By
Wedge Greene
I had the opportunity to audit and review a few NGOSS courses at the TMForum Management World in Nice. It has been a long time since I attended a TMF sponsored course. Before the bubble collapse, I volunteered to teach for a day at each TeleManagement World and did this for four or five years. Most of these courses were titled "Policy-based Management" and were team taught at first by myself and Jerry McDowell. Later we added John Strassner and he took over teaching the modeling part of the course. While this was Policy-based Management, those who attended will know that this is the course where we first introduced the early NGOSS concept at the TMF - specifically the architecture (which became TNA) and the modeling (which became SID).
It pleased us that so many of our peers were interested in our approaches and we were grateful to give some volunteer time back to the TMF, which we loved, but this volunteerism made the TMF courses very much hit and miss. The TMF itself had little control over the content - instead overseeing who could design and offer a course and insuring that the course slides got to the course attendees. Some management was required because, after all, the "students" paid for the course. I cannot truthfully call them students, as everyone who showed up was clearly a peer of ours. But volunteering was not easy for professionals making a living as independents, so during those 4-5 years, a
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There have never been a better collective group of teachers in our industry. |
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Enter today: TMF courses are all taught by professional consultants who know their field inside and out. By teaching continuously throughout the world in many specific "mini-university" conferences, and in having TMF courses attached to many shows in addition to Management World, these professionals hone skills and keep them current. There have never been a better collective group of teachers in our industry.
These consultants still create course material but the material is no longer so personal, as when I described early NGOSS or Strassner taught early DEN-NG. Today, course material is created in conjunction with the "administrative" TMF staffers, often as a collaborative effort among the consultant teachers and the TMF subject team
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few people began to be paid by the TMF for teaching a course. When the bubble burst, companies could no longer afford to volunteer their employee's time for creating and teaching courses. Often, the volunteer teachers stopped being telecom company employees and themselves because independents. The TMF turned to its professional consulting associates.
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leads. Courses today are about existing TMF programs, not general professional enlightenment. George Greenlee, the TMF's Training and Development Director, oversees the entire program, vetting final content to maintain a consistent style and message, approving all the teachers and getting them trained and certified on the material, and
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