The level of investment required for major system rollouts or upgrades means it is crucial that companies cover all bases to ensure the project is a success. However, the best laid plans can fall victim to overlooking or downgrading one of the fundamental elements of a successful project: User training.

We've all been there. A major systems rollout or upgrade, months (or even years) of hard work, midnight oil, planning and re-planning. You're on the home stretch with go-live just weeks away when somebody asks you, innocently, "What's happening with the user training?"

Long pause...

End-user training is the Cinderella of the project world. It gets pushed out, foisted on an overstretched project team, downgraded to providing some 'these are the changes' documents or even cut from the budget altogether. The statistics about its importance should be well-known and are certainly compelling, none more so than the failure in end-user adoption is a very significant reason for failure of IT projects overall. So what can we do? Well, we can start as we mean to go on.

 

If, as a colleague of mine has often maintained, defining testing should be Job One in any large systems project, then training should be Job Zero. Start thinking about who you need to train, what they need to know and when they need to know it, right from the very beginning. It pays dividends; weaving your training plans into the fabric of the project means you can take advantage of overlaps between capturing requirements and understanding user roles and how they interact with the system. Working with the business as their requirements are established means your training team will understand what success will look like when the system is in use, and how evaluation can measure that; whilst keeping a learning focus alongside testing means activities during business testing and UAT can contribute to developing learning materials and building a community of 'super-users'.

But a caveat – UAT does not equal end user training. It's a powerful source of information and resource but you need a learning professional who also understands the complexities of a systems rollout to make sure you produce effective, timely and cost-efficient training interventions. Similarly, your project team may not have the instructional design or delivery skills – let alone the time - to make sure your end users are ready, willing and able to use the system at go-live and are supported afterwards. 

Even if you have a great training strategy, compelling learning materials, a bevy of eager and well-trained 'super-users' and an exemplary selection of post-go-live support tools, your end users will not beat a path unbidden to your door. End-user reaction to system changes can range from total indifference to blind panic, taking in denial, resistance and over-confidence along the way.

An effective end-user rollout depends on the three Es: users need to be Efficient, Effective and Engaged. Efficient, meaning they can carry out the keystrokes and operations necessary to make the system work. Effective, meaning they can use that system properly to run your organisation. And most importantly, Engaged: that their hearts and minds are won over to the change, they're open to new ways of working and they understand (and agree with) the business benefits and the 'what's in it for me'. Those three Es are like a tripod: lose one of the three and the whole thing is in danger of falling over.

In practical terms, this means that your training strategy and planning should be happening hand-in-hand with your change and communications strategies. Training deserves a seat at the project table and there should be a representative from your learning team embedded in the project governance structure. The messages to end-users about training should be consistent in tone, content, appearance and positioning with the whole communications package and should be seen as an integral part of project communications. By showing your users that you understand the importance to your organisation of their being well-prepared and enthusiastic about the changes to come, you will help achieve the most important of the three Es; engagement.

Achieving this takes work as well as forethought. There are some hard questions that need to be asked before the project even begins - of your vendor, your systems integrator, your project team, your business sponsors and your L&D team. What's going to be done about training and by whom? Can it be handled in-house, will it be part of the vendor or SI's services or do you need a specialist provider? Just how big is the task and who is taking ownership of it – now? Getting this right is all part of defining the project and the old cliché applies: failure to plan is planning to fail.

 

Another hard question is how you measure success. Systems projects consume a great deal of time, money and resources and you need to be sure your investment really does return benefits. When the rubber hits the road, how well the system operates as a terrific piece of technology is to a great extent secondary to how well end-users actually employ it to run your business; getting the measures designed, implemented and evaluated to see what's really happening after go-live may give you one of the key indicators of how well it really went.

Go-live did, with no more than the usual dramas. The rollout is over, the project documents are archived and the team have disbanded and moved on to new challenges. All is well with the world.

What about the users?

Keeping them effective, efficient and engaged doesn't end when the project does. Users come and users go, with staff changes, role changes, maybe-mergers and acquisitions. Knowledge fades over time and bad habits can creep in: so how do you protect your investment in the system and the people? Another thing to plan from the start.

Think about how you can build a self-supporting structure that allows you to build, maintain and enhance skills over time – developing a network of super-users or a community of practice; providing online, printed or interactive learning materials; integrating help and coaching into the system itself. This is where end-user training develops into performance support...but that's a whole new story.