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The history and the DNA of QRP

Exactly 20 years ago, on a hot July day, our CEO Coos heard a strange noise coming from behind him. Wondering what it was, he looked around the small mediaeval flat on the walls of Bergamo's old town that he had rented when he decided to move to Italy. The strange noise came from the fax machine: he had just received his first ever registration for a PRINCE2 course!

After Coos organised his first PRINCE2 course (in Italian!) he decided to rent an office and to hire his first intern, a young university student by the name of Michelangelo, the current Chief Operating Officer of QRP International. This was the start of a team of 25 employees, with dedicated departments like operations, finance, marketing and sales growing over the years.

In 2006 already 1,000 people were trained by QRP International, and in 2008 the first million in revenues was celebrated. A specific market strategy for Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg and Switzerland was developed and these countries became the core of QRP International. In 2015 QRP started a dedicated blog on different topics related to Project, IT Service Management, Agile and Change Management that now reaches more than 200,000 annual visits. In 2020 we also started offering virtual classes due to Covid, besides the more traditional live classroom format.

Through all these years our main goal has been and still is to develop professionals to facilitate changes, which inspires our team and forms the value proposition of our company.

We cannot repeat our Core Values often enough:

1. We do our utmost to make our clients happy 2. We enjoy working together as a team 3. We keep our word 4. We are committed to our professional development

Awesome QRP Initiatives and Fun Facts about the Team

Besides organizing courses and developing professionals, QRP International also has devoted its time to charity. We strive to give back to our community by making a positive impact on society. QRP contributes €1 euro for each person trained in the fiscal year.

With regards to one of our team building activities, QRP has called into life the QRP Days. Born in 2007, the QRP Days bring the full team together for a day or two with the aim of learning from each other. During these days we also invite our trainers around the world to come visit us in Italy so we can get to know each other better. In this way, we live our values together.

And then some Fun Facts about the Team! We work with 75 trainers worldwide, we have count 9 different nationalities in our QRP office and we welcome new employees by treating the whole team to a brioche. Recently we organized a table-soccer competition during lunch breaks, and we go for a coffee walk every day after lunch. Real insider tip: did you know that the most common QRP zodiac sign is a Capricorn?

QRP’s Future

At QRP we work continuously to help professionals improve their skills and support both organisations as individuals throughout their learning journey.Our mission is to help clients when they are tired of losing time and money on their projects and processes. Our training courses can help unlock individual potential and achieve a higher level of structure and efficiency in the organisation, leading to an increased productivity.

In order to do so, we plan to expand our business beyond the countries that are already operational and to establish a presence in other mature markets across Europe. We stay close to our Core Values, both for working with our clients as for the relationship with our own employees. Through great social initiatives that keep developing, we continuously value having fun together as a team; we only just established our QRP Social Committee! We’re just getting started…

As in 2023 we celebrate our 20th anniversary, we are grateful that we had the opportunity to work with many great clients and help many professionals achieve their goals. We look forward to continuing this journey of providing the highest quality training solutions to our clients, and to contribute to their ongoing success.

For our 20 years of success we have to thank not only our clients but especially our trainers which lead us in a bright future and make us such a competitive business.

Do you know who is behind QRP? Meet our team and follow us on Linkedin!

Are you looking for a light, lean, concrete and equipped project methodology? Participate in our webinar and discover PM², the European Commission's project management method. PM² is a flexible and modular project management methodology that can be adapted according to the needs of any project. It consists of three main phases: initiation, planning and execution. The methodology also includes monitoring and evaluation activities to ensure the project’s quality. PM² is designed for use in projects of all sizes and complexities. It is particularly suitable for projects that involve multidisciplinary teams and external partners, such as research and development projects. To help project management professionals better understand and apply the PM² methodology, we are hosting a free webinar available in four different languages. This webinar will cover the main concepts and practices of PM².

PM² Project Management: harmonisation and united in diversity - Webinar

We invited our experts Natacha Brenner (EN/FR/DE) & Eusebio Gianodomenico (IT) to host the webinar. In just 30 minutes the webinar aims to provide an overview of the PM² methodology and seeks to clarify what makes the methodology stand out. Our experts will highlight the advantages of using PM² in an interactive way. Questions and active participation are encouraged! Choose your language and register to one of our webinars:

ENGLISH - May 11, 2023 11:00 AM

"PM² Project Management: harmonisation and united in diversity"

GERMAN - May 30, 2023 11:00 AM

"PM²: Harmonisierung und geeint in der vielfalt"

ITALIAN - June 13, 2023 11:00 AM

"PM² Project Management: armonia ed unità nella diversità"

FRENCH - June 15, 2023 11:00 AM

"Gestion de projet PM² : harmonisation et solidarité dans la diversité"

Starting from 2023, PeopleCert announced that all Global Best Practice certifications will need to be renewed after three years. This way PeopleCert can assist candidates in their lifelong journey and inspire them to keep on developing their professional skills. Besides retaking the same exam or taking further courses and certifications, the third option is collecting and logging CPD (Continuing Professional Development) points.

How to log your CPD Points each year

You can further develop your professional skills by logging CPD points through the MyAxelos portal. To keep your current certifications valid, CPD points can be logged against an individual or multiple certifications. For each Product Suite, candidates must submit at least 20 CPD points each year, across different categories of CPD, for three years consecutively. At the end of this period, your certification renew-by date will be extended by three years, and the cycle will repeat. These points must be submitted by the date on which you originally passed your most recent exam within the Product Suite. For example, if you originally passed the exam on 1st April, your 20 CPD points must be logged by 1st April each year.

What are the PeopleCert Product Suites?

Renewing a certification can be done within the same product suite. An ITIL® 4 certification will not be renewed by obtaining a PRINCE2® certification, but could be renewed by taking any other ITIL 4 certification, such as ITIL 4 Specialist: Create, Deliver and Support. Product suites are as follows:

• ITIL 4 Product Suite: All ITIL 4 certifications
• Project, Programme & Portfolio Management Product Suite: PRINCE2®, PRINCE2® Agile, MoR®, MSP®, MoV®, MoP®, P3O®

What are the different categories of CPD points?

Below you can find some examples (a more extensive overview can be found on the PeopleCert website):

• Professional experience: applying best practice in the workplace or coaching colleagues in relation to best practice
• Professional education: PeopleCert certifications or other certifications from non-PeopleCert accredited training organisations
• Community: organising or attending industry or best practice related events

For any questions, please reach out to us anytime or have a look at PeopleCert’s website.

At a time of unprecedented change, organisations are challenged by an extraordinary pace of technological innovation. Agile product delivery is needed, but is not enough anymore. Companies need business agility. This means that all departments need to use Lean and Agile practices to continually and proactively deliver innovative business solutions in a fast and efficient way. SAFe®, an enterprise framework for scaling agile, has the guidance to help organisations get there. It is an agility framework at scale, which means that instead of having an agile team it will imply an agile transformation for the complete organisation.

Leading SAFe

QRP International is now a Scaled Agile Bronze Transformation Partner. We offer the Leading SAFe training, which prepares for the SAFe 5 Agilist certification.

The Leading SAFe course enables attendees to lead a Lean-Agile enterprise successfully into the adoption of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). After an introduction to SAFe, the training provides the best practises and methods to drive your Lean-Agile transformation.

Thanks to SAFe 5.0, your organisation can become the Agile business it needs to be and win in the digital age.

Why could SAFe be the best choice for you?

If you want to become a lean-agile leader, SAFe could be the best solution for you. The framework is well suited to complex projects with many teams involved. Some of the benefits of the framework:

• It guarantees the technical agility of teams
• It makes it easier to drive and support organisational change
• It leverages the benefits of Agile, Scrum, Lean, DevOps and Kanban
• It can support you in managing your projects with a higher degree of agility, thus providing stakeholders with faster feedback
• The SAFe certification is recognized worldwide

Want to know more? Visit our page: SAFe certification For any further questions you can contact us directly here: switzerland@qrpinternational.com

In this article Fabio Mora, Software Engineer, Agile Coach, DevOps expert and author, delves into some more practical and technical aspects of the Site Reliability Engineer profession and some fundamental concepts, in particular, that of reliability.  

Reliability

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) means working on the most important functionality of a system: reliability, a “feature” that precedes any other. To illustrate its importance, imagine that you need to use a service whose operation is based, in whole or in part, on computer systems, electronics, telco and other related industries. Take any online service, reliability is critical. If the assistant who wakes you up in the morning and streams your favourite radio station might not be essential, the smartphone that allows you to interact with relatives and friends, manage documents and appointments, definitely is critical for the quality of your daily life. If your smartphone is “not available” and the apps like your bank account, Google, social networks, and Wikipedia do not work, some problems with your routine could loom. With various nuances of criticality, these are – under the hood – very sophisticated platforms that interact and work with each other, self-balance and often consist of millions or billions of lines of code and hardware devices. The functionalities all devices and apps offer to correspond to possibilities in the real world. The idea, therefore, is that they should be kept efficient and responsive for those who use them, with a quality of service that lives up to the needs. This is called reliability.  

The immensity of the system

To illustrate, if downloading a file from your Drive may appear to be a simple gesture, behind it lies an endless chain of events: from the mobile radio network, the data flow travels encapsulated, encrypted, in an optical fibre, through transoceanic cables that carry it within milliseconds to a remote datacenter, and back. In turn, there are data links that allow these infrastructures to communicate with each other, provide network services, hardware, but also energy and gas on the network – even further upstream. From POS to pay in-store, to ticketing services, to the railway, motorway, aeronautical and civil signalling networks, to remote surgery, to medical diagnoses in the cloud. But also the logistics of each package delivered by courier, the work of the “riders”, the heat trails of food and drug transport. All of these are pivotal platforms for entire sectors and for the quality of personal life: industry, communication, education, marketing, media, health, public administration, democratic processes – almost the entire service sector – and beyond.  

Possible drawbacks

There are many things that can go wrong.

1. First, systems become inherently unstable over time. Due to their incredible complexity, they tend to break down and it is necessary to work continuously so that this does not happen. The work activities on the systems and their updating must not be carried out only when «accidents», or events of an exceptional nature, occur, they must be part of business as usual. As business as usual, the activities can prevent inertia, obsolescence and technical debt.
2. The latter are all daemons that threaten not only the quality of the services but also the possibility of continuing to introduce changes in them. The SREs is to keep the systems stable and that of the programmers is to write and maintain the functionalities. of products, with continuous software releases. Each release, therefore, could introduce new errors, and complexity.

 

Value of SRE

Reliability is the upstream feature of any system. However, it is also a difficult feature to communicate because, when it is present, it can easily be taken for granted. It is also difficult to always give the right importance to this theme. To correct this small cognitive bias, the roles and organizational structures of the SREs are often autonomous with respect to the Software Engineers, who instead build the products. The value attributed to the SRE, therefore, is to keep these products stable on systems; error-free, maintainable, usable for the user – no matter what is happening. The value that an SRE offers to its organisation and to the users of its products is, ultimately, that of guaranteeing the stability of production systems, the maintainability of the software and a high-quality level of service. All this regardless of external conditions, be it traffic peaks or continuous releases of new features.  

Fabio Mora

Fabio Mora is a freelance programmer and Agile coach enthusiastic about Extreme Programming and Linux. Passionate about open source, economics and everything related to mathematics and data science, he first founded a web agency and then worked in eBay as a software engineer. He loves music, sound engineering and scientific dissemination.

Change Management courses exist to support the organizational change to make sure that employees are guided through their change journey. Organizational change refers to the actions in which an organisation alters one of its major components, like the used technologies, infrastructure, internal processes or internal culture. Organizational change is a direct response to an internal or external change in the organisation. Internal changes can be:

• New leadership,
• A new team structure,
• The implementation of new technology,
• Fast growth,
• The adaption of a different business model.

As we have experienced in the last year, an external factor can be

• A global pandemic,
• Changes in the business environment,
• A new competitive environment,
• Political changes.

Whether derived from internally or externally changes, any organisation comes at a point where organizational change is inevitable for the organisation to remain viable and scalable. Organizational change is often a very sensitive transformation as it is often conceived as something intimidating for those impacted by the change. In order to make the transition as delicate as possible, a Change Manager is appointed that has a strong knowledge of Change Management. This person can follow different courses and can get different certifications. Two common certifications are ‘Change Management’ and ‘Agile Change Agent’, two completely different approaches that both fit different situations. One is not better than the other, it depends on the organisation and the specific transition.  

Change Management by APMG

As the name suggests, APMG’s Change Management deals with managing change and its impact. It provides an overview of the theories within Change Management and can be seen as a collection of knowledge and best practices. The methodology provides an extensive insight at all the different stages of change and provides a structured approach for supporting individuals and teams to move from a current to a future state. The key takeaway from this methodology is that change is not a single event, it is a process. To follow structural change there is a need for clarity to connect business strategy to action and its main factor for success is proper communication with all stakeholders. Mastery, purpose and autonomy can help raise change engagement. This certification can aid Change Managers in the following situations;

• Traditional waterfall organisations,
• Transformational changes,
• Organisations with a strong top-down approach,
• Long-lasting and evident-based results.

 

Agile Change Agent by APMG

The Agile Change Agent is a hands-on course that supports the ideas of collaboration, empowerment and self-direction that are core to Agile approaches. These ideas are also at the heart of effective change management. Unless people participate in designing, practising and adopting the change for themselves, the change does not happen and benefits cannot be realized. The methodology defines different ‘change agents’, these can be managers or employees, or external consultants hired to facilitate change initiatives. A change agent is someone who has a (temporary) job within the organisation and next to his/her daily work facilitates change. The methodology and its course are full of exercises and practical tools, tips and advice. The course focuses less on the theories of change and is more methodological. This certification can aid Change Managers, and others, in the following situations;

• Agile organisations,
• Adaptive changes,
• Organisations with a strong bottom-up approach,
• Fast, person-driven results.

 

How do these courses & certifications compare?

The APMG Change Management program provides a structured approach for supporting individuals and teams to move from a current to a future state. The course equips participants with the theory, tools and techniques to contribute effectively to planning, implementing and sustaining change. The APMG Agile Change Agent certification includes a simple, repeatable lifecycle model which acts as the structure of any change plan. The course provides questionnaires and checklists to help create the culture for effective change. QRP Switzerland offers both the APMG Change Management course and the APMG Agile Change Agent course. Do you have more questions about the differences between the different Change Management approaches? You can contact us and we will be happy to support you with more information, customized to your needs.