A Peak into My Busy Five Weeks
Life is Going to Busy Over the Next Month or So, Here’s a Quick Peak
Today begins a period of around five weeks where I will be away on the road for at least one day during that week. This is due to be attending a number of different Salesforce events in the UK and Europe, many of which I will actually be a speaker. Over the course of these five weeks, I will actually be speaking at a total of four different events. Here in this post I want to share a little about those speaking engagements, and as well to highlight some of my upcoming posts relating to these events. I will be releasing some posts over the next few weeks highlighting some of the sessions that I personally would recommend checking out. So in this post, I’m going to give you a peak behind the curtain and detail how I set out the order for the sessions I’ll be listing.
If you’re coming to any of the events listed in this post, then I would love to meet you and say hello. These events are all in-person, so it’s going to be a great chance to get to meet people that you maybe haven’t met face to face.
Where Will I Be Over the Next Five Weeks?
I will be back and forth to London as well as travelling to Europe over the next five weeks. Here is the list of all of the events that I will be at coming up.
Nonprofit Summit, Tuesday 17 May
My busy month and a bit of travel all starts with the Nonprofit Summit. I will be leaving in a few hours to head off to London to attend the watch party for this event at Salesforce Tower in the centre of London. I am genuinely looking forward to attending this event and getting to meet a number of Trailblazers from the Nonprofit space, many of which I have not met in-person but know through the London and Midlands Nonprofit Group and the weekly Coffee Chat event organised by the amazing Salesforce.org Community Team.
Czech Dreamin’, Friday 27 May
The next event on my itinerary is Czech Dreamin’ in Prague which takes place on Friday 27 May. This event is a pretty sweet get for me personally as I’ve wanted to visit Prague for a number of years now, so attending this event gives me a great opportunity to see Prague and enjoy it. In fact I will actually spend an extra two days in Prague before the conference with me leaving on Monday 30 June. The session I will be delivering at Czech Dreamin’ is called Skills for Success: The Skills Every Admin Needs to Succeed in Their Career. This session stems from the work that went into getting the Skills for Success blog series that is currently running on Salesforce Admins. In the session I will be providing a high-level overview of each of the fourteen skills in the Admin Skill Set and talking about the blog series and giving it a bit of spotlight.
London’s Calling, Friday 10 June
After returning from Czech Dreamin’ and having a bit of time to rest up I’ll be back on the road, I’ll be once again heading to London, this time it will be for London’s Calling. This is pretty neat for me as well as London’s Calling has been on my bucket list of events to speak at, and it’s taken me three years to get accepted as a speaker for this event. At this year’s event I will be delivering the same sessions as I am at Czech Dreamin’, the main difference is that I will have a little bit longer to present on this topic in London than in Prague. This longer time frame will give a bit of scope to extend the discussion a little bit.
Salesforce World Tour London, Thursday 16 June
The week after London’s Calling will be the Salesforce World Tour in London. I’ll actually be there in-person as I will be leading a campfire session on the subject of Personal Branding. In it I will be picking up on the acronym I’ve used recently on this subject. That acronym being V.O.I.C.E. This will actually be my first time attending an officially branded Salesforce event of this kind of size in-person. I’ve attended a few events virtually such as TrailheaDX ’21 and Dreamforce ’21, but I’ve never been able to attend a Salesforce event of this size until now. So I’m really looking forward to being there for the World Tour.
YeurDreamin’, Saturday 18 June
The final event on my schedule (for now) is YeurDreamin’ which is taking place in Amsterdam on Saturday 18 June, two days after the World Tour event. This week for me will be the busiest week relating to travel and events of the five weeks. I’ll leave for London on the Wednesday, attend World Tour on the Thursday, head to Amsterdam on the Friday for YeurDreamin’ on the Saturday and head home on the Monday after hopefully being able to attend YeurLeadin’ on the Sunday. At YeurDreamin’ I will be speaking on one of my favourite topics, that being Flow. More specifically I will be looking at the question of can you achieve the same thing using Flow Builder that you can with Flow Orchestrator. Many in the Community are still wanting to see if Flow Orchestrator is a viable tool, I hope that this session will shed a little bit of this all-important subject. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to this.
You Said You‘re Writing Blogs About These Events?
That’s right, for Czech Dreamin’, London’s Calling and YeurDreamin’ I will be writing a blog post which will come out one week before each event that will feature a list of sessions that I am personally recommending for each event. Many people do this, but I thought I’d do it as well. Each list will be subjective as they will the sessions that I am personally recommending. So there may be sessions in the event that you find more appealing. That’s absolutely fine. I do have one rule for these lists though, my session can’t be on them. The reason for this is because I want to highlight the content from the amazing speakers that are going to be there and not make the post about me and my sessions.
With that in mind, I do want to share with you briefly my methodology for these lists will be ordered. I have opted for a methodology that will aspire to make the list hopefully a little more balanced and fair rather than purely being based on my subjective opinions … granted it is still very subjective.
The Methodology for Ordering Highlighted Sessions
The methodology I have chosen to go with for ordering the sessions I am choosing to highlight in these upcoming conference blogs is one I give each session a score based on three different areas. By scoring I don’t necessarily mean that one session is better than the other, this is merely a way to formalise an order for the sessions that I will feature in these blogs.
Here are the three areas I have chosen to use to arrange these lists:
#1: Accessibility
By accessibility what I mean is how much knowledge or experience do I think you might need to engage with the content in that session. For example, if you need to have a high level of experience then the session will end up having a lower score. However, if the session can be engaged with at any and all skill levels, it will have a higher score on my list. Now if I’m being honest here, we do need sessions that are geared towards higher skills levels, to be honest I’ve attended a number of sessions that I haven’t gotten all too much out of due to their content being pitched at too low of a skill level. That being said, I do feel that we need to make as many sessions as possible accessible to each and every skill level in the Trailblazer Community. So the more accessible the session is, the higher the score will be on my scale for rating each session.
#2: Relevance
Similar to accessibility, this score for relevance is graded higher the more relevant it is across the whole of the ecosystem. For this area I’m really referring to how niche the session is. For example, if it is a session that focuses on a topic that is relevant to the majority of the ecosystem, the session will score higher on my list. If the session is a bit more niche, focusing on a product that isn’t maybe as widely used such as Tableau CRM (sorry, I mean Salesforce Analytics), I’ve scored it lower on the scale. Does that mean that I think those sessions are worse than the others, absolutely not, I am actually really intrigued by Tableau and do want to learn how to use and implement it more. So if there’s a session that you think that is really cool, but it’s rated a little bit lower in my list, it might because (to the best of my knowledge) it’s not as relevant to the majority of the Trailblazer Community.
#3: Wildcard Score
And to wrap up the methodology we have the wildcard score. Truthfully this is really being used as the final step to put the sessions into an order. This score is based on my purely subjective opinion of which sessions from these list are the ones I’m interested in the most, so do bear that in mind. How this works is that I will give each session a unique number based on my interest of it that can not exceed the number of sessions on my list. For example, if the list includes 8 sessions, the numbers available I can use in the wildcard score will range from 1 to 8. The higher the number, the higher the session will ultimately end up being on my list. For the final step, all of the scores in each section are added together to create a final score, and those final scores are what are used to arrange the sessions in order for that given list.
N.B. Once again, do bear in mind that these upcoming lists are based on my subjective views and observations. Please do feel absolutely feel to disagree.
Do You Have Anything Else Coming Up?
I actually do have some other things coming up. This coming Friday is the kickoff to the next round of Release Readiness Live, so I will be watching both the Admin Preview and the Salesforce Flow preview. You can expect to see my usual blog posts covering those two webinars and the highlights coming out of them. I’m also probably going to be looking to do a post after I come back from Amsterdam in the middle of June to cover highlights from my time on the road. Truthfully, I don’t have too much planned out for that highlights post just yet, but I most certainly be writing one up after I get back home.
Closing Comments
So that’s a little bit of what my life is going to look like over the next five weeks or so. There’s a lot going on, many chances to meet people in-person once again or for the first time (many for the first time). Let me know if you’re going to any of these events. I’d love to see you at them and say hello. Until then, there’s a good bit to look ahead to on this blog with the posts coming up about these events and the content tied to Release Readiness Live. So there’s a decent bit coming up. Let me know in the comments below what you’re looking forward to the most from the list I’ve put forward in this post. I’ll be back with my next post on Friday, until then I’ll see you online, or maybe even in-person tomorrow at the Nonprofit Summit. I can’t wait to get all this going.
