare the field and partners for launch readiness before a product is able to be sold.   We produced almost 500 courses last year in support of approximately 170 launches.

Today EMC had a huge announcement about the Symmetrix V-Max.  Can you talk about your role in that release from an education perspective?

Since Symmetrix is EMC’s longstanding, flagship platform, we needed to begin analysis and strategy very early.  We knew there would be lots of folks that we would need to train.

This is considered a “complex” launch from the training perspective because it involved new hardware and software changes.  Complex launches typically involve several different learning modalities and multiple training assets:

• eLearning accompanied by remote labs so students can get hands-on on the key software features
• ILT for installation because the hardware platform was brand new and they needed to see and touch it
• The inclusion of multi-media,  whiteboard sessions, and video tutorials as an element of the eLearning assets to add additional value

A few days ago I posted about the importance of using a systems approach to instructional design. I would think  there were some real system challenges in figuring out how to enable readiness for such a huge product launch. First of all, how did you figure out who needed to be trained?

Training has to be geo based, and the forecasted number of internal EMC folks to be trained was almost 1,400.  That number includes “core” Symmetrix hardware and software resources.  Because Symmetrix is a key platform, there are many folks focused on “affinity” technologies that will also take this training but are not part of the initial forecast.  The PreGA training cycle began Feb 17 to ensure a certain percent of the population are trained and ready at the external announce date.  It will continue to run through at least the end of May to accommodate the folks who need hardware ILT training and hands-on lab activities for software.

What analysis did you do to come up with the learning objectives?

We are very experienced with job task requirements for the key field roles.  We examine the software and hardware changes that are planned and then cross reference that with the job task requirements to come up with the “draft plan of attack”.  This generally happens early on so we can assess number of resources and timelines required for development, delivery and course production.    This launch consisted of the following areas that required training (which post analysis were compiled into 13 separate development projects for our Symmetrix team):

• 1 Hardware Platform
• 1 Hardware Operating System
• 2 supporting software packages
• 8 “open systems” software packages
• 7 mainframe software packages

How many learning assets did you have to create to meet the objectives?

We produced a total of nine deliverables to support this launch – one instructor led offering and eight blended eLearning assets, along with lab workbooks for the hands-on lab activities that we will support remotely via a virtual data center.

Which internal EMC organizations had a stake in what was being taught?

As part of standard practice, our stakeholders are always involved with approving a training proposal which provides the details of the training deliverables – number of courses, modality, objectives and key topics, and projected length of the deliverable.   We are dependent on Marketing to ensure any technical positioning is in alignment and we put the right “spin” on the technical details in support of presales activities.  Since we are working with “versioning code” throughout the development lifecycle, we are dependent on Engineering for technical validation.  All of our projects go through a comprehensive content review that includes the prior mentioned organizations.

When did you first learn of the project?

I had a general awareness for quite some time – more than a year, but concrete planning started around August of 2008 with an expected training availability date of late Q1.

How long did you have to complete the development & delivery of this instruction?

Training development started approximately November of 2008, but did not kick into high gear until we had working systems and code.  Initially our folks worked with Engineering to get a sense of how a feature would work and how to get hardware and software up and running.  There is a lot of time spent getting equipment and labs functioning before actual “training development” begins.

How many developers and/or instructors worked on the project?

There were 13 technical subject matter experts (SMEs), two managers responsible for hardware and software work streams, and three instructional designers aligned to this project.

What challenges are there when creating training for products that are not fully “cooked”, and are part of a secret launch?

The key challenge is how to approach the launch.  Planning is extremely key.  The planning phase is generally about 3 or 4 weeks for a project like this one.

A complex launch requires a thorough impact analysis of feature and function – there were a couple hundred features we had to analyze.  This analysis has to be matrixed against audience job roles.  Triaging feature and function and the impact to job roles provides the focus areas for key deliverables and how content will be chunked.

The next challenge is immutable deadlines, so we need to schedule timelines for the number of anticipated deliverables and how many SMEs will be needed to work in parallel.   Then the issue of how to homogenize independently developed content so there is some amount of consistency across the deliverables.

Then the tactical phase commences – getting equipment, building an appropriate technical environment that will support development and to allow time for our SMEs to get experience with the hardware and software before actual development begins.  Initial code does not have all features/functions working as expected so there is an iterative process that takes place across several code drops.

The people are an incredibly important ingredient to addressing the challenges of a complex launch.  They need to have good technical breadth and depth and strong knowledge of the key and affinity technologies.  They also have to be able to deal with uncertainty and complexity as while we are in the development process, code and other components are evolving.

This project is evidence that proper planning and strong resources can be successful when addressing a challenging and strategic launch as the Symmetrix V-Max Series proved to be.

Well there you have it….a working example of why you have to have a systems approach when designing instruction. I know for a fact my colleagues worked very, very hard…many nights and weekends…to get our company ready to introduce the Symmetrix V-Max to the world. Thanks Nancy for the insight into the guts of corporate education.

You may be thinking: wait! This blog is all about education! Why would Gina go to a geeky engineer science fair? Well, I am a geek. Our group writes technical training, so all of us are very technical and geeky. It is great to have a different connection to the engineering folks we work with to get our product training ready for consumption.

Plus I had two submissions of my own! They were both education based. One was very very innovative – in fact several of the finalists submitted a key piece to my idea. Next year I’ll try to geek it up more and hide my education side.

After the conference, we had a meet-up of some of the social media types at EMC. Besides myself and Brian Rosenthal, Dave Spencer, Polly Pearson, Mark Twomey, Steve Todd, Dave Graham, Stu Miniman, and Radha Sekhar were there.

As we talked, I started thinking about the connections we have. The connections started with our internal social media site, EMC ONE. Then we moved to external social media like Twitter and Facebook. These social connections allowed our unseen business connections to surface. Here’s a quick concept map:

I’ll try to break it down:

• 4 of us had Innovation Conferences entries (One of us won 2nd place!)
• 3 people are in Engineering (one Distinguished engineer)
• 2 people in Education Services
• 2 people in Sales
• 1 person in HR, and 1 person in the CTO office
• 4 of us do work supporting the Resource Management Software organization
• We represented 3 different countries
• 8 of us are on Twitter, and 7 of us blog (which is how we all met)

It’s clear to me social media breaks through organizational silos, and as an educator this is critical. If one of the biggest competitive advantages right now is how fast your workforce can learn, educators need to be able to find the information they need in a true cross-functional manner.

So CCK08 people, how can Connectivism be used as an instructional method that connects and tunnels through these organizational silos?

Here’s a picture of the group (minus “the Daves”)

One person I talked to was Dan Schawbel. He looked exhausted. He’s just finished a book, he is working on his magazine, and oh yeah he works for EMC. I was feeling matronly and told him he has to slow down, take time for himself, and find time to just be still. He asked me, “is that what you do?” Unfortunately, my daughter was with me, and she immediately began snickering.  Dan turned to her and said I love it when people give you advice they don’t take. Know what? He’s right! Grad school has totally messed up my balance. I am not sure how I am going to do it, but I am going to make time to get my quiet time. Then I can harass Dan again with a clean conscience.

I also met Alicia Staley in person (aka @stales). She told me more about her Foundation, and I have to say I am so in awe of her. She is doing my dream! She’s working full-time, and working to build an organization that serves a cause she is passionate about. I hope I can be like her one day!!!

In addition to Jaime, David Alston from Raidian6 and Peter Kim spoke.

David talked about listening to the conversations that are going on “out there” in the WWW. He spoke about thinking about how a company would react if someone was in the front lobby shouting “Y’all Suck!!!” How fast would someone from PR be down there to see what was up? Well, people do that online, why aren’t companies engaging them?

Can that transfer to education? Maybe – do we have customers at smaller sites that don’t have the luxury of interacting with a huge IT team? Do they want to interact with people going through the same issues they have?

Peter Kim spoke about the importance of making Social Media about business. This is so important for my organization. Our training works because we tie it back to what the business needs. My senior management will not even consider talking about social media if it is not tied back to the business. We’ve stopped calling it “social media”, instead we call it “enterprise collaboration”. It’s the same thing, just a different term. The collaboration idea has lots of educational research and theory behind it; social media carries a negative connotation.

Social media enables some of the things educators have wanted to do for a long time: foster informal learning, make a way for the learner to create their own meanings to formal instruction. The challenge in a corporate environment becomes tying this back to the business.

My organization has some exciting things in the works. So watch this space, as soon as I’m able to report back on what we’re up to I’ll post it here first! OK, maybe 2nd, after I post it to EMC ONE – our internal social media site!

I am writing this blog from the point of view of an Individual Contributor – I’m just a cog in the machine so to speak. I wanted a space to apply what I am using in my graduate program to things I see at work. I also will probably talk about how the emerging Web 2.0 technologies can be applied towards education, but these thoughts are all my own and not necessarily a direction my group is pursuing.

I also have to put the standard disclaimer up – so go see it on my “About Me” page.

I think this post about EMC’s latest ON Magazine (which has several E2.0 articles) is what pushed me over the edge to “come out” as an EMC employee. One of the articles in this issue of On talks about how DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) had the first real E2.0 system – adding fuel to my argument that these tools are not new, and they are not the domain of the so-called “digital natives”.