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July 12, 1999

Staff Training Can Help Deployment Efforts

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PDF file: Deployment Training: You'll need to take the following steps as you develop a training program that coincides with application deployment
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Communicating information about training for the software rollout is extremely important. If you don't do it, or do it wrong, all the effort will be lost. There are many ways to let employees know about training, including E-mail, intranet, groupware, and newsletters.

Keep E-mails short. Also, remember, E-mail can't convey a sense of enthusiasm and urgency. However, for large numbers of people, it's easier to send E-mail than to approach people in person.

Newsgroups are also useful. By becoming a member of an internal newsgroup, you can pose questions to other staff members about the software. By keeping internal newsgroups about training open to all levels of employees, everyone can see upcoming classes and other relevant tips and information.

Software trainers often see evaluation as a necessary evil to keep the money coming. Visions of difficult procedures, complex equations, and detailed analysis strike fear in the hearts of training developers. There are hundreds of statistical methods that can be applied to the measurement, quality control, and continual improvement of training. The reality, though, is that most training programs need only a few of these measures to be effective, and it's relatively easy to measure training. There are four basic steps.

First, decide what to measure. Second, decide on the types of evaluations to be used. Third, create a course and trainer evaluation. And fourth, administer and follow up on course and trainer evaluations.

Evaluations should determine if the training achieved its objectives and if the training team developed and delivered the training according to plan. They will also help trainers discover what could be done differently. The hard part is remembering to instill in the company the discipline to measure and improve training programs.

It's easy to run the course, administer the evaluations, and file the evaluations in a drawer somewhere for posterity. Using the evaluation results to improve the training continually is difficult. This is where most companies fail, and why training becomes obsolete.

Be sure to develop specific measures for performance because they let trainers measure participant success and let participants benchmark and improve their skills throughout the course. A simple three-step approach for stating measurements is: Decide how each task must be measured, state how you will measure each competency, and state the criteria or standards you will use to pass or fail students.

Continual Improvement
Companies must keep software training updated. Each modification of the software may change how users operate the system. It's critical for companies to facilitate rapid responses to new or changing software training priorities. When software changes unexpectedly, or the scope of a new release is larger than anticipated, training teams should communicate with software and training vendors, as well as with the rollout teams, to discuss any revisions of requirements.

Training departments use evaluation information for continual improvement. A popular model is the three-step approach: plan, do, evaluate. The "plan" step is what's expected to happen for any selected action. The "do" step is the execution of what was planned. The "evaluate" step compares the results of what actually happened with the expected results. The results are fed back into the plan step for the next round.

If the analysis holds true, then execution can be standardized. The process for taking action varies, but generally includes the following steps: understand the results, establish and clarify priorities, generate recommendations, develop and implement plans, and monitor progress.

Charles Trepper, a Minneapolis consultant specializing in IT training, is the author of the upcoming book Training for Software Rollouts. He can be reached at chtrepper@uswest.net.

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