The past few months have seen strange happenings with BPMG. I wrote about the original hint of troubles, when Steve Towers and Terry Schurter jumped ship and Terry redirected the BPMG domain to his own competing website, then the follow-up a month later when BPMG appeared to have truly shut down. They’re not down for the count, however; this morning I received the following email:
Welcome to the BPTGroup website www.bptg.org
The following facilities and services are up and running or scheduled for the new site
- a full range of training and development programmes for open course and in-house delivery
- a comprehensive, degree-level programme for business change professionals designed to be internalised by organisations to provide a future structure for developing change expertise
- an accreditation process that is quick, efficient and authenticated
- insight to the 8 Omega methodology and maturity assessment process
- core sections dedicated to Strategy, People, Process and Enabling Technologies including articles, reviews, presentations and a comprehensive cross-referencing system
- the introduction of the BPTG global partners
- the International BPTG Chapters web facility
- executive briefings, coaching and mentoring, process audit services are offered to organisations as they endeavour to move effectively through the cultural and other issues of change surrounding their transformation to process-focused operations.
The deliberate sabotage of the BPMG website impacted its members, staff and associates worldwide and raises many issues, ethical as well as legal, about the integrity of the organisation and the individuals involved. The actions that created that situation are totally at variance with the core BPM principle that serving the customers best interests should inform all our actions.
However, as you will see from our home page, many of the BPMG key people have expressed their opinion very clearly by readily joining the BPTGroup. We also welcome new faces and expertise, and there are others on the way.
Website functionality will be enhanced in two further phases over the next few months ? we will be introducing new features, new courses and services to our fellow process professionals ? and we want you to help us in this development process.
One final point before I leave you to explore the BPTGroup website.
Why BPTGroup? After the BPMG debacle I am sure many of you would expect us to avoid any association with similar phrasing. Quite the reverse. The principal movers behind BPTGroup were proud of what we had created in the BPMG and the services we provided to our members. Although in no way responsible or accountable for the destruction wrought, we want to help rectify the undoubted damage done to an ethical and principled global community and we invite you to join us in these endeavours.
Please, express your opinion by your action ? help us to help you.
A number of delegates were seriously inconvenienced by the collapse of the BPMG and some lost their fee pre-payments. We make this offer to those people ? when the BPTGroup next run a commercially viable programme in a location convenient to you we will invite you to join us and waive all professional fees for that course. Please contact us now to enable our people to keep you informed of convenient courses.
Thank-you for your previous support and interest ? we look forward to the opportunity to work with you again.
Regards,
David Lyneham-Brown
CEO
They have some of the original people on board, including Mark McGregor and Jim Baird (who offered to provide BPMG courses for free to people who had paid for them). A lot of people are unlikely to trust Steve and Terry after the stunt that they pulled — I don’t know the whole story, but it appears to be pretty unprofessional behaviour — but they were two of the very visible faces of the old BPMG, and it’s difficult to see if BPTG will be able to regain the momentum. I don’t think that it’s necessary to have visible faces for an online community like this; certainly there’s others, like BPMInstitute, that are run by very competent people who choose not to put themselves in the spotlight, but to show off the content instead.
BPTG is offering a free membership right now, and I have no idea if they plan to go back to a two-tiered model that drew such criticism in the past. Personally, I don’t think that there’s any place in the market for a paid site for most of the content that they offer; there are a lot of other content sites related to BPM that get their revenue from advertising, vendor-sponsored content such as webinars and white papers, and live training and conferences.