Hornbill INSIGHTS 2018

[Gerry]

 

I am delighted to announce our next Hornbill Insights event is on!  It will be held on the 27^th June 2018 at the Hilton London Heathrow (T4).  This is a very special event in our annual calendar, it is one of the greatest privileges for us to be able to take the time out and meet our customers face to face and I am hoping together we can really build on this over the coming years.  We will of course be there in force so if you want to meet our product specialists, developers, customer success team and senior management in person, we will all be poised to network, answer questions, discuss ideas and even have a beer or two.

For Supportworks Customers: we will not be covering any Supportworks specific content at this event. If you are an existing Supportworks customer and you are thinking about a migration to Hornbill Service Manager then I have no doubt you would find the event and networking opportunities most valuable, there are a significant number of companies who have already migrated, I am sure many of those organisations and individuals will be in attendance at this event. If you have burning questions about how their experience migrating from Supportworks to Hornbill SM has really been, then this would be an ideal opportunity for you to find out.

The number of companies using Hornbill and its suite of applications has grown significantly since our last Insights event, and our community continues to flourish as a result, so we are looking forward to a great day and some face to face interactions.  The structure of the main day will follow largely the same format as before, we will be giving you product updates, introducing new features and of course insights into our thinking for now and the future.  We have so much to talk about and tell you we can hardly contain ourselves J

Now some of you may have noticed above that I said “The main day”!  From day one I have been keen to keep this event educational and focused on your success, and at the last event I felt strongly that one day was just not long enough to get into topics too deeply, we had to keep to a schedule and for me the day just went so quickly.  We have been thinking about extending the event this year to a second day, where we can focus more on educational topics and dive deeper, classroom or workshop style and get into detail, I suppose you could think about this more like training classes than a theatre presentation.  I have no idea what topics we would seek to cover, we want you to tell us what content you would like to see – it is your event as much as it is ours so please get involved.

Some suggestions include: -

-     ITIL Best Practice

-       DevOps/Agile

-       VeriSM

-       Enterprise Service Management and the Opportunity for IT

-       Team Collaboration

-       Service Catalog

-       Business Process Design

-       Specific Product Training (BPM, ProCap, Reporting)

-       Integration & Automation

-       Customer Presentations

-       One-on-one consulting, guidance or knowledge transfer
 

Just as before all Hornbill customers are invited to attend the main day of this event and there is no charge, lunch and end of day drinks are on us.  However, if we are to extend the event for the purpose of delivering more in-depth workshops and training I think we would need to put a nominal charge per delegate for attendance for the second day, something around the £150 mark, this is mainly to cover the cost of the facilities, and possibly cover the costs of one or two industry experts to join us. It also happens to serve as a good way of establishing if there is genuine interest in this type of extension, the number is small enough to fit into any sized training budget, but big enough to make a commitment.  I am hoping over time this will become an even bigger event extending to 3-4 days as our community and applications continue to grow.

I appreciate one day out of the office is already a really big commitment, so I am opening this up to you all to see if there is an appetite for this type of extension. Please let me know by posting on this forum thread.

We will also be sending a more formal communication out to all customers via email and I will soon post an agenda for the main day also.

Please let us know what you think

Gerry

[Gerry]

Well I guess it seems like there is no appetite for the second day, will shelve that idea for now..

Gerry

[Kelvin]

I like the idea of the 2nd day but for me having it as a separate workshop day later in the year would be better. Like you said to take 1 day out of the office is ok but 2 together is pushing it

[Lyonel]

Looking forward to that event! Thanks @Gerry

[Gerry]

1 hour ago, Kelvin said:

I like the idea of the 2nd day but for me having it as a separate workshop day later in the year would be better. Like you said to take 1 day out of the office is ok but 2 together is pushing it

Hi Kelvin,

Yeah that may be a possibility, the problem with running these things is they are very time consuming and very expensive to run.  I am seeing our community really build momentum and want to find ways of building on that.  If I look to the industry and see what other organisations do its very common to hold a 2-4 day event with numerous tracks of information sharing, trining, workshop and so on all designed to foster community, knowledge sharing, education and networking opportunities etc, its not just a soapbox for Hornbill to talk about our roadmap, its a conference, would have industry speakers, customer speakers etc..., this on the face of it seems to work very well for many organisations. An annual event like that is something we  (as in Hornbill) could plan our entire year around and make that our highlight annual event and thats what I am exploring.  Of course we are not quite at the size in terms of numbers that would justify such a large event today but I was interested to see what others thought to determine if this is something that should be in our long term thinking.  Perhaps this is type of event is better suited to run in the US where the format does appear to work. 

Gerry

[Steve Giller]

@Gerry I'll just jump in and say what I'm sure you will be able to guess after all this time - I'd love the opportunity a second day would offer, and it would be extremely useful to me and the College, but I have to fight just to get travel costs for the existing 1 day; adding a second, charged day simply wouldn't be approved however short-sighted that is.

Personally I've never gone home from these events without being buzzing full of ideas and renewed enthusiasm, and I've been to a fair few!

[Gerry]

Just now, DeadMeatGF said:

@Gerry I'll just jump in and say what I'm sure you will be able to guess after all this time - I'd love the opportunity a second day would offer, and it would be extremely useful to me and the College, but I have to fight just to get travel costs for the existing 1 day; adding a second, charged day simply wouldn't be approved however short-sighted that is.

Personally I've never gone home from these events without being buzzing full of ideas and renewed enthusiasm, and I've been to a fair few!

Steve, 

Yes fully understand, I expect that will be quite a common situation for many, its a shame because we could do so much more.  The day is too short, we find we have to cut a lot of content and really cannot go that deep into anything.  We have been asked quite a lot about more hands-on training sessions and we know that customers get so much from networking, I guess I am trying to find a way to bring those things together so its cost and time efficient for everyone. If as @Kelvin suggests we ran a second day at another point in the year, thats then two lots of travel and still two days out of the office, and for those that have to travel a long way thats potentially two over night stays too.  Thats why a consolidated two day event would make so much more sense.  Of course both days would be optional too, so its not an all or nothing. 

Gerry

[Steve Giller]

To be fair, if there's an outside chance of us getting funds extending by a day and crashing at Generator or similar is more achievable than a separate day - it's normally travel costs that are crippling!

[Keith]

Hi @Gerry I had hoped to respond to this sooner but its been a busy week

I really like the sound of the second day and would certainly welcome the kind of activities planned for the second day. I don't see the cost as a problem personally but I understand that others will have constraints. My problem in committing this year is based around organisational change which means I don't want to commit to too much at this point in case of my availability changing. 

I am sure that many of us would welcome sessions in some of the areas you highlight but I wonder if these can't be delivered in a way which is more conducive to the time, cost and organising constraints that a workshop of this type entails. How about something along the lines of a remote session on a specific topic. This could be run monthly or quarterly with much less effort and cost from your side and us users could pick and choose whether to attend more easily based on topic, without the need for travel, cost or too much time away from our day job.

Of course this means we loose the face to face interaction but this in tandem with your one day event might be a good compromise.

One of the things I am always interested to see is how others have implemented Hornbill, how have they structured services, what integrations have they implemented, what does their reporting and dashboards look like. So some customer lead session would also be good if you can convince any of your bigger users to take part. 

 

Keith

 

 

[Gerry]

@Keith

You make some good points there and I agree. One of he problems with getting customers to participate in this sort of thing is also time, in my experience its far easier to get participation in a physical event, people are more prepared to invest the time - that has at least been my experience, the Supportworks user group meetings we run were very heavily wighted in this direction and it works really well.  We are running a series of webinars/session, the next one is on the 16th of April [edit: tentative date] at our offices, its titled Using Change Management Successfully with Hornbill and is free to attend, I can see it in the schedule so presume communication has already gone out about this.  There are at least five others planned for this year that I can see, so I think we are on the case. 

The main thrust of the anuual even is to get everyone together and make it a focal point in the calendar for all Hornbill customers, perhaps the timing is not right though

 

Gerry

[Keith]

@Gerry

Totally agree that a physical event is better I was just offering up some alternatives if this becomes impractical or cost prohibitive. Good to hear your already planning on running some sessions but that makes me wonder/question why I don't know about them. How have these been communicated?

 

Keith

[Gerry]

9 minutes ago, Keith said:

@Gerry

Totally agree that a physical event is better I was just offering up some alternatives if this becomes impractical or cost prohibitive. Good to hear your already planning on running some sessions but that makes me wonder/question why I don't know about them. How have these been communicated?

Keith

To be honest I don't know, I have just raised the question internally, I can see the Academy Event Schedule internally, I had assumed given there is only a month to go that this has already been communicated. I will find out and let you know

 

Gerry

[Gerry]

2 hours ago, DeadMeatGF said:

To be fair, if there's an outside chance of us getting funds extending by a day and crashing at Generator or similar is more achievable than a separate day - it's normally travel costs that are crippling!

Yeah thats probably why it works so well in the US, there is a lot of travelling involved for most people, in the UK its easy enough to travel to/from an event even for a day so its less than an issue, but as you identity, two separate days is a bigger time and cost overhead for all concerned, that was my feeling anyway..

Gerry

[Guest Paul Davis]

@Keith We had set some provisional dates internally a little while back, but had not as yet finalised and communicated externally. As you say, where we are now this is not very much notice. That said, I do expect there will be a formal communication about this shortly. Watch this space!

[Kelvin]

1 hour ago, Gerry said:

We are running a series of webinars/session, the next one is on the 16th of April [edit: tentative date] at our offices, its titled Using Change Management Successfully with Hornbill and is free to attend, I can see it in the schedule so presume communication has already gone out about this.

@GerryReading this, is this for the Supportworks community or the Hornbill Service Management Tool?

[Gerry]

43 minutes ago, Kelvin said:

@GerryReading this, is this for the Supportworks community or the Hornbill Service Management Tool?

this particular series is for Hornbill Service Manager - although I have now been told the above date I mentioned is "tentative"

Gerry

[Keith]

1 hour ago, Paul Davis said:

@Keith We had set some provisional dates internally a little while back, but had not as yet finalised and communicated externally. As you say, where we are now this is not very much notice. That said, I do expect there will be a formal communication about this shortly. Watch this space!

OK Thanks Paul. I look forward to the communication.

[Kelvin]

@GerryI would be very interested in these. I await the communication.

[Darren Rose]

Hi @Gerry

I like the idea of a second day, but appreciate that you need the numbers to make it viable and that not everyone can make it due to travel costs etc... 

The smaller sessions sound like a great idea, and given the close proximity of your offices, we'd certainly look to attend in person.

Thanks

Darren 

[Gerry]

@Darren Rose

Yeah I was excited about putting on a second day but the costs vs the interest was not viable this time around. The bad news is we have removed quite a lot of content we could have covered, the good news is we have quite a lot of unused content

Gerry

[Darren Rose]

@Gerry I didn't get any comms about the change session on April 16th. Can you confirm the details? 

[Gerry]

59 minutes ago, Darren Rose said:

@Gerry I didn't get any comms about the change session on April 16th. Can you confirm the details? 

See comments above, this was a tentative date, so not sure this has been confirmed yet or not.  I will ask...

Gerry

[Guest Paul Davis]

Hi Darren,

In order to provide everyone sufficient notice we currently expect the first event to take place in the latter half of May. Watch this space (or one very nearby) for formal notification of details of the program.

Regards,

Paul

[samwoo]

Hello,

Is there an ETA for the formal communications on this INSIGHTS 2018 event? The sooner I can get something in our Calendars, the more chance for more of us from my team to attend

Thanks,

Samuel

[Gerry]

@samwoo

The details are nearing being finalised and invites will be sent and a registration form provided.  The date however is fixed and already booked so you an put this in your calendar now, the date is not going to change. 

Gerry