Inside ASI-AP

iMIS training dates for the Asia-Pacific region for early 2010 have now been posted. We have a number of face to face courses scheduled in February and March including Web Content Management, iBO .NET, iMIS Overview and Intro Crystal Reports. You can view all the details at www.advsol.com/ap/learning and registrations are now open for the early bird rates.

We encourage you to register early to secure your place and receive the discounted rate.

Further details about our At Your Desk training course program will be available soon.

The iMIS training class schedule has been updated for Oct - Dec 2009. There is a swag of At Your Desk and face to face classes scheduled.

At Your Desk (AYD) classes represent great value for money (only $165 - Australian dollars). The two hour courses cover a range of topics - including new courses in Customer Management. There are also AYD courses in Events, Billing-Dues, Orders, IQA, Business object Designer and AR/Cash.

Face to face classes have been scheduled for Melbourne including Web Content Management, iBO .NET and Task Centre.

Go to www.advsol.com/ap/learning for all the details.

iMIS Webcasts will be back in 2009. We're offering a range of webcasts suitable for customers currently using iMIS as well as prospective iMIS customers. Apart from our Intro to iMIS overview we will focus also on Friendraising, Social Networking, Marketing Suite in the first few months of 2009. Details and to register at www.advsol.com/ap/webcasts.

We're pleased to announce the 2009 iMIS Training schedule is now available. All the details on the courses, scheduled dates and registration details are at www.advsol.com/ap/learning.

On offer is a BIGGER and BETTER range of courses with more AT YOUR DESK courses. There are courses scheduled EVERY MONTH of 2009!

iMIS TaskCentre training kicks proceedings off in late January.

www.advsol.com/ap/learning

ASI will be conducting it's last scheduled iMIS training class for the year - iMIS Events - on Tuesday 2 December 2008 in the Melbourne office (Level 22, 459 Collins Street, Melbourne). Limited places are available for this course - for details and to register go to www.advsol.com/ap/learning.

The final round of funding for 2008 the ASI SMART Company Scholarship Fund closes on Wednesday 10 December 2008. This is the perfect time to apply for your 2009 training. Funding is available to attend FIA Skills 1,2,3 courses as well as a number of courses for IMIS customers in Part B and open funding under Part C of the fund. For details go to www.advsol.com/ap/scholarship or contact Marla at ASI on 03 9869 7503.

This week we're running two iMIS At Your Desk training courses:

iMIS Business Object Designer
Wednesday 26 November
11.30 am to 1.30 pm (AEDT)

iMIS Introduction to IQA
Wednesday 26 November
3.00 pm to 5.00 pm (AEDT)

Details & register at www.advsol.com/ap/learning.

On Thursday 24 July we hosted our 2nd IT Round Table event in the Melbourne office. This is an invitation-only event for the IT managers of our largest customers and customers in the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) program. It followed on from the Executive Forum we ran for the same group of customers earlier in the year (for the Exec Forum the invitations are for COO's and senior executives). I posted some notes on our preparation here.

Based on feedback from the IT round table last year we are going to run these 1 day events every 6 months. The next one is scheduled for November and we will move to Sydney for that event.

Andrew Kennedy officially joined us back in June but had a month's holiday already scheduled before he accepted the ASI job, so for most of July he has been away overseas. But he is back this coming week and ready for work. In the few weeks he had with us before going on leave he came to Melbourne for the standard ASI induction program - the week long bootcamp. I took this photo while he was here.

As a full time project manager Andrew becomes part of the global Project Management Office (PMO) for ASI Consulting. Being a part of the global team of project managers means that we should be able to improve the consistency in our professional services - from methodologies, to status reporting and to quality standards - across all regions. Andrew is located in Sydney.

Colin, Liza and I sat in on a brown bag session given by Das last week on how to access the iMIS Analytics data warehouse via ProClarity. While the Analytics engine has been available on our internal iMIS client system for some time, it has now been made available to all managers globally, thus putting the information in the hands of people who can make something of it and do something about it. The US managers had their brown bag intro session some weeks ago.

Strategic Management - Hubbard et al

Course Overview

While strategic management is crucial to an organisation’s direction and growth, it is generally recognised as the most complex and challenging aspect of management. Although traditionally it has been seen as the responsibility of senior management and the company board, successful companies today recognise that all their employees need to practise strategy. In this course, we present a conceptual model and fully explain each part of the strategy process and the required tools and techniques.

Participants will receive a copy of Strategic Management by Hubbard.

The AP management team is currently enrolled in a Graduate Certificate of Management course at the Australian Institute of Management (AIM) in Melbourne. The final of four modules is 'Managing, Developing and Implementing Strategy'. This set of wiki pages is for collective sharing within this module of tools available, learnings and book references.

Course leader -
Ken Williams - Mobile: 0419 341 528
Email: pivotal@wire.net.au

Yesterday was our last day of management training so that we have now completed all the necessary course days for our "Graduate Certificate in Management" at AIM. All that is left now is to complete the 3 written assignments and then it is graduation time!

Since it was our last day, I took photos of some of the team in the AIM training rooms in Melbourne. Unfortunately Jay was not with us this week as he is attending the annual Product Management planning meeting in the US. And Colin did a separate management class at the end of last year.

Marla recently completed a summary of our training classes run throughout 2007. Makes for some interesting reading. We didn't have a strong focus on customer training in 2007 (we had a much stronger focus on our own staff training) but with the launch of the 'SMART Customer' program in 2008 we will see a more aggressive push for customer training.

We scheduled a total 45 training classes and conducted 30 classes. 121 students came to classes. The majority of classes were run in Melbourne and Sydney, with a couple of Open Alms classes also run in Brisbane and Adelaide.

In the training surveys, all questions were answered with an average of between 'agree' and 'strongly agree'. We rated highest on the survey questions related to 'Instructor' (the instructor was well prepared, the instructor was able to provide useful examples that applied to the topics covered, the instructor involved students in discussions and activities, the instructor was able to answer questions related to the class, the instructor’s overall performance was effective and helped me to learn) so congratulations must go out to all of our training team.