The Training Value Proposition Revised

That Time of the Year

Yes, the turkey has been gobbled, the fat dude in red is planning his annual sled ride, and training organizations are preparing their annual budgets for the upcoming year. OK, not all of them, but some of them, or at least, one or two of them, I’m sure. Anyway, just in time for the budget planning, we have revised our worksheet, "What is the Value of a Good Analyst?" and, based on the revisions, changed its name to " How Much Can Business Analysis Training Save?" There are several factors that caused us to do this, not the least of which is the time of the year.

Time for a Change

For starters, we published the first version back when the Noiseletter was very young, a mere fledgling amongst e-newsletters. Meanwhile, we have nearly tripled our subscriber list (thanks to each and every one of you), so there is a fairly large audience that has not had an opportunity to try the tool to see how much it can help you sell the need for business analysis training within your organizations. Secondly, we noticed a couple of phrases in our original version that could be misinterpreted (Yikes! Were we, the masters of clarification in requirements, allowing ourselves to be potentially misunderstood? I can hear you all in my head screaming, "No, no, tell me it isn’t so!" But, yes, we, too, are subject to attacks of ambiguity, and suffer the slings and arrows of that subversive agent, Subjectivity.) The short form of this is, we did not get the idea that we were trying to communicate across as well as we wanted to due to the wording in a couple of cells. At any rate, we have fixed the problem.

Revised Results

In the new version, if you tell it the number of business analysts in your group and the size of your projected IT or maintenance budget, it will accurately predict how much money you could save annually by training your business systems analysts. It also shows you how much on the average it costs to train business systems analysts to increase their proficiency. Finally, it adjusts the projected savings by deducting the projected cost of training to show you how much money you can save your organization in the first year alone. As before, all of the sources that form the basis of the calculations are documented. All in all, a very interesting model. We hope you are getting it just when you need it, meaning while you are in the middle of preparing your request for a training budget for 2007. Let us know how it works.

E-Learning Status Report

On the e-learning front, we have meanwhile conducted a number of our virtual workshops. They have been extremely well received but we are still trying to figure out what scheduling pattern will meet the majority’s needs. Is it easier for you to work in a daily session or is once a week better? Would two 3-hour segments be better than four 90 minute sessions and, if so, should they be scheduled for the same day? We don’t know. This is where you, dear readers, can help. If you want us to schedule training to fit your schedule, we need to know what that means. Go to http://www.requirementssolutions.com/VWSurvey.html to answer a couple of quick questions and submit it to us. We will publish the results of the survey in an upcoming Noiseletter and use them in our scheduling algorithm for virtual workshops in 2007.

The Future of E-Learning

Beyond that, we are moving on adding two more levels to our training program, recorded manager overview webinars that will be offered in the near future and a brand new, different approach to On-Demand (also known as ’self-paced’) training in the topics we cover. We will be sending you a separate email announcing our initial On-Demand Training module as soon as it is ready for prime time, which should be within the next week or so.

Tom Hathaway and Dan Myers
Managing Partners

Future Feature: "The Clarification of a Good Business Requirement"