Inside ASI-AP

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.

In the past month the local NiUG chapter committee have held their annual planning day to map out the agenda for the year. We were asked to give some feedback on NiUG activities in 2007 - their first year in AP - and on things coming up. A summary of relevant activity for everyone to know about is as follows:

- Discovery Conference dates - 15-17 October 2008, Rydges Oasis Resort Caloundra, Sunshine Coast, Qld - ww.rydges.com/oasis.

- International speakers for Discovery Conference - ASI to assist where possible to support international speakers from the iMIS community coming to Australia for the Discovery conference.

The local management team are back in the classroom this week down at AIM Vic for the fourth and final module of our Graduate Certificate in Management course. The final module is 'Managing, Developing and Implementing Strategy' (AIM course link here). Amanda, Jason and Julie are in Melbourne to attend the training in-person, along with Jay, Liza, Martin, Mick and myself. We are in class Tuesday and Wednesday this week, then go back next month for another 2 days on March 12-13.

The 2008 calendar for iMIS and Open Alms Training is completed. Full details are at www.advsol.com/ap/learning

Open Alms Courses on offer are:
- Basics in a day
- Administrator
- Custom Query (on request)

Courses will be held in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide

iMIS courses on offer include:
- FundRaising
- Customer Management
- Billing
- Events
- A/R Cash
- Introductory Crystal Reports
- Content Manager

Courses will be held in Melbourne and Sydney

This year we will also be offering iMIS customers At Your Desk (AYD) Training - 2 hour web based training in:
- IQA
- Business Object Designer

The local management team completed the third of the course modules for the Graduate Certificate of Management course (previous posts here, here and here) last week. The third module was "Managing Financial Resources".

The topics included:

Because of Colin's US commitments and travel, he was unable to join the rest of the local management team in undertaking the AIM Graduate Certificate of Management course this year. In its place, we found a 5-day residential (live-in) management course for him to undertake, which he is doing this week.

It is the "Looking Glass" course run by the Melbourne Business School down at their Mt Eliza campus. MBS is highly regarded, and as is the Looking Glass program which is licensed from the US.

Julie distributed via email last week the nine month (3rd quarter) results of our SMART STEP internal training for 2007. We made some changes to the training program for this year that can be summarised by this saying: "planning to execute, and then executing to plan". I wrote more detail about the changes in the half year results.

The spreadsheet distributed by Julie shows your quarterly actuals against your quarterly plan. I want to recognise in particular the following people who are either ahead of their plan, or within 10% of making their plan, as of the three-quarter way mark (September 30):

I am very pleased to see our new training room in the Melbourne office is becoming more utilised as every week goes by. This coming week it is booked all week; last week there were classes for 2 days, and the week before for 3 days. Before having our own training room we would have paid $1,500 per day to hire external rooms, or just not run the courses at all.

As well as our publicly offered classes, the room is available for customers to use for customised training at very low rates.

We will be launching our SMART Customer program before the end of the year and this will result in further training growth. Excellence in training is critical for us to provide to all customers and we have initiatives in the SMART Customer program that will see us execute on this challenge over the coming year.