When I think about clients that I’ve worked in the past and what’s important for them to think about when they’re making their decision about end-user training, three things come to mind.
Plan early
The first thing that’s really important to remember about how to plan your end-user training adoption strategy, is that the programme behind the end-user training had a business case tied to it. It had an outcome and a result that was committed to by your business and management team.
If you don’t consider early enough, or within your overall programme, how to manage the adoption of your new system, it’s kind of like running the race without crossing the finish line. Your impact and your result is likely to not necessarily be achieved in the way that you’d intended or communicated. So, making sure that you finish all the areas in your strategy, early enough, to give you enough alternatives to make slight alterations if you need to, is the most important thing in terms of making your decision.
A hybrid approach minimises risk
There’s risk associated with every technique and there are different levels of risk associated with every technique that you use.
While it may feel risky to talk to an external service provider about doing your end-user training, even if you choose to do something internally, with your existing resources, there is risk and cost associated with that also. Internally, you’re very committed to the business and your outcomes, however, it may be the first time that those resources have done this type of activity, or been a part of this type of a project, so there is some quality risk associated with that.
A hybrid approach using some external and some internal resources and techniques helps you blend and manage that risk, as well as give you more options going forward.
Change is experienced by people, not systems
You’ll have changes within a system but that change is experienced by a person.
How that plays out, is that it’s really important to have training tools that will help an end-user adopt the change that’s coming their way, but the actual experience requires a blended set of approaches to make sure it works for all end-users.
The tools are key and it’s great to have them, but make sure that you think about how that end-user is going to experience everything that relates to their new role and the systems that they’ll be using as part of the changes within the business.
The right next step
So where do you go from here? You’ve thought a lot about your decision, you’ve done a broad plan that encompasses everything that you need to achieve, but that’s the right next step?
The right next step is take a look at what you have internally, the people, the tools and what outcomes you want. Then, go and have a conversion with a training service provider.
They can help you leverage all those internal tools and resources that you have and create a plan that brings it all together and gets you ultimately towards the objective that you want to achieve.
