I’m just back from the PASS Summit 2014. What a great event. But this year, it was a little different. I did a lot of the usual things, presented a pre-conference seminar to about 130 people, helped out at the Red Gate booth, presented a session on execution plans on Friday, went to a few after hours events (that included karaoke). You know, the Summit. My tenth one. But, I am starting the process of transitioning onto the board. This will be my first report on the work I’ve been doing around that. However, please let me point out something, that was made very obvious to me during the event, I’m coming on to the board, but I’m not yet on the board. I say this because whatever work I put in for board business last week, it was nothing compared to the time put in by the people who are actually on the board. Make no mistake, that’s insanely time consuming work.

I went to a series of meetings that reflected my past volunteer work and my upcoming time on the board. I attended meetings with the Chapter Leaders and the Regional Mentors. There were some great discussions around past performance and support of the organization and future needs. I’m not going into details on this stuff. Some of it is NDA, most isn’t, but I don’t think it’s my place to address any of it yet. Let’s just say it was really interesting. I especially loved hearing about why the Regional Mentors do the work that they do. Ask one sometime. We have a lot of work ahead of us and I’m pretty jazzed about some of it.

I also attended a series of PASS Community sessions at the event. I really enjoyed the session on how to build a user group by two of the best Chapter Leaders I know, Kendal Van Dyke and Jes Borland. I also went to a couple of sessions in and around the work I helped with on the Summit Selection Committee. We had a workshop on building an abstract. It was attended by committee members and other speakers. If you didn’t get selected, you both learned why, and we reviewed individual abstracts to help people write better ones. It was a great session and if you needed more feedback on your abstracts, I’m sorry you weren’t there. We then had a mission report session from the Selection Committee. We walked through how the various teams on the committee did their work, how it’s going to change next year, and how well, overall, despite quite a bit of heat generated at the announcement, the process went. Based on the fact that attendance was up all over the board, even on pre-cons sold, I don’t think the committee did too poorly. But, the committee is going to try to make it even better next year, especially around getting better feedback to everyone.

My biggest impression from everything I did in and around the board, is actually not a shock or even news to me, the board is a team of great people who are doing simply amazing work. I’m actually humbled and more than a little fearful to be joining such a great team. I’m also really impressed by the people at PASS HQ. Another amazing team I’m looking forward to working with. If I had to provide criticism about everything I’ve seen so far, I’d say that I think all the work done by all these people isn’t adequately communicated. Maybe it’s better that it all looks like effortless magic, but I think I might have been slightly less critical in the past (slightly), if I had known how much work it was.

If there was a unifying theme to everything being said and done, I’d say it’s communication. More of it is needed. More of it seems to be promised. More of it is wanted. You will see quite a lot more work done in that area. Heck, it was part of Adam’s keynote.

Look for more updates as I get to work with the teams more.

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