Take a Stroll Down Mattison Avenue

Greetings GRAPA Members!

Welcome to Mattison Avenue, a place where you can gather information about GRAPA and get an inside view about what’s in store for us this year. Today, I was sitting at my desk, thinking about all that we’ve accomplished in the past year. With our sights set high on taking revenue assurance professionals to the next level, I’d like to discuss where we are headed in the year 2009. For starters, I’ve implemented this blog, as a way for you to get inside my head (just a bit) and discover my ideas, hopes and thoughts about our organization. This blog will serve as my sounding board to you about GRAPA and the initiatives we set to accomplish this year. I’m also looking to utilize another online tool, LinkedIn, which will give revenue assurance professionals a place to network with one another and stay in the loop about the great things GRAPA is doing.

Well, I’d like to start by saying that in 2009, we’ll see a number of improvements and re-commitments to many of the things that worked well in 2008. More importantly, we’ll continue with our innovation by initiating a number of new activities as well.

I think the biggest single event and the most important GRAPA activity in 2009 will be the final ratification, publication and promotion of the GRAPA Standards. The formalization and ratification of these standards and their promotion around the world signals the maturation of revenue assurance as a professional activity and GRAPA as the agent of that professionalization.

We will see a recommitment of GRAPA to the Town Hall meeting venue. Although there were some false starts and challenges in 2009, we are sure that our more experienced team members will be able to make Town Halls a foundational component of GRAPA member activity in 2009.

Simultaneous with the release and promotion of the GRAPA ratified standards will be the launching of the GRAPA Certification Program. This program has been designed to assist revenue assurance professionals in the establishment of clear goals and objectives for their career paths, and is designed first and foremost to accomplish the primary objective of GRAPA, the PROFESSIONALIZATION of the industry. GRAPA certification includes: requirements for members in the areas of training, testing and real world experience. GRAPA will assemble a support staff to support this certification effort.

Based upon the success of the Revenue Assurance Academy in 2009, GRAPA will be seeing a recommitment and radical expansion of venues and course offerings. The Revenue Assurance Academy (RAA) is a training organization that offers classes to revenue assurance professionals through a number of different venues including:

1. On-site training at corporate locations
2. Venue based training at independent training sites and hotels around the world (Johannesburg, Miami, Chicago, Dubai, Madrid, Amsterdam, Lagos, Nairobi, Bangalore, Kuala Lumpur and others)
3. Web based training classes

For 2009, expansion will include:

1. Expanded course offerings that will further align with the GRAPA Standards
2. An aggressive calendar with reduced pricing. RAA will offer more venues and will be announcing tentative dates, at least 12 months in advance. This aggressive calendar and reduced pricing will attempt to help members reach certification in less than 1 year (if possible).
3. Expanded Curriculum – A number of GRAPA members have been recruited to write much of the training required by the new expanded body of knowledge requirements.
4. Expansion of faculty – The RAA is planning to add a number of teachers to the staff in 2009 in alignment with the new curriculum and certification requirements. 

For more information, check out the RAA website at: www.ra-academy.org

We’ll also see the addition of web based certification training. There are a number of serious issues to address when attempting to make web based training available. Challenges include:

1. How to offer training in regions where internet speeds or quality are not high enough to support the approach
2. How to protect the intellectual property that the courses represent
3. How to organize material for maximum effectiveness when you cannot interact in person with the teacher.

The GRAPA Forum was unfortunately, one of the big disappointments that I saw in 2008. While initial interest was high, the approach and the technology seem to be less than what is required to make it useful for GRAPA members. But this year, we’ve launched a new "answer man" format. This will allow people to submit questions to different "expert members" who will have a question and answer blog to be utilized to track and provide the support that people require.

In order to help stimulate activities in certain key areas, we will initiate a new GRAPA Endowment Program. Endowments will allow members to receive a fee for spearheading specific research of other focused activity for the GRAPA organization.

What does the Future of GRAPA and Revenue Assurance hold?

While the battle is far from won, I think it’s clear that the Global Revenue Assurance Professionals Association has made great strides forward as an organization and for the benefit of revenue assurance professionals around the world. I believe the goal of the organization is to redouble our efforts to increase our effectiveness, penetration and influence in the coming years!

I hope you enjoyed hearing some of my thoughts about what’s coming up for GRAPA. Make sure to add this to your links or RSS feed. If there’s a link or information you’d like to share with me, feel free to leave a comment!

Thanks,

Rob