The past week I have been with a customer delivering a mixture of training and best practice advice. The training was based on my data warehouse design course, but heavily customised to fit their specific needs, and with complete new sections to look at data quality strategies and some specific approaches to managing a major BI development project. In reality, I guess that 40% of the material I presented came from existing Rittman Mead courses and the rest I created to fit the customer’s needs. I think this is a good way to work – I had always intended to write more extensively on data quality and the new slide set will be a useful add-in to our other training materials – and, of course, the customer gets the course they want.  I will write about some of the data quality issues we discussed in a future posting, a lot of this will be highly relevant to most BI / DW owners.

Next week I am working on some course customisations for another customer and then joining the others at our first ever Oracle BI Training Days – I have been working on this project for quite a while now and am really looking forward to seeing the fruits of our work. The whole team have put in a lot of effort; it should be a good event!

Unlike other training courses that you may have seen this one is different! With involvement from the whole Rittman Mead team and a course structure that allows you to choose to attend on one, two or all three days this is a course that will take your existing skills to the next level. Although there is a lot of intensive training and knowledge sharing the course is designed to be very interactive; there is also time for networking and discussions – a course meal one evening and some special surprises during the three days. Can’t say anything about the surprises or they won’t be surprises!

One of the great things about the venue is that is is easy to get to – just a short distance from London City Airport, near the London Underground and DLR stations  and just across the road from the River Bus pier. Looking out from the conference centre windows it is hard to imagine that you are in one of Europe’s financial hubs!

There is more about the BI Training Days on our courses pages – but a couple of things we don’t say there are:  “buy two days and get the third day for free”, the three day price is the same as the two day price… so there is an incentive, as is the Early-Bird discount that is available to the end of September. And the course includes lunch and refreshments each day; overnight accommodation is not provided, but we can make recommendations .

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to ‘road test’ some of the course content in a different presentation format; a tutorial-style workshop. Although I had a plan of the topics to be covered over the three days and the slides to back that up, I left it to the attendees to dictate the pace and emphasis, for example we spent a long time discussing how to model a particularly complex part of their business, and an equally long time on how to identify some of their dimensions. We even moved away from the planned agenda a couple of times entirely, for example when I demonstrated Oracle Warehouse Builder (a product they had only read about) and when I gave an outline of how to gather requirements for a DW/BI project.

For this customer this form of delivery had a great advantage, it put the course into the context of their business. They covered the topics they needed and were given the right tools to allow them to start to tackle their BI reporting project.

If this style of course presentation appeals to your organization then drop me a line.