I’m in Dallas for the first part of this week, delivering my 2-day Making BPM Mean Business course to a client. This is the second time for an end-to-end delivery of the course (the first time being for a group of FileNet customers at their user conference), and it’s quite a different sort of audience from the first delivery so I expect to learn more about what’s needed and what’s not.
I’m having a lot of fun with the teaching gig: I seem to have been teaching most of my life, from the 3rd-grade teacher having me run the spelling test because I knew all the words already (and she probably wanted to sneak out for a smoke), to substitute teaching first-year university algebra when I was an engineering graduate student, to teaching machine vision and image analysis courses for Learning Tree in the late 1980’s, to the teaching component of evangelism when I ran my own systems integration group and, later, worked for FileNet.
This is the first time that I’ve completely written a multi-day course as well as delivering it, but it turned out to be easier than I expected: the biggest problem was cutting out material to keep it to two days, and I still found myself having to cut one section on the fly during the first delivery because I really tend to get carried away talking about this stuff with customers. In particular, the first part of the course (a little more than one day) is entitled “Why Process Matters”, a topic on which I can rave passionately for hours on end.