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Professional Education

Focusing on Knowledge Transfer
Professional Education


Course Summaries

Course Summaries (43)

KCI provides applied management and professional development education in several disciplines. The extensive portfolio of seminars addresses a variety of business interests and needs. We provide various seminars and courses for public and in-house training.  These courses are focused on contemporary topics, issues, and skills needed by many organizations. Our courses are designed to provide a broad understanding and clear application focus for all participants.

Performance excellence in business depends on high quality, timely data presented in a clear and simple manner to all layers of management. The emphasis today in management is on performance reporting for decision making, not just the everyday factors but enterprise wide performance factors such as key results indicators (KRI) and key performance indicators (KPI) coupled with competitive intelligence interests. Methods and tools have evolved recently that point to best practices in business intelligence. These accepted methods and tools include management disciplines, dashboards, briefing books and reports to analyze the business. Business intelligence requires more than just rolling up data for senior managers. Business data must be delivered in a clear and concise manner in context of pressing business issues. If not, managers may be misled and worst, they may make decisions based on bad information. Here are expected learning benefits that you can apply directly to your job include:

  • Prepare a basic analytic workflow
  • Define the drill down taxonomy used by managers and staff to display data from a data warehouse
  • Consolidate multiple views of data across the organization
  • Define a technology architecture perspective suitable for managing the data of business intelligence
  • Organize a metadata library for reference and reuse of data definitions material
  • Develop a deployment action plan to implement a BI solution

Duration: 4 Days

Performance management of the organization is of prime interest today for every enterprise. There are a number of management disciplines that can be applied to an enterprise to gain insight into issues of performance. In fact there are over 65 of these disciplines available to managers today. There are several enterprise focused disciplines that seem to predominate, such as: balanced scorecard for performance internally, value chain for process improvement and the five forces for strategic management. Additionally there are a number of disciplines for functional areas, such as: HR, Finance, IT and so on. Evan more there are capability oriented disciplines such as the Rummler – Brache approach for process management, capability maturity approach and total quality approaches to mention a few.

KCI provides training in several of these disciplines plus key information on how to relate them together and use architecture concepts to increase their value to management through techniques of impact analysis. The courses listed below provide a comprehensive education for any management group:

Strategic Management

  • Enterprise performance management
  • Strategic Business Planning  
  • Management disciplines (5 Forces, Balanced Scorecard, Value Chain) 
  • Enterprise analysis and enterprise architecture 
  • Effective business and enterprise integration
  • Effectively using Balanced Scorecard – A Hands on Approach
  • Competitive intelligence
  • Strategic Enterprise Management
  • Mergers and Acquisitions Methods
  • Benchmarking for Strategic Excellence
  • Essential Management Reporting
  • Enterprise Business Intelligence
Drives Organizational Performance

With all the volatility in economies today there is a need to understand the scope and magnitude of change required to align and manage markets, products, processes and enablers of an organization. There are two key skill that support this need, business analysis skills and business architecture skills. A skilled analyst is disciplined in several forms of analysis such as financial, systems, process, quantitative, descriptive, computer, technology and many others.

Organizations today have considerable financial and quantitative data available. A lot of descriptive material is available as models of processes, chart of accounts, bill of material, application flowcharts, UML diagrams and many other forms of models. The elements of these models make up the primitives needed to describe the architecture of an organization. The architecture is then used for various forms of business impact analysis, ranking techniques and other methods of analysis.

KCI currently provides the following courses in business analysis and architecture:

  • Business Architecture
  • Functional Architecture
  • Business Architecture for managers
  • Essential Data Analysis
  • Product and Process Architecture
  • Advanced Quantitative Methods of Data Analysis
  • IT Architecture
  • Core Methods of Business Analysis
  • Architecture Management
 
Description:

The Institute of Internal Auditors in a professional guidance statement stated the following: "Internal Audit is being asked to provide much greater assurance to Senior Management than ever before. The Institute believes that the only way to provide such objective assurance is by means of risk- based auditing".

Audit functions that are able to focus their efforts towards the significant risk in their organizations are able to concentrate their limited resources on the issues which drive business goals and aspirations. In consequence audit plans are directed at the issues, which really matter. This course provides all the latest developments. The course features interactive voting and includes many new topics.

Furthermore, a participative approach whereby auditors and managers work together to identify, assess and control business risks significantly enhances the level of assurance and reduces the chances of nasty surprises – a huge benefit in these more difficult times.

Duration: 5 days

Description:

In the ever-changing business environment, encountering risk is inevitable. The ability to manage these increasingly significant risks now represents the difference between a thriving organization and one that is struggling to deal with the challenges facing it. Many businesses have realized that misunderstanding risk can lead to disaster. The organizations that have dealt with the recession most effectively have realized that this requires extensive knowledge of risk management tools and techniques. This is exactly what you will find in this course. As the current worldwide situation demonstrates, poorly informed or improperly executed risk management can mean disaster. Conversely, a well organized and focused risk process and strong risk management team will enable your company to maintain and strengthen your edge over your competitors. Moreover, studies have shown that financial risk is only the ‘tip of the iceberg’, as nearly 80% of key risks are not insurable. This critical 80% of risks must be ‘insured’ internally with a capable risk management team.

Risk management has been catapulted from being a useful tool to becoming the very pulse of the organization and the yardstick by which its management is judged. The key is to recognize that risk is not something that should be avoided – a risk is often an opportunity in disguise.

Duration: 5 days

Understanding and delivering Workflow

Description:

Workflow is a key approach to improving business process and organizational performance today. The includes the three stages of performance improvement as supported by the International Society for Performance Improvement focuses on the Organization, the Processes and the Individuals that execute the processes. In this course the process execution is extended beyond the individuals through other enablers such as systems, policies, procedures, databases and other means of improving and supporting processes. Including all the enablers is the key to successful workflow implementation.

This course explains the most current approaches to workflow. It covers the core concepts in documenting and defining the workflows of the enterprise. The course includes the idea of performance excellence and the center of excellence for workflow. Analytics are included that relate workflows to the performance of the organization. Simple examples are provided of certain types of tools for workflow, performance analytics and enabler impact.

This course includes extensive exercises organized around a case study concept that the participant can use as a workflow project template in their organization. The techniques presented in this workshop provide a staff the means to increase value by starting projects with realistic skills and knowledge.

Duration: 5 days

Essential ways to do Process Analysis, Analytics and Measurement

Description:

Process analysis identifies the major process improvement opportunities in the business. Process analytics identifies which ones would have the best yield in terms of strategic performance to fix and the most impact on the strategic performance of the organization. Process measurement identifies if you are meeting the performance goals.

Issues such as process analytics, process modeling and mapping techniques, process management and project organization are critical to improving process performance. These topics are covered as part of the lecture portion of the course. Examples of each artifact used in the course are provided along with a CD that contains trial versions of all products used in the class. This course uses extensive exercises and some analytic tools for assessing impact and ranking process opportunities. The attendee should have some basic working knowledge of process mapping but no tool experience is needed.

Duration: 3 days

Tooling for improvement

Description:

Hands on Business Process Management (BPM)The tools used on a Business Process Management BPM might include an analysis tool, a process modeling tool, a workflow tool and even a repository for saving the results. Positioning skills us-ing BPM tools can be a great advantage in doing a BPM project or embarking on a larger BPM effort that requires the use of tools.

Developing skills for BPM is usually done on the first project an enterprise undertakes. Often few or no tools are used or tools designed for other purposes such as graphic tools used for process mapping with no linkage to analysis tools or workflow. This adds risk to the project as the staff must learn anywhere from one tool to a suite of tools plus the methodology framework for the BPM project. The work may be performed by contractors or company staff or even by a tool vendor in some cases. Usually the framework for good process management is an afterthought and the resulting artifacts left in a chaotic state.

This course provides hands on work experience using a case study project designed to highlight the tools in BPM typical of those used today. Related issues such as analysis analytics, process modeling and mapping techniques, process management and project organization are covered as part of the lecture portion of the course. Examples of each artifact used in the course are provided along with a CD that contains trial versions of all products used in the class. This course uses extensive exercises based on a tools suite for BPM. The attendee should have some basic working knowledge of process mapping but no tools experience is needed.

This seminar provides work experience using a case study project designed to highlight the tools in BPM typical of those used today.

Here’s what you can expect to learn in this hands-on course:

  • Different analysis analytics.
  • Some process modeling and mapping techniques.
  • Approaches in process management and project organization.
Visio Skills for doing Business Process Management

Description:

Visio is the most commonly used process mapping product in the world. Yet, there are few methodologies that use the capabilities of the Visio product to advantage. Visio has all the needed elements, swimlanes and other components of good mapping tools. Most people know how to use Visio so there is a very small learning curve with the product itself. All that remains is a good, disciplined approach to applying the Visio capabilities to process management.

This course brings order and discipline to the use of Visio with such topics as mapping symbols, simple graphic layout techniques, adding enablers, effectively using swimlanes, best practices in drawing layout, what features to avoid, how to create and manage a process library and many more handy techniques for good mapping practices.

Many formal process management products also will accept a Visio diagram as input. This course gives the skills needed to make this transition as seamless as possible. A process analytic tool is also used in the class that inputs Visio diagram and performs semantic analysis to compare diagram.

Duration: 4 days

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