Education and Consulting: the Dialectic of Contradictions

Alexander Alexandrov

During professional training courses development and execution the following topics are usually discussed:

• Training scope and techniques
• Is there enough of training activities or trainees need more
• What is a gap between training and consulting

To clarify this, we analyze consulting needs that arise during training. To be more understandable we concentrate mainly on quality assurance area.

Firstly training scope (testing and others) and trainees’ roles (testers and others) correspondence is analyzed. Then origins of testing issues are listed and recommendations to mitigate the issues are discussed.

We show that usually the recommendations implementation requires consulting activities. We also discuss these activities stakeholders, their expectations and possible benefits.

Finally we describe typical cases (mainly from quality assurance area) of “shifts” from training activities to consulting ones as well as recommendations, or to-do lists to fulfill customer needs.

Project managers attending this presentation will learn:

• How to identify educational needs
• How to identify when to contract external consultants
• How to combine education and consulting in the most efficient way

Trainers and consultants attending this presentation will learn

• How to make wining training proposal
• How to balance training and consulting offerings in your proposal

Alexander Alexandrov

Bio

Before starting working in a software development business, Alexander spent 34 years of his life (1965-1999) in Moscow State University. He graduated MSU with honor in 1970 and in 1982 got his PhD and spent many years working at MSU as assistant professor. At that time he published 7 books and over 50 scientific papers.

Since 1999 Alexander works at Luxoft, where he contributed to a number of projects for high-profile clients like Boeing, Google, LUKOIL, etc. Alexander participated in a number of ISO 9000 / CMM(I) audits. In 2006-2007 he lead Quality department in Auriga company, which resulted in achieving CMMI level 4 certification for Auriga in 2007. Since 2008 Alexander hold a position of software quality expert in Luxoft.