I’m giving a number of presentations/talks over the next few months. I will be touching on various topics relating to my professional interests within the localization industry and outside of it.
I don’t want to give too many spoilers away, so here are some of the key points from each. I do hope to see you and look forward to discussing the finer points.
The Business Side
I’m at the TTT Conference in Bled, Slovenia on the 23rd/24th October. I’m off at 9 am on the 24th.
I’ll be looking at the wonderful world of localization and giving my perspective of it from the business side. I’ll be showing some tools and methodologies that I use to help me to build a sustainable competitive advantage and create demonstrable value to our client’s operations. From this perspective both LSP owners and translators will be able to gain an insight into what we do in ‘management’ and hopefully allow them to increase the value of their services.
I’ll cover some basic business principles in marketing, finance, leadership and hopefully show you how to keep your sanity.
I’m also looking forward to seeing the beautiful city of Bled, its been on the list for a long time.
Agile Project Management
Building on the popular GALA webinar on the same topic I’ll be presenting at the tcworld conference 2014. It’s on the 11th, 12th and 13th of November at the International Congress Center (ICS) Messe Stuttgart.
Agile breaks a big project down into a series of small development tasks (called ‘sprints’). Teams then work on these sprints. They deliver tangible results and feedback to the rest of the team. It’s innovative by nature and all areas of the project have a ‘seat at the table’ at all the main stages of the process, it should be particularly interesting to localization/translation companies.
We use it to great success here for software and retail localization projects. I have a great case study about a popular retail client in the UK where we managed to scale up quickly and translate their entire food product catalogue (thousands of own-brand products), including artwork and legal review.
My own personal take is that project directors have forgotten about the essence of Agile Project Management and its fast-paced throughput is often blamed for burning out good project managers. I address this by taking it back to the original manifesto and apply the same philosophy to the project as was intended when the movement started. This puts people ahead of process and puts a much larger emphasis on good leadership and emotional intelligence.
Britain Means Business
On the 19th and 20th of November at the ExCeL London we’ll be exhibiting the company to around 3,000 entrepreneurs looking to expand their business aboard. As part of this I’ll be talking about how to take your business overseas and what a decent translation company can do to help you along the journey. It’s being launched in partnership with the Digital Marketing Show and we’re hoping for a busy time.
For part of the event’s marketing, the organisers interviewed me. They asked who my favourite British entrepreneur is, I said Richard Branson. Why? because he builds space rockets.
The T10+ Show
It’s a large event (25,000) and celebrates some of the best British businesses around today. It really is an honour to talk at this event. We’ll be part of the T10+ exhibition, that’s for businesses with revenues of over £10M. Our stand is W204 (opposite the global business event).
I’ll be talking at this event as well. It’ll be on the topic of international growth and understanding your (new) international consumers. A professional translation service has some way to go to help to remove the language barriers but that’s not all, the people you choose to partner with must understand the demographics and forces acting on new businesses in the new regions.
Next Year
I’ll have a few in the calendar for next year as well… more details will follow nearer the time. I do hope we get to have a talk/beer/coffee.
Take care.