I’ve had a great morning presenting at the DITA Europe conference. DITA Europe is a content management conference bringing together the best minds and solutions to provide strategies that you can use directly in your daily work.

The conference was held in Rotterdam with great views of the city! The conference venue was really well set up and the room/ environment was really conducive to a good learning day. There were a series of great talks and also a ‘technology test kitchen’ which had some really great session like: DITA Adoption: How to involve non-technical authors and how to make metadata great again. I find it really fantastic that the audience was a mix of technical team and management.

I was presenting a topic called: The Questions you should be asking your team. This is one of my favourite topics to discuss and it’s great to share knowledge with different groups of people.

The audience was slightly different to the normal people that I present to, which gave me an alternative viewpoint and insight hearing from team members themselves. What was most important for me during this workshop was seeing how they could use the information in the presentation to adapt their working day and the information that they are giving to their management/ leadership.

During the lively Q&A, I got to learn how other teams celebrate success/ improvements and also some more constructive areas (e.g. how some managers highlight success/ failure). One of the audience mentioned that:

“In a previous company, our management had a massive screw and they used to give it to the employee who screwed up that week”.

One of the areas that gave me ‘food for thought’ was how teams respond to the different motivations and what’s important for them in starting and opening dialogues; “I didn’t like my Project Manager trying to force their planning on us when we knew that it was inaccurate”.

After the session, several people came up to ask questions and as a follow up i’ll be emailing them with ideas such as:

• How to work with French teams and how you can orientate your questions working in a French environment
• What’s the best way to manage your mental health as a team member being involved with a difficult team
• How to work /orientate your questions when you have multiple cultures/nationalities in your team

It’s been a great day and I can’t wait to connect with others on this fascinating topic.