alexbmorris

Summer 2019 and Winter 2020

IBM Pollinate

Bringing culture and creativity to IBMers.

Culture*Event Design*Experience Design*Public Speaking

Inception

While working on platform-wide search my manager noticed I was itching for more to do. Outside of my project work, I had begun to earn the title of “Culture Queen” by planning many bonding activities. Luckily, she noticed how pumped I was while doing that and asked me to create something even bigger: to impact culture at a grand scale.

“Create an event that will bring together Developers, Designers, and Project Managers to make the IBM Silicon Valley Lab a hub for design.”

- Ana Manrique. Design Manager

My contribution

I created and spearheaded a semi-annual conference called IBM Pollinate. I recruited a committee of four IBMers to plan the first conference for August 7th, 2019 . My tasks included creating a mission, establishing a budget, delegating tasks to the committee, securing event space, and marketing a new event.
200+ IBMers gather for the keynote talk

New responsibilities

While continuing to balance my product work, I met with the committee once or twice monthly for six months. Together we ran into a few challenges:
  • Establishing a budget: How much would it cost? Where would the money come from? Luckily, I met an event coordinator at IBM and together we created and secured a 9k budget.
  • Fully remote team: The committee only met in person once in a six month period before the event. We learned how to balance meeting cadence and expectations while continuing our full time design jobs.
  • Marketing and spreading the word: The five Bay Area studios had not seen an event like this before. We had to come up with a name and mission that would quickly convince IBMers to get involved.
Original IBM Pollinate branding by Mihir Chauhan

Creating a mission

Our committee came up with the name IBM Pollinate that holds strong for two reasons:
  1. We IBMers have a bee in our logo.
  2. Pollinate represents the sharing of ideas in a creative way.
Here is the message we presented:
IBM Pollinate, a full-day IBM-only event, in which Developers, Designers, and Offering Managers (Product Managers) held sessions to share a creative skill or craft of their choice to an audience of their peers.
The event would tap into our collective creative expertise and provided an opportunity for our team to come together in the true sense of community.

Achieving and succeeding

Our four committee members split up several responsibilities: branding, recruiting volunteers and speakers, creating a registration website, and ordering food and swag. The conference had one keynote speaker and 24 IBM led sessions that each ranged in topics, structure, and length. Examples of session topics include: demystifying data science, guitar and UX design, power of personal narrative, switching careers, visual note taking, accessibility, animations made easy, introspection and Kazien.
I’m very proud to share the outcome of the first conference:

Goals

150
Participants
3
Bay Area IBM locations represented
3
Disciplines in attendance (Design, Development, PM)

Outcomes

226
Registered participants
5
All Bay Area IBM locations represented
7
Disciplines in attendance (technical sales, marketing, content, etc)
Video by Raymond Suarez

Expanding from a conference to a culture

After the conference, we expanded our resources and network due to the demand coming from IBMers. They wanted more! We created an internal website and encouraged IBMers to host mini talks between the semi-annual conference. The committee grew from 4 to 9 in order to keep up with the new responsibilities and mentor new members to take on primary roles once they felt up to speed. I increased the budget from 9k to 16k so we could go bigger and badder for the second conference.

Planning Winter Pollinate 2020

Our committee was more agile the second time around. I mapped out a 6 month plan to help committee members communicate with their managers and understand when their priorities would pick up.

Adapting our efforts

On March 6th, five days before the Spring IBM Pollinate, we decided to cancel the conference due to COVID-19. My committee was devastated, and so was I. After a few weeks of brainstorming we took the conference virtual. The speakers signed up for slots over a 2.5 month period on Friday afternoons. As participants began to tune in we saw engagement of 70-100 IBMers attending every talk. This allowed speakers to have bigger audiences than the first conference.

A new sharing culture at IBM

I set up the committee to continually have a changing mix of experienced and new members so that this effort will stay alive for years to come. The Pollinate message was powerful enough to encourage IBMers outside of our committee to create a mini site-specific Pollinate in for IBMers in Emeryville, and regular “buzz talks” that happen anywhere.
Company culture proves to be one of my passions, and I am so glad I had a space to affect change at IBM.

“IBM Pollinate was the best IBM event I’ve attended. I learned concrete skills, met people with whom I plan to collaborate in the future, and felt inspired to return to my day job knowing that I have a whole community of developers, OM’s, and designers.”

- Product Manager
The only in-person committee meeting for IBM Pollinate 2020.
Next project
Platform-side search