Jesse Freese
In our last newsletter I told you about the release of our new online simulation technology. In the last 4 months of 2011 we had over 200 students run up to three executions of our University/College market product, SimProject®. The feedback was extremely positive and we have been very busy working with instructors and students to make enhancements and fix the ever-present bugs associated with any new software release.
A special thank you goes out to Mike Kushner and his class at the University of Maryland. Mike and his students were the first official users and a big challenge right out of the gate as Mike’s approach in this particular class is to turn the students loose on the project simulation with very little upfront project management or simulation introduction – a real “learn by doing” approach, which of course we at Fissure love! Mike will contribute an article to the next newsletter describing the experience.
Our monthly webinars have been a big hit with a lot of you and they are usually very well attended with very positive feedback. Lately we have received feedback from some attendees who would like us to offer webinars that dive into more detail on a specific topic, tool, or technique. This would be a natural progression and as a training company something we are qualified to deliver. The challenge for us is that when we started offering the webinars, the intent was to keep the topics at an introductory level to introduce our clients and potential clients to project management, business analysis, Agile, leadership and change management. Because the webinars were introductory, we offered them at no cost. In offering more focused webinars we move much closer to training which is how we make a living and giving it away just doesn’t make good business sense. To make a good business decision we needed to know what the customer wanted.
At the end of 2011 we sent out a survey to see if there was a desire on your part to attend training focused webinars that lasted 90 minutes rather than 60 minutes for which you would pay a nominal fee. The result of the survey was a resounding yes on providing training focused webinars and nearly everyone was OK with paying for attending.
As a result we have scheduled three training focused webinars for 2012.
- April 11th will be on Project Communication and will be delivered by Sandy Haydon, an experienced project manager, coach and Fissure guide.
- May 8th will be on Stop Managing and Start Coaching, delivered by John Kaman, a certified coach and long-time Fissure guide.
- October 10th will be The Art of Negotiation and will be delivered by John Kaman.
We look forward to taking the webinars to this new level of training and helping you meet your learning objectives. If you have ideas for future webinars please drop me an email, jesse_freese@fissure.com.
I have spent quite a bit of training time recently with a large company working on a very large project. I thought it would be a good time to write an article about schedule vs. quality. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Our upcoming public workshops and webinars can be found on our website – our computer simulation powered workshops the most effective and fun way to learn AND EARN PDUs.
