IT Forum is now only a few days away, and its success is now largely in the hands of the speakers and onsite logistics team. The success is measured by you; through completing evaluations.

Let me give you an insight into the importance we all - speakers, events team and ultimately the event budget holders - place on the feedback;

The event is measured inside Microsoft based on the feedback. If the overall event score shows year-on-year improvement we have achieved our goal.

We award the highest scoring speakers with a prize to encourage the best performance.

The speakers are highly competitive, in the speaker room there is a large plasma showing the current top speakers and their score - this is automatically refreshed every 60 seconds. Its quite normal for a speaker to check their score immediately after the session (in fact, its possible for them to check their feedback whilst delivering a session) - and most read all the verbatim comments. Speakers who score highly usually get invited back to the next event. You can work out what happens to those who under perform. Performance at events like IT Forum is often a discussion at the speakers annual review with their manager.

Top track prizes are awarded to encourage the best content selection by the track owners.

A low-scoring session will immediately get flagged to the relevant track owner and I. We find out the reason for the low score and take action accordingly, whilst the event is running. For example, sessions which finish early typically score badly – and rightly so.

There are other reasons some sessions under perform; misleading abstract, poor speaker knowledge, noisy or uncomfortable room. Some of these can only be captured and fixed if you provide verbatim feedback; please be specific. If you’re not happy with anything, we want to know.

During the event, I typically spend 30% of my time looking at the scores to see if we’re going in the right direction or if we need to make some changes. In the past, we’ve cancelled poor-performing speakers outstanding sessions so you don't attend a bad session.

There is one thing you can do to help make the event meet your needs; provide feedback which is actionable.

Some good examples of actionable feedback:

• Great session, the demo really helped show how to setup clustering
• The speaker needs presentation-skills training
• The room was too noisy

Conversely, here is feedback which isn’t actionable:

• Great session J
• Waste of time
• Get a better speaker

We want to know why the session was great, why it was a waste of time and how the speaker failed.

I’m confident the event will be a great success and you’ll find it valuable, with your feedback we can make next year even better.

Cheers & enjoy IT Forum 2005

Kevin