Seminar Fruits

The seminar took longer that was originally planned for it. It went on okay, while of course there were some sides of it that cried from improvement. The tone of voice of the presenter was so monotonous and tired and it lacked energy and enthusiasm. The presenter also did not let the audience interact with him except in a very limited manner. Both those points caused the seminar to be rather boring and made the audience feel rather sleepy and it was more like attending some old boring lecture at the days of university. Another drawback was the inability of the presenter to simplify the concepts enough or present them in a clear way. A lot of 'floating' words were used without giving clear meanings or putting them in context.

One of the main draw backs was lack of focus on specific points of interest and of high practical value. The session was more like a monotonous sequential listing of points. The PowerPoint presentation on the laptop was not a good tool. It was just a tool for more boredom as the presenter went through it trying to talk about its content point by point. Interest however started to increase after the first part of the seminar as the presenter moved from the PowerPoint presentation on the laptop and used the whiteboard to illustrate his concepts. This was a much better way of communication and grabbing people's attention and interest.

Seminar Kick Off

Today is time for the first seminar or let's say mini-seminar as we've hinted upon it before when introducing the concept of mini-seminars and our attempt to integrate it into the work system. I'm looking forward to the results of that 'mini-seminar' and hope it would turn out fine. I'm preparing evaluation forms to give to attendees in order to fill after attending the seminar.

My aim from the seminars is to enhance communication between team members, give them a break from their mono-type coding work and revitalize their energy. Of course the content of the seminar itself will have its positive effect on them not only when the technical subject touches on their current work directly, but even when it talks about some part of technology which is used for developing part of the system that the developer is not working on. In this latter case, the seminar will broaden the scope of the developer and make him see the other side of the story. This in turn will have an indirect positive effect on his own work after that.

Update: I now managed to finalize the seminar evaluation form. Instead of making it in Word, I switched to Excel which I found to be a better idea. The main reason for this switch is to enable me to make calculate statistics easily from the collected evaluation forms after attendees have filled them.

Case Study

Problem
Deadlines are not being met.

Analysis
After analyzing he situation, it was clear that the reason behind the inability to meet deadlines was the absence of a system for allocating and keeping track of task.

Solution
We started researching methodologies for describing and documenting the system in a clear unambiguous manner. We then delivered seminars to the whole team on such methodologies and their basic concepts. Next, we started implementing such concepts in the project. An agile methodology was followed for developing, documenting and keeping track of the project progress.

Results
Deadlines were met within a much narrower margin. Project was delivered on time. A bonus was that developers were less anxious during development as the path was much clearer in front of them. We also got productivity increases as a result of the added clarity of the project components, enhanced communication and reduced time had previously been wasted in redesigning parts of the projects that did not fit with other parts due to absence of comprehensive planning before starting on the development phase.

Weekend Refreshes

I'm back from the weekend. Wow, how refreshing. It's nice and refreshing to have a weekend. One feels revitalized back at work. I intend to do some good stuff at work now that my brain is revitalized once more.

Role of HR Consultant

My role as an HR Consultant is to attract, develop and keep great employees for the company.

CV Rush

In less than 8 hours of posting my job ad at the Egypt-IT-Jobs Yahoo! group, I've received over 50 CVs. How amazing!

I've noticed however that most CVs are applying for the fist job mentioned in the ad. Perhaps the first job attracts the attention more. Maybe I should be putting the more important jobs at the beginning of the ad. I'm not sure however if the high number of CVs that were sent applying for the fist job in the ad is a result of this or if it's simply due to the availability of more professionals for the first job in the ad. In any case, the job we put at first was indeed the one we wanted to fill most.

I'm glad the results look good. Hope screening and selection goes safely and smoothly till the end. I hope we get the most suitable members to our teams.

Job Ad Sent

Today at last I finally sent the job ad after putting a lot of energy and work into designing it. It contains 7 different positions with detailed and focused requirements set for each one of them. I hope we get great results from them God willing.

HR in Ramadan

Companies start crying out for HR people in Ramadan. This is when performance drops start to show they heads. Perhaps the best time to market ones recruitment services is in mid Ramadan of every year.

Time Wasters

A Pain in the Neck
No. Today a lot of time was wasted. The majority of time wasted was in configuring my email account to work from the Outlook client on the Exchange server. Finally it did work, but after eating up a lot of time and good will. Perhaps automating such tasks and creating a policy and procedure for them would be best. It would save a lot of company time not to mention the headache.

Exchange Server
I admit though that after everything was setup and working it was a breeze. So happy now to have everything working now on the Exchange server like magic. Kudoz for team members who have helped me and done the troublesome configuration process for me.

Mini-Seminars
Today we've done something nice. We've agreed at last to start testing the grounds on letting team members conduct mini-seminars on technical topics. I like to think of it as what Google have and call TechTalk. I got the inspiration for it from them anyway.

English Test
I've also started working on creating the English test for use during screening of candidate developers. It'll be short passages taken from technical books with multiple choice questions on them to determine comprehension abilities of applicants.

Writing Technical Job Ads

Yesterday, I sat down with the Senior Developers to determine the company's requirements of new recruits. It's best to consult with the people who are senior and those whom have their hands and minds involved inside the project. That's something I had learned during my work at Sharm in the HR department of a 1600-employee operation. It was a piece of advice given to me by the HR Director. Indeed, it does bring good results. Not only does it help tailor solutions to the real problems, but it also makes people feel better for being consulted and see results in a more favorable way in addition of course to producing better results.

Today I started outlining the job ad for the several positions required. Due to my insider knowledge of IT technology and programming I was able to write deeper and better targeted job ads, specially in the requirements section. My insider knowledge of programming and IT technologies gave me an edge. I started fleshing out the outline with bits and pieces from what I had gathered yesterday from the input of the senior developers in addition to my own knowledge of the available talent pool in the market and their profiles. After adding points to the job ad here and there and finding it has flashed up reasonably well, I showed it to one of the senior developers for feedback whom in tern also showed it to another developer within his team. They gave me some more suggestions and additions most of which I took into consideration and edited the job ad accordingly. I finally submitted the final draft of the job ad to the other senior developer (who is higher in rank than the firs one) to have a final look. Probably I'll be posting the ad tomorrow God willing if he gives me feedback on the ad by then.

It's been tough work, but the results I believe are promising and exciting. It is quite rewarding to find some deep and hard work evolve finally into a nice piece of work, it's like the feeling you get after completing working on a work of art!

Refining Clouds

Today I started to create some clouds then refined, re-refined then created more smoke then refined some more. The end result are a bunch of open-ended documents in different parts of the HR function. These documents are the seeds and skeleton of the HR documents and forms. They are the core upon which the whole system will be built.

HR from Scratch

Starting an HR department from scratch is a tough task even if it's only in a tiny company. One has to design and build all sorts of HR forms from scratch, build if even a simple information system to keep track of employee information even if such system is nothing but a bunch of spreadsheets in Excel.

Then one has to took into the ailing problems of employees that had been accumulated over time in the absence of any proper HR function. One has to work in parallel trying to give instant relief from such ailing pains while at the same time working on a more long term remedy for such problems by treating them from the source. This way there would be a balance between achieving long term stable goals while at the same time showing fast results in no time.