Internal Development.

After getting back from the MS development day yesterday, there’s nothing but grins and good thoughts bumbling around in my head. You simply can’t beat being in the same room with a bunch of people that think like you do and get excited about helping others discover and utilise the new technology and ways of communicating.

I don’t normally write these ‘post dev day‘ reviews, so maybe I should back up a little…

What is an MS dev day? Well let me walk you through one. Obviously it’s got some business attached to it in the form of what MS has been up to in the past few months, what people are working on right now and where things are heading in future, but once that’s out of the way, its all about doing wheelies in ‘blue gear’ and skids in ‘red’.

Straight after a company round up by DK, each of us broke into a quick presentation on a new online service that we had found and think MS can make use of. We took a look at lovelycharts.com, oovoo.com, GoAnimate.com and Prezi.com. Discussions quickly kicked off about the ‘real world’ usefulness for our clients in our training sessions. Anyone can show you how to use a new website, but what about the context? All these services are only as good as their longevity of existence, ease of use for the layman and how it compliments the existing operations of the clients that use them.

After a quick lunch break, I kicked off with the twmmf project, showing the stages I’m at with figuring out how this thing is going to look and function, and listening to the rest of the crew input their thoughts (more on this in another blog post). The discussion that followed, went well. When the project was first introduced to the team on Dev Day 4, DK and myself, got a good kicking regarding our approach and its viability. Which was great because we took a long hard look afterwards re-examining our motives and objectives. So I guess for Dev Day 5 the refined imagery and change of pitch got everyone excited… *phew* :)

Next up DK spilled his guts regarding monetising MS—which isn’t as commercially blatant as it sounds—MS doesn’t and never has advertised, sponsored or marketed in the traditional sense, regarding the services it offers. We’ve informed people, yes but never sold. People have mostly found us through direct recommendation, or heard of, and/or seen DK talk somewhere else—which is pretty remarkable when you look over some of our past clients. Anyways, this discussion was about facing up to the changing economical financial climate, appreciating that clients budgets and priorities will change in future, and that MS has not capitalised (much) on our work so far. So we took to the board and brainstormed all the revenue generation methods we could run with. This doesn’t mean that we will implement any of them, but it was certainly worth kicking the whole idea about and seeing what people could come up with… and naturally, when you’ve got good heads a room, the gems began to flow.

Next up Barney took the lead on a presentation about presenting. Giving a valuable session on tips and tricks to make life easier when standing in front of an audience. ‘Surely you should know your stuff by now?’ you might be thinking… well to a degree, but none of us are big headed or too proud to admit that we could all do better. Barneys 10+ years of public speaking and working 100+ kids at a time with 6min attention spans, means he can draw on a wealth of knowledge; judging by the number of questions and discussions afterwards, it went down very well and could be part of future development days.

The final main agenda item of note was my presentation of some new t-shirt ideas. We’ve all been running about in black Ts for some time now, and its time for a refresh. The past couple of years have brought into the limelight some consistent phrases and terms which seemed to have become ‘sticky’ with MS training. We have also had requests from clients in the past about buying our shirts—so maybe we should be thinking about making some available for anyone that wants one? We’ll keep you posted on how this shapes up in future.

Ok that’s it—I think I’m about done, check out the photos above and look out for Barneys ‘fist’ push ups, my handstand, Bobbies headstand, Matts Yoga pose and DKs (assisted) backspin. Here’s to ‘MS DevDay 5′ and looking forward to more of the same on 31st May with Dev Day 6 and MS’s 3rd Birthday.

Author: mark - 05/03/09