Microsoft EMEA Partner Network

How QA provided a large-scale Microsoft Visual Studio Team System training roll-out programme to 100 independent IT companies across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The challenge

When new Microsoft technologies come to market, it’s important that IT suppliers have the skills needed to provide solutions to their customers. With a sophisticated, feature-rich product such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System, training plays a vital role in assuring high levels of skills and knowledge within the partner community.

The solution

Even prior to the launch of the Visual Studio Team System, QA had been providing training to Microsoft’s own partner network, using a course jointly developed by QA and Microsoft. So, once the product launched, QA had a clear six-month lead in terms of experience and capability – and became the natural choice to provide training to other companies across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

In delivering the training, QA provided a different course to each of the two key communities: a one-day workshop, in sessions of up to 50 people, for sales people – and a four-day Visual Studio Team Workshop, for developers. In addition to training IT suppliers, In addition to IT companies, QA also provided training and consulting services to some corporate organisations.

The logistics were immense. QA handled training in no less than twenty-five far-flung countries: Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Dubai, Egypt, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey. In total, QA provided training to around 700 people across all of these counties.

Flexibility was important; perhaps the most outstanding example of this was QA delivering consulting services on Visual Studio Team System, in the Gulf region, on Christmas Day (where Christmas isn’t typically celebrated).

The training was a huge success – despite logistical difficulties such as language (many of these countries do not use English as a common tongue). This barely affected the quality of the delivery from QA , which scored an average of almost 8/9 (which roughly equates to more than 90% of people attending courses rating QA’s instructors as ‘outstanding’) across the whole programme, for the quality of its instructors. Few training companies could undertake training on this scale, even if it were within the UK. Delivering it across a third of the globe is a unique challenge - and one which QA met comfortably.