Taking a new look at Training

One of our goals in forming this business was to bring together different skills into one place and reapply them in other ways. We have quite different backgrounds and career paths, but a common theme is that training can always be better and integrated into businesses in a more complete way.

In recent years I have been involved in various projects for various consulting companies implementing SAP. Some projects have been large with 100 team members while others have been small at around 10 members. But often training has been handled as just something that needs to be done. It is often under resourced, and often can be ineffective.

Suprising really...considering that these companies are spending huge amounts of money to put in a new system that is the biggest change that will impact staff in years.

Training needs to be planned early in the project lifecycle. Careful assessment needs to be made, agreed with all those with an interest from users, to project teams, business units, steering committees and project managers. It needs to form part of the foundation of the project to be able to deliver effective training, in appropriate ways, in appropriate time frames.

The training is not only about using the software. Project teams need to be assessed to see what needs apply to them. Often the SAP Consultants may be experts in SAP, but pretty green when it comes to your business. Also consultants come and go during a project lifecycle so it is worth considering what type of induction is required to provide an understanding of the business.

Business members of project teams are often not formally trained on the software early enough in the project. This can lead to assumptions, misunderstanding, and tension as the project progresses. It is not a good situation as the traditional methodologies used by most consulting companies do not consider this knowledge gap. They work to highly structured phases - typically "Gather Requirements", "Gap Analysis", "Blueprint", "Build", "Test" and "Go Live". So while busy gathering requirements, blueprinting etc decisions are made, assumptions are made, that often turn out to be poor in hindsight leading to project conflict, redesign as the project timeline forever marches forward.

So looking at training requirements early in the project just makes good sense.