Conferences

As part of the benefits offered to employees, Agile Lab offers the opportunity to attend one international conference per year for training purposes, leveraging company money following the boundaries listed in Training Budget. Multiple conferences can be attended during the year if the constraints on budget are respected and the additional time effort does not disrupt normal work activities (discuss with coach and project lead).

The process to attend an international conference is listed below.

Checklist and accountabilities

Once identified the conference to attend to, an employee must:

1. Get approved: obtain aproval for the participation by your coach (project lead/lead link);
2. Broadcast & Register: Consult the Conference Tracker (Excel) to verify if the event is already listed; if not, you are invited to add it as a new entry and announce it in the BigData/conferences channel. Record your participation in the Attendees tab: not travelling alone is helpful to get more involved in conference networking, joining multiple talks in parallel and have more fun
3. Purchase the conference ticket with your own money and ask for reimbursement for these expenses on ElapseIt following guidelines on the Spending Company Money page. If you still have personal budget that can cover these expenses, the cost of the conference ticket will be reimbursed following the timeline described on the Spending Company Money page;
4. Research on your own travel tickets and accommodation, according to the rules as in SpendingCompanyMoney;

   Important: The invoice for the conference ticket must be in the name of the employee, not the company. If the invoice is in the name of the company, the reimbursement will be rejected.

5. Book travel tickets and accommodation for this trip on Bizaway platform;
6. Speaking: If you are submitting a talk proposal, update the CfP & Speaker tab in the Tracker to coordinate with the Speaker Pushers for support and coaching ThoughtLeadership. Please note: If your talk is accepted, the conference participation will be funded by the Thought Leadership Circle budget instead of your personal training budget. Refer to the ThoughtLeadership page for the specific approval flow and budget.
7. Enjoy the conference!
8. Sharing the Knowledge: sharing your experience is a collective responsability for a significant company benefit. We use a dedicated OneNote Knowledge Base to centralize all insights.

That's it! Pretty simple, right? A small accountability for a big benefit. :)

Checklist for the coach

Which are the drivers that should be taken in account to evaluate conferences:

• Is the conference aligned with the individual career path, technical progression and personal goals ?
• Is the conference aligned with the technical strategy of the company ?
• Is the conference aligned with team goals and needs ?