The P&P Group Plc of Haslingden, Lancashire, which used to be known as a hardware and software distributor, is moving towards services as fast as it can and has announced a new training subsidiary. Called P&P Training Services, the new company is independent and will serve its own clients as well as providing training services to the corporate and dealer customers of the P&P Group as a whole. Training Services was born from the marriage of Training International, acquired in May 1988 which catered for bespoke needs, and the training division of Personal Computers Plc acquired in March 1989, which, reasonably enough, specialised in training on micros. Consequently, Training Services can tackle any office systems training difficulties from the micro, through the mini, to the mainframe – but its particular expertise lies with IBM and Unisys hardware. It offers consultancy, application training, bespoke courseware development, and product training – the last of these being described as operating systems and software. It currently has 70 staff, 30 of whom are lecturers and is operating from offices in London, Birmingham and Leeds. If that were all P&P was announcing, one might dismiss the subject, noting that the company was competing with ComputaGroup, ComputerCenter, Datasolve Computeraid and so on; but P&P is also announcing a Training Services Standard to be known, since a concept hasn’t arrived in the computer industry until it has an acronym, as the TSS methodology. The Standard is an attempt to put Quality Assurance into training. It has five phases and the client must approve and sign off each phase as it is completed. First of all the training service is designed with the client, then a blueprint is drawn up, and the course materials are developed and produced. Fourthly a pilot test is introduced, and finally the training is actually implemented. The markets targeted for new subsidiary are: large corporates, medium-sized businesses, the professions, and computer dealers, resellers and manufacturers. Aside from bespoke courseware, Training Services also offers introductory, intermediate and advanced courses in PC General Application, MS-DOS/OS/2, PC Networking, IBM AS/400, and IBM Mainframe Office Automation, as well as 60 software courses. Headed by Mike Cross, Training Services currently has a broader outlook than the rest of the P&P Group and may well prove to have a hidden reconnaissance mission to sound out future areas into which the group will move.
