Pipeline Publishing, Volume 5, Issue 2

	This Month's Issue:
	The State of Standards

School's In:
Education at Management World

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finally administering the venues for courses. Today, the TMF teaching program is a professional mini-university and it makes money for the TMF coffers. John Reilly, TMF master teacher and author: "I liken the adoption of NGOSS to a cresting wave...if a correlation can be made between the amount of training done by the Forum and adoption of NGOSS, and it can, the wave is building and it's a big one...and it's spreading to other sectors, such as government, media, entertainment...with more than 15 instructors worldwide delivering a least a course a week via open enrollment and on site format in a variety of languages, such as English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian...it is quite rewarding for those of us who started with an idea in 2000 to see this happen."

The positive result is a consistent and probably better experience for the students. The downside is the great inspiration and creation

that cropped up in the early courses is no longer present. Most of the creation today is rightly in the TMF technical teams and area domains; the TMF "university" is a communications vehicle. Also, today the attendees really are students. Where once some courses served as introductions to get people up to speed on a TMF program and then feed these new people into the technical teams, today these are mainly employees sent as students to learn a quick skill and provide data to take back to their companies for application. The TMF "university" has become a professional development organization, manned by professional SMEs - teaching the world about NGOSS.

And it is doing a good job, in my humble opinion. I do not know of any professional, scientific survey which has been done that measures information dispersal and retention; however, if the student wants to learn, they will get the opportunity to learn. And the material they are provided is fundamentally sound and holds the potential for effective technical modernization of OSS/BSS departments.

A downside of the new program is companies now send employees to learn because they want the skills; it is not because the employees fought for the opportunity to attend a TMF course. Motivation is key to learning the NGOSS material. I saw several bored students who clearly were "tuned out" and could care less about learning the material. Likely they were there because they had to be, and likely this was a waste of their

They walked home with completion certificates that will actually damage their companies as they are called on to apply skills and use knowledge they do not have.

company's money and the teacher's time. They walked home with completion certificates that will actually damage their companies as they are called on to apply skills and use knowledge they do not have.

But the great majority of the students I saw paid attention to the courses, were engaged in the work exercises, and asked enlightening questions. It is these students who are becoming the true disseminators of the

NGOSS message. Companies should vet who they are sending and check their new skills and data retention when they return. Better, companies can send attentive students to a brace of courses and get their employee NGOSS certified - thus insuring availability of skills in exchange for their training capital.

This is another positive development in the training program. TMF now provides a coordinated series of courses that first introduce the material and then teach the content in more detail and provide small-team hand's on exercises within the course environment in order to practice the skills of applying NGOSS. There are more courses because there is, after all, much more material to assimilate. Once upon a time the only way to learn NGOSS was to participate on the technical teams and help create it. While this is still the best approach, today the technical teams are equivalent to a Graduate School. The basic skills are now taught in a series of collaborated courses. But to gain these skills, you must attend the whole series; and because NGOSS is a group of interrelated Frameworks, you must attend the series that includes all the TMF NGOSS frameworks.

Today, courses exist in introduction and then application of the SID and eTOM. Work is underway to develop course series for the TNA and TAM. Start with NGOSS distilled. Continue with eTOM Distilled, SID Distilled, and TAM Distilled: the introductory courses. These earlier courses are necessary to attempt the certification exams. Continue with the intermediate courses: the SID Modeler's Workshop (UML knowledge a strong help), the eTOM Implementer's Workshop; and the SID for Application Integration. Lastly, add either of the

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