Institute of Management Accountants: Continuously Assessing the Needs of Professionals

The Foundation for Applied Research includes leading academics and practitioners who look beyond the horizon of management accounting, Turner said.

“They are looking at what’s new, what’s coming up, what the changes in the bodies of knowledge are, what’s evolving, etc. Then we look at how these new and emerging concepts are turned into possible learning initiatives,” she said.

Turner employs a “rapid prototyping” technique while developing and launching fresh education initiatives to ensure the professional development offerings are on par with professionals’ needs.

“We employ a ‘rapid prototyping’ approach, bringing theory together as quickly as we can,” she said. “So rather than spending six months or a year designing a more complex program and then launching it to market and seeing what people think of it, we’ll start to work with a chapter, for example, and we’ll work with them to start delivering what we’re working on. We improve the program as we go so that as we circle out the launch to larger audiences, it’s already gone through a cycle of adapting and improving based on feedback.

“We treat everything as a process — everything that we do, develop and deliver is constantly going through a cycle of improvements so data can be used real-time in what we are doing. If it is something as actionable as data from a webinar, we use that data when we start to see clear trends. We can use that data to add information around the webinar so that when it becomes a recorded event and is posted, if there was something that was lacking in terms of information, we can include references to articles in our Strategic Finance magazine, white papers, etc., and build it in right away to get the added benefit of that data and improvements.”

In addition to the “rapid prototyping” technique, Turner employs metrics to measure the success of IMA’s professional development offerings. The purpose of these metrics is not to simply gauge participation rates and satisfaction but how the education offerings help participants contribute to the overall goals and performance of their organizations.