Ikram Khan is an an internationally accredited trainer with over 25 years experience. He is the co-founder of Business Beam and the founder of LearningCert, an online training platform skilling IT professionaly globally.
Tell us about yourself and your background
I help organizations and professionals learn global best practices of the digital world and apply them successfully for growth and improvement.
In a career spanning 25+ years, I have successfully completed 160+ business & IT transformation consulting assignments. Over 5,000 professionals from 1,200+ organizations have attended the 300+ training courses and workshops I have conducted in various countries including Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Hong Kong.
I am an internationally accredited trainer for Scrum, COBIT, ITIL, DevOps, PRINCE2, P3O, AgileSHIFT, ISO 27001, ISO 20000, and ISO 38500. I also hold certifications including CISSP, CGEIT, CISA, CISM, TOGAF, PMP, PMI-ACP, PRINCE2 Agile, CSM, CSPO, MoP, MoV, CSQE, and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.
I earned my Master’s degree in Computer Science from Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), and my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Systems Engineering from NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi.
What is it that you currently do?
I co-founded Business Beam in 2004 as a process improvement consulting firm with a vision to drive organizations towards excellence. Business Beam is a top-of-the-line consultancy firm known for its world-class skills and capabilities to deliver value-driven services and solutions. We help organizations to resolve their issues related to IT governance, operations, quality, services, projects, enterprise architecture, information security, business continuity, risk, and internal audit.
I assist corporates to answer questions such as:
• How to balance between agility and stability?
• How to optimize value from investments in technology?
• What means can be used to enhance security of information assets?
• What can be done to complete more projects in-time, within-budget, and with the agreed-upon scope? • How can IT provide better value to customers through services?
• Which practices help minimize defects and make the software development process more predictable?
The answers to these and other questions helped mould my career journey. They enabled me to successfully solve process and performance related issues of C-suite executives through consulting assignments and training courses.
Why do you believe learning is so important in the journey to companies reaching their objectives and full potential?
The customer demands and business needs are changing rapidly. Organizations are facing newer challenges on an almost daily basis. Fortunately, most of these challenges are not so unique.
Organizations globally have faced similar challenges; they tried various options; and the practices that worked are documented in the form of best practices.
As a smart organization, you must focus on learning these valuable best practices and map them to your scenarios. Effective adoption and adaption of these global best practices can save millions of dollars and thousands of productive hours. This can also put you far ahead as compared to your competition.
I and my team at Business Beam help organizations deliver better, cheaper, and faster.
You have also founded a training platform, tell us about your training platform
I started LearningCert in 2020 as a dedicated training platform. LearningCert aims to create skilled IT professionals globally. According to research, there will be a global IT talent shortage of more than 85 million people by 2030. Skills like programming, cybersecurity, cloud computing, artificial Intelligence are needed, DevOps and agile are considerably in demand. The skills shortage can result in 8.4 trillion dollars in unrealized revenue if the issue is left unaddressed.
LearningCert provides internationally accredited training courses in highly interactive self-paced, and traditional classroom-based formats. These courses help students and professionals pass premium international certifications.
LearningCert has already signed several top international accreditations; several more are in the pipeline. These certificates and the relevant skills are highly desired by the industry.
What are the benefits of being accredited on your training platform?
LearningCert provides authentic value to its customers.
• Learners: Be confident – you are in safe hands. Our courses are 100% aligned with relevant accreditation guidelines. We designed them not to let you sleep. They are highly interactive with lots of quizzes, animations, and engaging human voiceover. An examination simulator with multiple sample exams is also available. We offer excellent value for money to our learners.
• For industry experts, LearningCert offers you a chance to become an accredited trainer, share your experience with others, and enhance your earning potential. We offer easy access to our internationally accredited training content and train-the-trainer workshops to enhance your delivery skills.
Why do most training courses not have a lasting impact and what is it that makes your training courses so successful?
Most of the courses teach concepts by trainers who have never implemented them. They teach theory only. As a result, conviction in the message is usually missing.
My consulting and advisory experiences help a lot during my training courses. I explain concepts with the help of practical examples, case studies and implementation scenarios that I observed during various implementations (of course, while ensuring complete customer anonymity). This helps me catch the audience’s attention.
I encourage conversation and questions. Since I have hands-on knowledge in several areas, I feel happy answering questions that may not be directly related to the discussed topic. For example, if a participant of a PRINCE2 Practitioner training session asks PRINCE2 comparison with PMP or ITIL, or the role of IT governance in Project Management, I gladly answer. This enhances the participants’ interest and their overall understanding of the topic.
What value do you bring to organizations as a consulting firm?
We at Business Beam strive to bring lasting positive change at our customer organizations. Organizational change has 3 dimensions – people, process, and technology. Instead of focusing only on one or two dimensions, we focus on all three simultaneously – in a balanced manner.
For example, if we are implementing portfolio management office, we not only develop proper processes, policies, procedures, and guidelines, we ensure that your workforce is properly trained, and you have the supporting culture in place. We also ensure that you have the right tools and technologies to implement portfolio management.
This three-dimensional approach always results in lasting results.
Can you share a case study in the consulting field?
We have hundreds of consulting case studies. Let me share the one related to the software engineering division at Yesser, e-Government Program, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Yesser wanted to redesign and automate its software development, quality assurance, configuration management and change management practices. The organization also targeted CMMI Maturity Level 3. CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) is the global gold-class standard for software development teams.
Business Beam is a CMMI institute partner since 2008. We have successfully completed several CMMI implementations globally. At Yesser, we developed a tailored process model based on the specific needs of the organization. We automated this process model using the Microsoft Team Foundation Server. After months of dedication and efforts, Yesser successfully got appraised on CMMI Maturity level 3.
We witnessed a significant rise in productivity at the organization and received very positive comments from all levels.
What are your top strategies for continued success after an organization completes a training program?
Training helps professionals and managers gain specific skills. For example, after attending ITIL courses, professionals can understand the value of IT service management and how to co-create value for their customers and users. However, if the organizational processes, culture, and environment is not supporting to ITIL concepts, the training participants will forget the gained skills very quickly.
If an organization plans a training program to bring transformation, I suggest two important points: • Use Multi-tier approach: Focus on developing different skills at different levels or tiers. In a typical transformation training program, there are 4 tiers. First tier is senior management that needs awareness about business benefits and their responsibilities. A short and concise session is necessary for them to ensure their continual support. Second tier is core practitioners who need full in-depth training sessions and hands-on skills. Third tier is champions who belong to different departments and contribute to a successful transformation. They also need hands-on training sessions. The last tier is all employees, who must be aware of and motivated for the revised approach.
• Include post training support: Training is an important component of any transformation. However, it must be supported by the right processes, practices, culture, and technologies. Otherwise, investment in training courses can be lost easily. I and my team remain available for all kinds of post-training support. We offer first level support free of charge. If participants want to clarify any concept, they can contact us anytime. We are always happy to help them. This support is available for lifetime to all participants who have attended any training course from us. We also offer extended support to organizations. In this case, we ensure that the training program achieves the planned results by having the right processes, practices, and technologies in place.
What are your most popular courses right now?
Courses related to Scrum, ITIL, COBIT, PMP and TOGAF are quite popular these days. Organizations need these skills and professionals also see significant value by achieving these certifications.
Can you share a successful case study?
I recently completed agile transformation for a corporate in financial sector. The organization wanted to move from traditional to Agile approach. I suggested the following approach. The customer liked the approach and got it implemented.
• Step 1: Conduct gap assessment to identify training needs at different levels.
• Step 2: Perform awareness sessions about agility for top management.
• Step 3: Conduct a certification-based training course for all managers and practitioners. I used the AgileSHIFT framework for this purpose. It is a globally accepted framework for bringing organizational agility.
• Step 4: Conduct an Agile concepts awareness course for relatively junior staff members.
The assignment took 6 weeks to complete during which I trained more than 500 professionals. The overall results were very positive.
In the second phase, I and my team are providing onsite hand-on support for implementing agile concepts. This handholding will last for a few months until the practitioners become self-sufficient.
What can we expect to see from yourself in the next year?
I enjoy teaching. Therefore, I will continue to do so.
However, my goals for 2023 include enabling other industry professionals to become top-class trainers. I therefore like to focus also on conducting trainer-the-trainer programs for aspiring trainers.
LearningCert’s platform is available for all such industry experts. Once they fulfil the requirements of international accreditations, we will be happy to share our training content and help them conduct training courses globally.
How can our readers connect with you?
Personal website: www.ikramkhan.info
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ikram/
Email: hi@ikramkhan.info
How can readers get involved with your new training platform?
For training courses: www.learningcert.com
For consulting: www.businessbeam.com
