It seems that the Accenture Testing Center for Excellence is looking to start handling the Testing courses internally, as opposed to having 3rd party vendors (which I'm technically a part of). The move is a logical one, and had I been in Accenture's shoes, one that I would have implemented long ago. After all, if the company is a Center for Excellence, then why need outsiders teaching their capabilities the best practices of the company?
However, two things can get in the way of this reality:
The first is, of course, the future facilitator's knowledge of the lessons to be taught. You see, despite my, and my colleagues, being outsiders, we are aware of the technologies and practices of Accenture for the past decade. On the other hand, the new facilitator, although coming from some testing-related projects, may be approaching their lecture from a practical perspective - nothing wrong here, except the possibility that they may not be practicing what the ADM (basicslly the company's bible on how to run the entire project) is saying.
This means that somewhere along the way, there will be a possible misalignment with what 'is the best practice' and what 'is being practiced', as the facilitator uses his or her experience as basis of discussion. This will include, practice, terms, thought processes. Nothing technically wrong here - unless said project practice is doing some 'practical' short cuts that may impact quality of the practice.
The second concern is more a business-priority concern. Apparently, many companies - Accenture included, look to training as a 'cost' and not as a strategic pillar. The latter will mean looking at all testing-related activities, including training of personnel (and naturally, all aspects of said train ing - including faculty development) has to be addresses from a long-term investment viewpoint. Simply put, it's a farming mentality (to use the analogy), you reap the benefits after having spent the effort to planting.
What am I trying to say? My experience is that resources assigned to training are suddenly pulled out when more profit-centric projects suddenly need them... thus uprooting critical resources to the ongoing training. Why is this the case? Because of the aforementioned viewpoint of training as a cost, and not an investment.
The irony of this is that Accenture -at least a few years back, even published a book on the return on training - specifying how much a return on every training hours can be, calculating it at a 5:1 ratio, meaning for every $1 spent on training a resource, the ompany can get a return of $5. Said repot was even hailed in the industry for it's putting a monetary feedback to training, one of many nebulous activities hard to put some measure on; specially in this seeming metric-intense environment.
That said, I'm not saying this is the case here, though historical experience bears this out.
On a personal viewpoint, it will mean I won't be given testing-related training in the near future. But so long as this will be done properly, I won't mind losing the work, and will be happier if I need not be recalled after a few years because Accenture suddenly reassigned their resources to more profit-centric projects.
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