On the Job hunt

As many people within Manchester have already heard Idaho Technology Ltd will cease to trade by the end of this week. It has been 6 years in total I have worked for the company and have worked through the ranks from a Graphic & Interactive Designer to project coordinator to General Manager over this time.

Everyone will be sadly missed and I am hoping to find somewhere equally as rewarding to work where I am able to have a great impact and work on some interesting projects.

An article about the closing of the company can be found here.

I will keep you posted. As some of you may have noticed the layout of this blog has changed today and I am hoping my new site design and content will be live shortly. A final thank you to everyone at Idaho for the commitment and dedication to delivering great quality projects as well as how the whole process has been handled.

I have successfully completed the Accidental Managers course

The course is now over. Having finished the 6 month course on Accidental Managers I now feel I am more of a Manager than an accidental one. The final day and presentations went well and it was interesting to see what everyone else had taken from the course as well as report back about ways in which I have used it to improve the team.

As with many people in creative industries designers/developers find themselves slowly moving into management as an additional role as roles progress and people become more involved in the running of a business - as the title states... Accidental Managers.

I have learnt a whole wealth of information and now believe combined with the knowledge from the PRINCE2 course I am now equipped with several skills and techniques that aid me in the day to day running of a team - I now have a sound foundation to manage a team, the people, the important part of the managers tool kit as well as being able to manage projects and time within the team.

I feel I am now a more approachable, efficient and productive manager and I have helped improve myself as well as the team and believe that by spending time focussing on the Process - the how and why a team works a certain way and if that can be improved - rather than simply working on the WHAT - the day to day getting jobs done - it is possible to improve performance, happiness and overall quality of work. It is the age old saying "SPEND TIME ON THE BUSINESS NOT IN IT".

Basically most teams get a job and aim for an end result. The way they do that is by simply tackling the problem at hand, often using techniques and processes they have used before simply because the last time it came out OK so we know that method works. This is restrictive as by spending time on how you achieve that end result and forcing some time out to evaluate and get the teams input on how the team functions and how that can be improved it is possible to improve several areas and achieve better results and often faster.

I may be posting some useful tips from time to time here on experiences I have had and the results of putting some of these techniques into practice so sign up to the RSS feed if you want to be the first in the know :) For more information on some of the techniques I learnt see my Smashing Magazine article here: Professional-Team-Management-Tips-For-Creative-Folks

For those of you interested in the course please visit: http://www.kirkbright.com/

Smashing Magazine article is now live!

I am proud to announce that my first article for Smashing Magazine has now been published and can be found here:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/03/professional-team-management-tips-for-creative-folks/

Seems to have gone down well so far which is promising and I am already looking into what to write about next. Would appreciate it if people can comment - good or bad - below the article and feel free to Digg it etc if you feel it is worthy.

Hope people find it useful and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

Soon to appear on Smashing Magazine

I am proud to announce that Smashing Magazine will soon be publishing my first article. I contacted them regarding becoming an author for their design/development blog that currently has 142,000 thousand RSS followers and is often the first place to go on a Monday morning to see what new posts they have up there. After they vetted me - a process involving seeing who I was, what previous writing experience and examples I had and also finding out what it was I actually wanted to write about - I got asked to write a trial article that will be published within the next two weeks.

The article is entitled 'Team Management Tips for Creative Folk' and I look forward to the feedback. I hope people find it useful and it sparks debate within teams. Let me know what you think by commenting below it when it is published. I will post again here with a link once it is live.

www.smashingmagazine.com

Let's all be Geese

I have completed the first two days of the new Accidental Managers course and don't know where to start in describing what we have covered. Not only did this course deliver some amazing managerial skills and insights it also, as strong as it sounds, potentially improved my whole way of life and how I interact with people.

The course was expertly delivered by Greg Orme (Founder of Kirkbright) and Adrian Banger (Paradigm Partnerships) and they instantly engaged the group and had us actively involved in the activities. Both tutors obviously have amassed a huge amount of knowledge on the subject and interweave often comical real life stories to explain their points.

The course involved a series of activities that needed to be completed before hand. One of them was a DISC profile. This is possibly a more honest and accurate view of me than I would even care to admit to myself. I would say that after completing the online survey and getting the generated PDF immediately back that 99.5% of all the information in it was spot on. By using this profile it is possible to work out what kind of person I am, how best to deal with me and what characteristics can be seen. By using this model it is also possible to start assessing others behavoir and work out how best to deal with them. This is extremely useful when trying to get the most from a team. For example, if you have someone that is a 'High S' as it is termed (See the link above for explanation of terms) they may be the kind of person who is non confrontational and just because they sit there silently in a meeting when you offer a solution to a problem does not mean that they agree. Therefore you begin to learn how to draw out what you need from different team members and how you need to act with different characters and situations in order to get the most out of the situation.

There were several sessions on team building/management, being a leader, understanding yourself and understanding others. I also now have a load of suggestions for follow up material and books to further delve into the area of managing people and building teams which I am looking forward to reading. It has really lifted my spirits and made me actually excited about the possibilities and the ways in which I can improve the teams at work.

I still have a few more days split over the summer that will cover things like finance, law, intellectual property etc etc and I have a personal project to complete within my company to try out what I have learnt and try and improve an area of the business.

Basically, there is a hell of a lot of content that was covered in the first two days. Far too much to cover now. I need to sit down, process it and work out how I am going to apply it to my business. Bottom line is...... I couldn't recommend this course enough so if it is ever running again make sure you are first in the queue. I will create another post after my last few modules for an update.

I learnt a lot from just the first two days of this course. I won't go into too much detail as I am sure I will be implementing a lot of it into everyday life at work and I wouldn't want to spoil the teams fun by giving it all away too soon.

Below are a few links to useful documents, sites of the people running the course etc. Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

http://www.kirkbright.com/

http://www.paradigm-partnership.co.uk/

http://adrianbanger.typepad.com/

http://www.kirkbright.com/files/accidental-managers-prospectus-1.pdf

Visit accidental managers

Finally, an explanation for the title of this post if it is unclear. It refers to a slide in the course which asked if you would rather have a team of geese or canaries. Canaries are very much self focussed, with their own needs at the front of their mind and are oriented toward shorter-term targets. Geese work as a team. They fly in a V which creates an up-draft and allows the geese behind a much longer flight. When the front one becomes tired they switch to the back. If a member moves away from the pack two follow in order to help it and either rejoining the group or make their own group. They are far more focussed on a common goal and look to long term targets. I think this is quite an important if not abstract metaphor as if you have a team full of geese you are more likely to have a happy, effective and successful team than if you have a team full of canaries.

I managed to get a place on the heavily sought after Accidental Managers course

'Accidental Managers is a training and development programme to help the rising stars of the creative and digital industries in the Northwest'. The course is to be delivered by Kirkbright a specialist in creative industry management training. After visiting the launch party at the Tate, Liverpool only a few weeks ago I am to attend the first session later this month and believe I will take an awful lot from the course. As the title suggests it delivers training to individuals who perhaps did not attend university courses in management but who have found them selves "accidentally" in that role as their positions have expanded and progressed within a company.

I believe that, combined with my Prince 2 practitioner qualification, this will make a great addition to the management side of my qualifications.

I have just had to complete a psychometric test before starting on the course and the results are spookily accurate.

I am definitely looking forward to the experience and will post again once the course is complete on my experiences.

View the programme here