Dealing with Disasters By Molly Connolly

Our last FMPug meeting was with Molly Connolly, owner of Thorsen Consulting, a Chicago-based technology consultant. Her background is in management consulting and over the last 10 years she has focused on delivering customized FileMaker Pro database solutions. As a former partner at Soliant Consulting, she managed a team of developers working in a variety of industries including advertising, education, and manufacturing. Molly is currently providing advisory and training services to consulting companies on a variety of issues including client management, training, recruiting and sales.

Being an expert problem solver is important for all businesses and with Molly’s interactive presentation, the group really learned a lot about how we instinctively respond and how we should respond to business disasters! Whether it was dealing with trouble shooting a bug, resolving a change order conflict, or dealing head on with crashing files and deleted data, in addition to your technical skills, the lesson of the day was that you need great communication skills to get the information you need.

You also need to be able to effectively communicate with your users so you can help them to understand the downtime and/or find workarounds while you solve the problem. This interactive session has armed the attendees with problem-solving and communication techniques to address a variety of difficult situations.

Here are a few of the highlights!

1. Learn initial response techniques to determine what issues really are “urgent” and address them effectively.

2. Practice how to ask the right questions in order to pinpoint the problem.

3. Learn communication techniques for high-stress conversations regarding change orders and bugs.

4. Expand your support network and have a team of problem-solvers at your disposal.

We look forward to Seeing all of you on February 25, 2008 when Alexei Folger, Systems Engineer from FileMaker will be speaking along with Phil Smith, Business Account Manager from FileMaker.

To sign up for the meeting visit www.fmpug.com.