Short courses are always a worry and this one was no exception. A banking client wanted to have a delivery of an overview course on business architecture which we delivered in London earlier this week.
Having attended our normal 3 day event the senior manager wanted to to create awareness of the role of business architecture across his organisation as a whole; but due to time constraints wanted a distilled bespoke and targeted delivery.
There was a lot to get through and, although and I did have some initial concerns of "compressing" the content, this " Yellow belt" type course in business architecture was well received.
The practioner attendees, as opposed to the executive types however did say that more time on practical workshops and case studies would have proved useful; but that comment is not unexpected as in reality it takes at least three days to show how people to build "Target Operating Models", rather than just give an overview. In fact I am commonly told by delegates that they wish their companies would book four/five days to allow for more working through of examples; but costs and time constraints rarely allow such extended events in today's environment.
There is a trend for organisations asking for byte sized training driven by a reluctance to release staff for multiple day training events rather than cost. Most teachers/trainers worry on the effective learning of such short sharp events, as the reflection required to gain learning benefits is difficult to embed and develop in short course. However, like in this case, if the content is well designed and carefully delivered then the downsides of short training can be mitigated to some degree; particularly if backed up within a e-learning programme residing on a learning management system (LMS) as we provided in this case.
The real problem though lies in the trend for very short sessions of just an hour, perhaps over lunch; and the jury is still out on this type of delivery and whether this is good value for money or just an excuse to reduce cost and work place disruption rather than good learning development. I think with complex topics this is really difficult to do justice to.
Anyway another delivery and another happy client who can ask for more!
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