ANZ Pied Piper

The enablement portion of the program is behind us. Now it's time to have fun! As we saw in previous posts, all program participants acquired various skills through a series of workshops and competed against each other by creating a project of their own involving elements from all workshops. The next step was to have a 24 hour Hackathon. Hackathons are events where participants prototype a concept about a common theme, either working individually or in teams. Between illness and various working and internal training commitments only 9 people could join us but it was fun. The theme we chose for the Hackathon was to improve the app I had developed for the previous year's Presales Conference. The idea of the original app was twofold: to help us navigate the event and choose between as many as 4 parallel tracks to help us obtain better feedback about the different sessions as they happen, as opposed to rely on a survey at the end of the 3 day event. Additionally th...

The Pied Program program recently reached a major milestone; the completion of the enablement phase. Overall have covered 4 workshops that cover the pillars of the Digital and IT transformation: Agile and Cloud Native Apps, Automation, Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence. Customers often see DellEMC Presales Engineers as trusted advisors. The knowledge we acquired through the program will help ensure we remain relevant in the context of the big wave that is shaking the market. To culminate this phase we asked the team members to work on a personal project that would help them internalise what we have taught so far.  This would be a competitive endeavour. They would be scored primarily on the use of all different skills with a minimum one skill from each workshop. This led to them adding features to their projects that looked unnecessarily convoluted or even not fitting naturally with the rest of the solution. We also scored creativity. At the end we saw a range of ...

Welcome to my blog! Thanks for dropping by considering I am still trying to shape up this project The idea at this stage is to share some of the content I have developed for a project we are running at work. This project is called Pied Piper and was kicked off in June 2017, so slightly over 2 months right now, although due to high levels of activity if feels we have been at it for longer than that. I work for DellEMC as a presales systems engineer (EMC before the merge) focusing mainly on block storage. The world around us is changing and we need to change with it. Organisations of all shapes and sizes in every industry need to embrace the digital transformation to add value to their business and stay competitive. Presales engineers need to transform themselves by learning new skills to be able to guide customers through the digital transformation journey. Amongst other things the Pied Piper program aims at enabling the participants in the three pillars of the Digital Transforma...