During any enterprise commercial software implementation, the project team should take steps to ensure the customer can operate and maintain the implementation after deployment and rolling off the vendor resources. There are several considerations when determining how to accomplish this body of work including the organizational structure of the customer resources, the current knowledge level of the staff, and the existence or non-existence of any post production support contracts. Once these questions are answered, the next set of questions entail identifying the sets of unique groups to be educated and the individuals in each group.
A quick side note: I typically use the term education vice training as training has the connotation of a formal set of activities including a classroom, a trainer, slides and a formalized agenda. Although, this activity has a part in educating people, I believe this is the beginning of educating people and not the end. The paragraphs below identify additional opportunities to increase the knowledge level of customer personnel to the desired level.
- Formal Classroom Training
- Use Vendor training first
Most commercial software vendors provide formal classroom training which is a good base level for individuals new to the software. This also provides comprehensive coverage across the entire breadth of the available functionality. It is optimally attained very early in the project and prior to any significant requirements analysis activity to afford the customer resources application level context for the requirements discussions or sprints. The vendor team gets discussions in more depth and additional resources to collaborate on the optimal solution.
- Use project team to conduct informal training. Let customer drive the agenda. product documentation can be guide
In some situations, formal classroom training may be impractical for any number of reasons. In these cases, the project manager can consider using experienced project team members to review the available functionality. These formal sessions should focus on configuration options available and how these options impact business processes. Typically, the product documentation can be used to provide a sort of agenda for this less formal training so the project team is not burdened with developing training material. Given the project team’s understanding of the customer environment, this type of training is typically more focused on the project team’s understanding of the customer needs. There is a balance point here between briefing functionality which may not be used versus providing more depth of functionality which will definitely be used.
As with formal classroom, this enables the customer to see how their needs can be met and the background to be a true partner in deciding the optimal solution. A positive side effect is the beginning of getting familiar with any administration screens and a customer more committed to the defined solution since it was determined in a collaborative fashion. A second positive side effect is more predictable detailed design sessions for those PMs running models with defined requirements periods. By having a more educated customer, there is less need to review how the system works since this was covered in the training. This discussions typically become focused on discussing the pros and cons of a small set of alternative solutions or quick agreement on options with few options. In either case, the discussion timeframe is more predicable affording the PM greater schedule control.
Part 2 of the series is now available.
