Loading ...5 ways to fail at IT training
I would have named this post “5 ways to waste IT project investment”.
To be successful, users must understand the project’s goals, status, and impact on their jobs. Many projects pay too little attention to training and documentation, especially when the project starts to run over-budget. This oversight makes reduces productivity and can negatively impact the project ROI. In extreme cases, users simply don’t use the new software, bringing the effective ROI to zero.
Often the training is treated as a part of a roll-out, an event rather than a process, and limited to a screen - function navigation exercise. This type of approach results in a very low retention rate, which means that only very limited parts of the system functionality are being utilized by the business community.
The best approach is to plan process-centric training “campaign” which includes:
- pre-roll out orientation session for a business team;
- roll-out process based team training session;
- context based on-screen process focused help;
- cheat sheet (s);
- short (30 minutes) bi-weekly or monthly on-line refreshing seminars which focus on specific process based functionality. These should be recorded and made available on-demand.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.