Speaker Abstract and Bio

Allen worked for over 9 years for a project management consulting firm in the San Francisco Bay area, traveling around the world conducting project planning workshops. While facilitating these workshops he would engage 20-30 team members and in two focused days come up with a charter, project plan, defining documents and a schedule for a particular project. Each participant was given a pad of Post-it Notes and a Sharpie pen and they brainstormed, writing down risks, issues, tasks, durations, etc. When the workshop was over, the walls were literally wallpapered with flipchart paper and Post-it Notes. At the end of two days it took Allen and one other person working nonstop till 2 or 3 in the morning to get all this data entered into Project, Word, etc ... essentially redoing what had already been done by the participants. Allen started thinking that there had to be a better way!

Post-it Notes are indispensible in working with teams. Cover your walls in flipchart paper and Post-it Notes. You can't have too many. Post-it Notes beats any collaboration software system you can name, and can be used for many purposes. High level plans/roadmaps, key dates, design discussions, sketches of functionality, issues log, ideas, stats, status reports, topical posters, etc, etc. You name it, stick it on the wall!

People have a special tactile relationship with Post-it Notes. Like email compared with face-to-face communication, no tool will replace the sense of collaboration and teamwork this focal point provides. It's an excuse for people to collaborate. And in development, where many people are not necessarily natural collaborators, it's an important step to get the team talking … to get the team working together, as a team.

But for all the benefits of Post-it Notes, there is one glaring drawback. Once the idea has been written down, the information must be re-captured, transcribed and distributed in order to share it with the team. This is a very time consuming and tedious process.

After a great deal of development we have patented NxtNote. Instead of handing out Post-It Notes or working from whiteboards, participants simply bring their personal notebooks computers to the room, launch a web-browser and are connected wirelessly to Post-it Note printers placed around the room. The participant types their comment into the NxtNote software, and the NxtNote is printed (so that you can actually read it instead of trying to interpret handwriting hieroglyphics). But the real magic is that we also print a bar code on the NxtNote, so that at the end of the day the facilitator can take a scanner and literally in 15 minutes capture what took two people 8 hours to keyboard in manually. These can be scanned into ANY application, including Word, Excel and Project.

In addition, we have just recently released an additional piece of functionality called "RemoteNote". This allows participants who are not able to participate in the workshop physically to submit NxtNotes from anywhere in the world via the internet. This will allow your facilitators to have participants who cannot physically be in the room collaborate with other team members.

NxtNote is an exciting new way of brainstorming and planning. With this leading-edge tool, you can electronically capture information and share it with team members in real-time. This technology allows you to communicate your ideas more clearly, resulting in shorter meetings, stronger collaboration and increased productivity for you and your team. NxtNote revolutionizes the planning and brainstorming process, accelerating the implementation of ideas and projects.

Allen Meyer is founder and president of NxtNote Technology and is a Principal and Senior Consultant with Wireless Workshops Inc.

Allen has served as a scheduler, project manager, trainer, and facilitator for projects in telecommunications, manufacturing, automotive, information technology services and government. He has over sixteen years experience in all aspects of formal project management including projects of all sizes up to multimillion dollars. Allen has been consulting in project management since 1992. He currently provides services in project facilitation, project management training, project management consulting, project management software selection and implementation, and project scheduling services. Allen has dedicated his efforts to bringing best practices in project management process training and implementation by working with such companies as Hewlett-Packard, Compaq Computer, Dell Computer, Motorola, American Airlines, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, State of Alaska and Capital One Finance.

As a trainer and consultant, Allen takes a hands-on approach, integrating the "theories" of project management with real-world applications. His courses and workshops are deliberately interactive and encourage participants to challenge the theory in order to make project management applicable to their own environment. All of his courses and seminars use terminology and process consistent with the framework of knowledge of the Project Management Institute. He has been designated by PMI as a Project Management Professional (PMP) since 2002.

It was his desire to improve the project planning process, which lead him to develop and patent a state-of-the-art technology called NxtNote in 2003.