BPM Training - Is it a sign?

Many people spend years in education to prepare for their profession. This is especially true in disciplines like medicine, law, architecture, and engineering. Even historically, people were mentored or served as interns to get them ready for their jobs. But, with thin budgets and overloaded teams, many companies spend less and less time on formal education. So, is training a critical component of a management science (e.g., BPM) to make it succeed?

Training indicates many things - methodology, best practices, experts, lessons learned, buy-in. Six Sigma has been built around a very robust and formal training program which includes classroom training and OTJ (on-the-job) training with accepted recognition of competency (green belt, yellow belt, black belt, master black belt). ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is library of best practices for people in ITSM (IT Service Management) in which most companies start with training, and training is offered by everyone from IBM to Pink Elephant.

There was some discussion about this at the Gartner conference, but I think it begs the question of whether all the new training which is being offered around BPM is an indication of the maturing of the market. Will training on process design, BPMN, Six Sigma and BPM, and others make a difference? Will they allow BPM to become a mainstream dialogue around the board room? It would seem that education is a fundamental difference between fads and acceptable management sciences.

One survey showed the 54% of surveyed companies planned on sending people to external BPM training.

If you combine the formal education opportunities that now exist (see some below) with the staggering number of webinars available, people should be able to learn the space, understand the processes, learn from others, and embrace technology. The key will be that the market keeps focused on several key messages rather than fall trap to the healthcare educational dilemna which has people struggle with which sources to believe.

I must admit that we have decided to jump on the bandwagon. We are sponsoring our first series of webinars on people, process, and technology around BPM. Our first one is next week for anyone that is interested and follows up on the people issues surrounding getting buy-in and adoption of BPM. Howard Webb (principal at BPM Group) and Dr. Kiran Garimella (author and VP at webMethods) are presenting. (Sign up)

BPM Institute Training

BPM Group Training

BPMN Training

BPM Focus Training

Additional Training Programs

Comments on several of the training programs

List of webinars and conferences

Please add comments with other educational programs that you have found valuable. I know there are lots out there. Thanks.