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Offering Management in IBM

It is not a long time ago that IBM established a new practice in IBM: The Offering Manager. While IBM was successful with the old role of Product Managers the new role is matching IBMs Digital Transition. Instead of long and complex processes the Offering Manager is moving forward fast. His mission is to act more like people act in a small company. Using an agile and business driven focus this is an interesting change. It reflects IBMs new approach of doing business.

I think our Training Partner Model was successful so far. Based on the Partners we doubled our country coverage from 64 to more than 130, and we tripled the skills in the market during the first three years of the model. And while working on country coverage and overall skills the Partners also started last year to invest into development and technologies.

Offering Manager for Training & Skills

I was announced as Training Offering Manager end of March. And also 1 quarter afterwords I’m still impressed by the opportunity.  You need to know that IBMs BUs always want to be on the top of technologies. We’re moving fast forward as our products, trying out new technologies, looking forward into new technologies.  I see the same from our Training Partners. But we never truly linked together all ideas and using speed and investment from both sides to move even faster. I realize that I’m now in a central position being able to accomplish this linkage between IBMs BUs together with the GTPs, which is interesting, and which seem to even speed up implementation. You’ll see in the next months lots of innovative and business development ideas getting implemented from within IBM together with our Partners.

What are the next Offerings?

Studies from TSIA have shown that a key part of the routes to market is usually a Training Credit Product. Due to our Partner Model we stopped selling Training Credits in IBM (called EdPack in the past). Of course all our Training Partners are offering Training Credits. But they’re not as close to our direct business as we are. Investigating TSIA studies around Training Credits was helpful to get the bigger picture. We decided to resell the Training Credits of our partners. This may sound for some readers to be a small step. But is is creating a linkage and opportunities that should not get underestimated. As mentioned above TSIA is treating this route-to-market as one of the key approaches when we’re talking about Training and Skills. I’ll write in this Blog once we’re having the Offering ready in Q3.