Well, this is disappointing: Due to a lack of sufficient sales, Paul and I made the difficult decision earlier this morning to cancel the Toronto stop for his SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class.
We thought and schemed about ways we could keep pushing this inevitable decision off, but in the end time played a factor and not having certainty that we’d have enough people to make the event worthwhile was going to play havoc with his itinerary and ability to secure reasonable travel and accommodation arrangements.
Boo.
What Went Wrong?
I’d love to know myself. Paul and I worked our networks to drive traffic to register. We tweeted, blogged, cajoled colleagues, pitched the local user group and talked to customers. No dice.
According to my EventBrite site stats we garnered over 300 page views, and while a bit lower than I’d like even that number wasn’t a wide enough catchment to get interested parties to sign up. And as I wrote yesterday, that really surprises me because I know how important the topic is: Governance is *huge* for the enterprise as they are just *now* coming to grips with the reality of hundreds of failed SharePoint implementations. Ditto for small and medium sized organizations.
They all know that they want to be in some happy future state where SharePoint enables them to be more productive collaborators and information hunter/gatherers but haven’t the foggiest how to achieve it. Paul’s course provides this guidance – and while it does take some hard work, it’s not that difficult and can be a lot of fun. It’s our loss to have missed out on the opportunity to have him come to Toronto.
Not All Bad News
Those that have registered for the event will have received a refund notice from the EventBrite site and you can contact me regarding any questions you may have. Now, it’s not all entirely gloom & doom: There is an outside chance that Paul may still want to make a trip up to do a guest appearance at a local SharePoint user group. This is still in the envisioning/planning phase (HA!) – if it comes together, you’ll hear about it here and on Twitter.
Paul has said that it’s unlikely he’ll be back this way (Toronto) any time soon – but there is always an opportunity for the future. I’ll be working with him over the coming months to see what we can do differently to try and get his Master Class here and in front of an audience of the willing!