10/21/2009
Decide how many people will actually attend training. You can put the total number of employees in your proposal to management but never use that number to get quotes from vendors. The quotes will be way too high and it will end up making your ROI look very poor at the end of the year. Small ROI means no money for training next year. As an example, if you tell a vendor that you want to train 10,000 employees, then the cost to you is the same if 10,000 employees show up or if only 500 attend class. Training quotes aren’t like catering contracts, you don’t pay per head; you pay by the class. So, if you’re delivering enough classes to train 10,000 people, then you are offering (and paying for) way too many classes. On top of that, attendance looks low when your manager looks at the class rosters and now it looks like no one is coming to the training you’re providing. Do you see how this happened? How we all got to a place where training is no longer in the budget? Start this exercise by admitting that there is no way that all 10,000 employees will attend training even if you make it required.
When budgeting, the trick is to figure out how many people you would have to train to reach the number of employees who actually use the product for critical business functions. That’s a mouthful. What I’m saying is that chances are that 10,000 employees don’t rely on Windows to make better business decisions. It’s great that it does so much cool stuff, but let’s face it, the Start button is in the same place. Unless you are customizing widgets, most of the benefit of Vista or Windows 7 is behind the scenes in your IT Department. So, training on a new operating system in a managed PC environment is really only affecting the people who can log in as administrators of PC’s. That’s nowhere near 10,000 folks.
And not everyone who is affected is going to attend training either, so the number gets even lower. You are going to reach more people than will ever attend a class. Reach is when someone comes back after attending a class and tells someone that the class was good or shares the tip sheet with a co-worker or shows their boss how to do something that makes them more productive. Reach is the service desk sending people out to watch the video long after the vendor has left the building. Ask your Six Sigma expert how many people one trained person can reach in an organization. It’s not as many as a dissatisfied customer, but for the purposes of this exercise, I suggest targeting an audience of 30% of the total number of employees who will use the new tool as a critical path in their business process. So, if it’s Office, then you only count people who spend their day in front of a PC and then take 30% of that number to come up with your audience. Big companies turn into small business real quick. Now...
Pick a price per head that you’re willing to pay. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Sure, we’d all like to train everyone for $2/head, but coffee and sodas and cookies and doughnuts in the back of the room will cost you more than that (and if you weren’t planning to include refreshments – big mistake – food is a big draw to convince someone who’s on the fence to attend a training class). Instead, think about this number in terms of an hourly wage. How many hours of company time (lost productivity) are you willing to pay for one employee to get trained on the new toolset? How much is it REALLY going to cost the company to train everyone? This is a much bigger number than that quote you just got. Employees are the number one cost to companies. The longer you keep them away from their desks, the less likely their boss will be to allow them to attend a class.
Human Resources can probably provide you with an average cost per hour of how much employees cost the company, but if you’re just looking for an estimate, then $37/hour is the weighted average that Siemens Communication used in a 2007 study on how much money companies lose due to fragmented communications amongst team members (interesting read). So, for the purposes of our estimate, tack another $5/head onto that figure for catering and you’ve got a pretty good starting point for how much your company might be willing to spend on training next year. Keep in mind that this is not suggesting that training courses are only an hour long, just that an hour is about all the company is probably willing to pay for. That means that you will have to figure out how to make the productivity gains justify each additional hour spent in class. Design your curriculum with this in mind. If you can’t save them 15 mins/ week for the first month after they attend class, then you’ve just burned one more hour of the company’s time to the tune of $37 an hour.
So here’s what we’ve got so far:
($37 + catering cost/head) x .3(total # of employees affected) = min training budget for one tool
Decide how many tools you need to train on. Don’t panic. Office 2007 is one tool even though it’s multiple applications. The idea behind this exercise is to ensure that your training plan is in line with your technology roadmap. If you are deploying a new operating system at the same time as you are deploying a new version of Office, then that counts as two tools and you need 90 minutes (content builds on itself) to train them. But if you are deploying one tool at a time, then you have to teach two classes and the same content will take two hours (time for the intro and a review of what they might have missed if they didn't attend the first class).
IT implementation plans rarely consider that it will cost the company much less to pay for training development and delivery of all the tools that are integrated with one another at one time than it will be to repeat the process for each tool at different times of the year. Giving users training just in time, as the product is deployed to their machine, is the key to user adoption. While it makes sense to teach them everything at once and it is cheaper that way, you have to balance that with the fact that it’s a waste of time to teach something that they aren’t going to be able to use for six more months. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t pay to have the content developed and then just have someone in house deliver it later. Better yet, if you roll out the operating system first and people can get through their day with the new tool, then wait to teach them those couple of things you want them to know until you are going to train them on something else like Office.
The first step is only budgeting for the people who will come to training and the next step is making the content relevant enough for people to come to class. Get them through their first day, their first status report, and their first major deliverable using the new tool. They’re already going to be frustrated enough that they have to change that much; don’t get greedy. Business travelers need to know how to connect to a wireless network and manage their battery life. End users need to know that they can no longer use USB drives to share files and you need to teach them how you’d like them to do that in the future now that you’ve taken that option away.
As another example, if you are deploying SAP in the same year as you are replacing hardware with a new operating system and a new version of Office, then you would probably use two training vendors, right? But if you are integrating SAP into Excel, Access, and SharePoint, then why not have a class for your SAP users and teach them the new features of Excel while they’re in there? Teaching two separate training classes isn’t helping them put together why you did both implementations this year. Whenever possible, group applications together on the same quote. Seek out a vendor that can do both SAP and Office training together.
And if you’re deploying six new tools in the same year and everyone is affected and none of the software applications are related, then you might want to reconsider. You might not, but realize that it’s going to cost you more than the company is willing to pay in the way of corporate profit and loss and now you’re stuck with no training budget because you came in too high and demanded too much of the company’s time to do it all. At the very least, this exercise allows you to line item each training program. If one gets slashed, you still have enough money to deploy training on other applications. I know it’s hard enough to get approval in an Enterprise to deploy new software that your business desperately needs. That’s why you need to make training count. The free classes that the software vendors offer are great but they are not going to be customized to your complex business scenarios and unique needs. And it only gets worse.
Figure out how many critical business processes are going to change. Whether they are improved or not, teaching users how to do a new process using a new tool is much more complex than teaching them how to do things the same way they’ve always done them using a new tool. And this is where most companies opt out of training. They figure that there isn’t much change between two versions of the same software, so users will pretty much figure it out on their own. The number one reason that I’ve found why companies opted out of Office 2007 was because they felt it was going to cost too much to train users on the new user interface – The Ribbon. Pshh. There’s a 15-minute video out there on Microsoft.com that can do it for free, but whatever. Unfortunately, training vendors really played this up in the hopes of making a bunch of money and it turned into quite a backlash for the entire industry. Companies panicked and didn’t deploy Office 2007 at all. The real losers were the users who missed out for the past three years on some amazing new features designed to help them get their work done faster and with less frustration. The ribbon should have been the least of your worries.
If you are using SharePoint 2007 and Office 2003 – SHAME ON YOU! You robbed your company of the integration between SharePoint and Office 2007 and made it that much harder for your users to adopt the new technology that you did deploy. For the sake of our formula, not rolling out to Office 2007 with SharePoint 2007 will cost you more in the way of complexity. It will take longer to teach users how to work around the lack of integration then it would have been to show them how to use the Ribbon.
This is why some companies opt to bring someone in to do analysis prior to training development. Bring a vendor in to just identify pain points and run skills assessment. This information can then be delivered to all future vendors and will save you from paying everyone you hire to do the same analysis. Make sure that they figure out what it’s going to take to align both the IT vision and the corporate objectives with end user efficiency. They’ll deliver a gap analysis that tells you where your users are based on where you want them to be and they will publish recommendations as to what the company needs to do to get everyone to a baseline of competency.
So, where did we end up?
$42 x .3(employees) x (1 +.3(# of additional tools)) + analysis = training budget for the year
Example: In a company with 10,000 user affected by the introduction of SharePoint and Office 2007 with no other rollouts planned.
[($42 x 3,000) x (1 +.3(2))] + 20% = $196,560
On a proposal, that comes out to about $20/head to train 10,000 employees. So, if you want to skip all of this and you need a number for the scenario above right now. Then, use that one. Just multiply your total number of employees times $20 and be done with it. The good news is that no one ever believes a number that low, so they’ll usually throw in a little extra. Which is good news because…
We did not factor in multiple locations into this equation. Typically, travel is another line item in the budget, and we all know that travel expenses can kill you. For the vendors part, just make sure you get an all-inclusive rate (seriously, who wants to deal with expense reports and receipts from these guys?) and write into the contract that you are not paying for the time it takes the presenter to travel to and from the event. You give them your budget and then agree with them on what they can deliver for that price keeping in mind that the more locations you add, the more likely you will have to go with a larger firm that has local offices. Now, for that price, you’re stuck with canned content (not customized to your business needs), fewer participants because these classes run all day and may even be delivered off-site, as well an inconsistent user experience based on the as fact that you have multiple presenters.
On the other hand, if you go for a highly customized training program, then you need to factor in another $2500 per week for each week that you or someone like you is going to have to spend out on the road. A successful training program means that you don’t send the vendor in to do your dirty work for you. They are just the talent, but you are the one who needs to answer the tough questions from the users and hear firsthand their frustrations and celebrations. I typically suggest delivering the content twice for each off-site facility with 300 or more affected users. You can minimize expense by traveling to multiple cities in one week, so if you have two locations you want to travel to, then estimate two weeks of travel or an additional $5,000. It seems trivial but by the end of the year, most people realize that they didn’t budget enough on this line item.
We also didn't factor in technical training. The only formula I have for this is that you're going to spend as much to train your IT department and support staff on the tools as you spent on your end users. That might sound like an exageration, but you know that I'm right. Any experienced project manager knows to pad whatever number you come up with, so this is as good of an excuse as any to take the results of my formula and double it. See for yourself, I bet this still came in lower than everyone expected.
So, how much is training going to cost this year?
[($37 + catering cost/head) x .3(total # of employees affected) x (1 +.3(# of additional tools)) + analysis + travel] x 2 = training budget for the year
In summary, don't expect to spend less than $20/employee for non-technical level training, and no less than $400/head for your support staff. In this example of 10,000 employees, I've assumed an IT staff of 500 people. Return to the top to go back through the scenario - how many will actually attend, number of tools, and level of complexity plus travel costs... or you can just take my word for it. 9/1/2009
As any trainer knows, there is a fine line between consulting and training and every user insists that they are an exception. You can imagine how difficult a one-on-one training model is to sustain, so concepts are typically broken down in a number of different ways - skill level, business process, etc.
Add to that the fact that no one ever has time for training, and many users are resistant to the change that SharePoint brings. So, you may design a training program that builds on itself. In the first class, users could learn the difference between publishing and collaboration templates, then you can add library design and security models, followed by publishing concepts. For people coming from html pages and shared drives, SharePoint training is a lot of information designed to get people away from tools used in the past to share and surface information to different audiences. It's not just teaching them the steps, it's teaching them business process improvements. More and more, we are seeing that a good SharePoint trainer is a good Business Analyst.
I've made the comparison that SharePoint training is like trying to teach someone to be a good parent. Everyone is going to manage their site differently based on the needs and personalities in their group. As a trainer, I can teach you not to shake the baby, how to change a diaper, and what the symptoms of serious childhood diseases are that require immediate medical attention, but in the end, it is up to you whether or not you participate in school activities, help your child with their homework, and start saving for their college fund. I think this helps to explain the passion that people who work with this technology have for SharePoint. Every site, by design, is deeply personal and collection administrators have the power to create a very user-friendly tool. For any user who claims that SharePoint is not intuitive, I blame the bad site administrator who didn't raise the child site right.
So, we make training mandatory and we teach them not to use SharePoint Designer, how to change their default views, and when to send tickets to the service desk. We show them the steps to manage a new site, but the reality is that things are going to come up that we might not have mentioned in class. People are going to need support beyond training and if you were a good, kind teacher, then people are going to want to confide in you and ask you for help. But those situations turn into a lot of consulting and less training for others. The time you need to spend developing new content to keep up with the skill level of your users is perpetually spent supporting new users. In the industry, it is often referred to as burn out, but trainers rarely leave positions where they are teaching, they typically leave because they have been relegated to phone support.
When designing your training plan, make sure that you account for one-on-one support. A good training class is just the beginning. Even after the Sermon on The Mount, after everyone was fed and many were in awe at what they'd just heard, the first thing that Jesus encounters is a leper asking to be healed. As instructors, we have to design content for the masses, but don't fool yourself into believing that any training class is going to be good enough to account for every situation. Who is supporting you? Are people allowed to bypass training all together and just speak directly to you? If so, then you will soon find yourself in a one-on-one training model handling only the special circumstances. Who is taking care of the 5,000 while you do that?
If you fail to plan for what happens after class, your training plan will fail. Make sure that you are not the only person that your users feel comfortable confiding in. Make sure that you are not the only expert. And NEVER, EVER put your email and phone extension on a slide presentation. EVER. Refer the users to their support model to get help after class. If you love your job, then remember your place. If you love the one-on-one problem resolution, then professionally develop yourself into a BA role. Trainers are meant to be on stage to a faceless multitude. If that's why you love training, then make sure that the job you do reflects your unique skillset. A lot of people are good in small groups, but your company needs you because you excel in front of a crowd.
And I don't want to hear any whining about the skillset of the support model either. You're a trainer for Chris' sake! Teach them! That should have been the first step in your training plan. 8/16/2009
Just like the company takes holidays every year and no one is expected to come into the office and work; set aside five days every year when everyone in the company is expected to be away from their desk so they can participate in a training class. Like in-service days for teachers or safety stand downs in the US Marine Corps, corporations need to understand that unless work stops, then no one is ever going to feel like they have time for training. So, pair an OSHA day in your manufacturing plants with an ergonomics day in your corporate office. Work with local training partners to provide off-site software training classes on the same day in an effort to accommodate all your administrative professionals at once.
So many companies have mandatory training policies that say that every employee is supposed to complete a certain number of hours of training each year and then they put production and sales goals in direct opposition by demanding that people work longer hours to make their quotas. Do not set your people up for failure by wasting money on training programs that you don’t mean. Take a good hard look at your training strategy and see if you aren’t holding organizational development classes that no one is attending because your middle management isn't making employees feel like it's okay to go. Why do you think Lunch and Learns have become so popular? And by the way, how come it’s okay for us to expect people to work through lunch now? In my opinion, what a company really needs to make their people more productive is mandatory lunches (and possibly nap time), but we'll start small with five training days each year.
When your people do put their foot down and insist that they need to be in a training class, don’t be the passive-aggressive boss that pages them every five minutes saying that you forgot they were in training today. Instead, be the boss that tells your administrative professional to take at least one day while you’re on vacation to attend on off-site training class. Work your way up to attending a class on productivity and time management with them to maximize the benefit of the message. I hear it all the time from users that the tips would be more effective if their boss would do it too. Better yet, attend a SharePoint Boot Camp together.
I am excited to see the increasing popularity of the boot camp concept. Take a couple of consecutive days to teach all the concepts in an application instead of dragging the details out over months of fundamentals, intermediate, and advanced courses. I remember when I worked for an open-enrollment, single application training company and my users would always be upset to find out that they had signed up for the wrong class. They came to the intermediate class to learn something that was taught in the advanced class or worse, based on what they were trying to do, they really needed a course on databases and not one on spreadsheets. They were upset because it took them months to convince their boss to come to training and now they weren’t even going to get what they came for. Over the years, people who went to training decided that there was little value in attending.
So, when employees aren’t attending the training that is being offered, the answer isn’t to fire the corporate trainer and turn the training room into a conference room. The answer is to make an organizational commitment to a well-balanced list of offerings that combines custom, scenario-based and hands-on training methods. If you’re going to take a whole day to train them, then you better teach them an end-to-end solution or workflow and not just focus on one application. Teach them how to create a meeting in Outlook, how to connect it to a SharePoint Meeting Workspace, and how to conduct the Live Meeting. Don't just show them Outlook - it's not a total solution to their meeting problem.
Lastly, we have got to collectively decide that we are going to break the cycle of making people figure things out on their own. If you want to retain talent and increase job satisfaction, then tuition reimbursement and paying for technology certifications is only one piece of the puzzle. Most companies stopped those programs when they saw good people come in for that benefit alone and then leave within one year of receiving their diploma or certificate. In order to make those programs succeed, you must balance them with a number of knowledge management strategies. Why would they want to stay with a company that trains them and then doesn’t allow them to use their new skills? Time their education with other corporate initiatives so that training is relevant and just in time. Work with your IT Department and Law Organization to roll out a communication plan in tandem with training so that it is clear to people that they are using SharePoint as part of your SOX Compliance efforts. Don’t just let it show up on their desk one day without telling them why, and don’t expect them to use it if you never tell them that it’s there. That's the problem with a web-based application - no one knows how to open it. Don't assume that your users know anything if you've told them nothing. Stop making them figure it out on their own!
One of the easiest ways to train your users is to make sure that they are using the same software at home as they are at work. I am disappointed at how many people in an enterprise don’t even know about the Microsoft Home Use program that allows employees to purchase software to download and use at home for $10. Why? Because their help desk doesn’t want to be called on to help people install the product at home. Or worse, IT put the information in an e-mail to people who are used to deleting any message that comes in from any departmental address like IT, HR, or Wellness. Why? Because they have a mailbox size limitation and they have to trim the fat to keep their head above water every single day. Because you never taught them what technologies were there to replace attachments in email!
What I’m saying is, don’t just limit the size of their Inbox without teaching them how to use SharePoint and encouraging them to use new tools in MOSS 2007 like blogs and wikis. Set aside time for training and walk the walk by letting employees know that even the CIO is in an executive boardroom on the top floor learning about blogs today. Ask your trainers how to get it done and put it in next year’s budget. You’ll get it back in your bottom line by increasing production and reducing employee turnover. I promise. 7/30/2009
Listen to the podcast here.
In my train-the-trainer course, I teach people how to connect with an audience, control a crowd, and motivate the group to make an immediate and permanent change in their behavior. My favorite way to connect with an audience is to use analogy. In this example, I use something that isn't technical like doing the laundry to introduce SharePoint concepts to users for the first time. I've heard some people say that concepts like content types should not even be mentioned to the end user but since my audience of end users includes site administrators or people who may one day become a site administrator, I don't ever shy away from teaching people new vocabulary. In the long run, it will only help to empower the users to talk to the technicians and support staff using the same language. If they need a new content type added, they need to be able to say that to someone who can show them the steps. So, for me, I absolutely think that people need to know the right terms for the technology and I've had a lot of success with audiences using analogy to teach them new words.
This analogy is used as the outline for a two-hour hands-on learning class to teach site administrators how to create a library, add content types, add metadata, and create custom views in a web part. In this example, the concept of document retention is new to the users, so content types are a requirement for them (and have already been pre-defined).
1. Site collection – Think of a site collection like your house,
2. Libraries – and libraries are similar to the rooms in that house. Even if the room is a mess and we can’t find anything in it, we know that this shirt that we found in the living room belongs to our son, and so we put it in his room. Ownership is a logical place to begin classifying something, and
3. Content types – content types are all the things in your house. I’m using the term ‘shirt’ as an example of a content type and my son’s room as an example of a library, but there are other rooms (or other libraries) and many other things (or content types) in your house that you put in each of those rooms – things like electronics, lamps, chairs, dishes; even pens. Do you see how giving a group of items a name like ‘shirt’ doesn’t mean that there is only one room in the house to put it in? I know it’s my son’s shirt, but is it clean or dirty? Does that piece of information about the item change where I need to store it? So, if ownership and a content type aren’t good enough to decide where this one shirt goes in the house, then I’m going to need more information.
4. Metadata – That’s why we need metadata. Metadata is how you differentiate between the same type of thing. This not only allows us to decide which library to put a document in, but it also helps us to quickly scan through each room in the house to find just what we’re looking for. For example, dirty shirts, and if your goal is to do laundry, then you may also want to separate dirty shirts by color or style. Depending on the age of your son, you may not be so inclined to do his laundry, so metadata may even define workflow. Who washes this dirty shirt?
5. Web parts – For this exercise, let's assume that you want to find all the dirty, dark-colored T-shirts in the house. If this is a search you do often – going into each room of the house looking in various places where dirty shirts could be hiding, then you’re going to appreciate the concept of a web part. Imagine if you could hone in on all the dirty dark-colored shirts in the house without asking for anyone’s cooperation to SORT their laundry for you. Metadata makes it possible to filter out all the stuff we’re looking for and show it to you in a web part. They can keep it wherever they want to in the house (so, you may know about a dirty shirt in his locker at school but you’re web part can’t get it for you if it’s not in the house). Still, this is pretty powerful stuff. We’re saying that if all the shirts in the house have metadata associated with them, then they cannot hide from you.
You think that’s great? Consider this. If you classify all the documents in your site collection, you'll be able to check to see if you already have a clean, blue shirt before going out and buying a new one. If people are classifying their content, then it is not only easier to find what they are looking for but to make better decisions about the data they have. Using content types and metadata in addition to libraries and web parts allows you to be confident that you have uncovered all the documents you are looking for.
And there’s one more way that corporate documents are a lot like T-shirts in your house – trying to get your son to voluntarily throw away one of their favorites away is impossible. It’s not always the case that whoever owns the shirt is in charge of how long it is kept. Moms work like document controllers to go through the house and get rid of shirts that have outlived their usefulness or shame the entire family each time they are worn out in public. In the same way, libraries and content types in the Records Center allow your company to be in compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. These retention rules happen behind the scenes to make sure that certain documents are kept as long as required and no document is kept too long. While you may disagree that your tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt is a permanent legacy of your glory days, it doesn’t make sense to keep that old shirt in search results. It’s like the shirt in the drawer that even when all other shirts are dirty, you still won’t wear it. Let it go.
If you are focusing on content management during your SharePoint implementation then remember that you are requiring everyone to change the way they are currently storing and retaining documents. Communicate the benefits and remember to use analogies like these when introducing new terms to your users.
For more SharePoint training tips and tricks, please subscribe to this blog and follow officeovereasy on Twitter. 7/1/2009
Here's what I came up with after reading Lorelle VanFossen's article titled, "Writing a Blog Disclaimer."
By reading this blog, you agree that Tiffany Songvilay is a passionate and opinionated woman and so must also agree not to hold her libel for what is said or displayed in posts and comments on volitionservices.com. The content of her Office Over Easy blog is sage advice and wisdom fresh from Tiffany’s vivid imagination of what a perfect world looks like, but it should in no way be used as an unsolicited expert opinion that dictates how you should run your business. Any conversations that happen within the comments of this space should not be construed by readers as a consulting service. Should you use advice, tips, techniques or recommendations mentioned in this blog, you acknowledge that Tiffany Songvilay is not to be held responsible for any injury that you may incur as a result, but just in case a reader still wants to take legal action against the author, then you will be happy to know that she is willing to pay the offended parties damages up to the amount of $0.01 while encouraging you not to spend it all in one place.
True, many people float around Tiffany as fans of her eccentric personality and illegible autograph (heretofore referred to as 'minions'), but there is no possible chance that anything she says is a reflection of any employer, client, volunteer group, membership organization, church, or other agency which she might be seen to represent and in no way reflects their policies, practices, or messaging. Sadly, no one pays Tiffany to write this blog and the more you read it, the more you’ll understand why. Still, even when ranting, Tiffany would never intentionally malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, software product, technology, banshee, vampire, goddess or individual.
It drives her crazy to admit it but even Tiffany makes mistakes, so please don't hesitate to contact her at tiffany@officeovereasy.com if you find any broken links or information that was misquoted or should be updated. Keep in mind that as technology and tools change, so will the relevance of this content. Sometimes people move stuff around or delete things that they said before, sites get hacked and things pop up that might not be suitable for work or around small humans, so remember that the internet is a crazy place and you really should be very careful what you click on. Follow hyperlinks from this site at your own risk and don't be disappointed if they don't go anywhere anymore. Take it as a sign that you really shouldn't be reading this when you're supposed to be working anyway.
While she wishes that you were a better writer too, this content is the copyright of Tiffany Songvilay and you are not allowed to reuse any portion of it and pass it off as your own. In kind, any request to reprint or translate blog entries or comments should be directed to her at the email address referenced above. While this disclaimer is not an express written consent to reuse an entire blog post, four lines of content at a time may be quoted by other bloggers in their own posts on similar topics as long as proper credit is given to the original author and a hyperlink back to the original post is included for context. This blog is written and published in the United States of America and while the author is a little kinky, she is not bound to government, religious, or other laws from the reader’s country of origin, but she is humbled that you are enjoying her writing from so far away.
Thank you all for reading. Now, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. 6/16/2009
Everything I needed to know about training, I learned in stand-up comedy.
Just because it's funny to you doesn't mean it's gonna kill
The only way to make training perfect is to deliver it, evaluate it, and rework it. You can't make it perfect before you deliver it because training is always developed based on what we want the users to know and not on what the users need.
Starting out in comedy means that you have to do open mics. The majority of your audience at that stage in your content development is other comics. The mistake a lot of newcomers make is that they want desperately to make someone (anyone!) laugh, so they start writing material that other comics will think is funny instead of using the time for what it is - experience delivering and perfecting the joke. Open mics are peer reviews and just like in training, the best compliment is when a peer, another presenter, comes up afterwards, shakes your hand and tells you one of your bits was good.
Many times trainers develop content that is interesting to them and because we've been in the technology longer than our end users, the things we like are well beyond the level of what our users need. Or worse, they deliver content to impress their boss and show everyone in the audience how much they know. If you get comments like 'slow down,' 'I should have been in a more basic class,' or 'this was way over my head,' then you failed. Stop criticising the audience and start looking at your training objectives. In the end, your users are just trying to get through their day. Go for the most common objectives and resist the urge to write extreme content.
Starving artists want it more
If you have another job, you will never be taken seriously as a stand-up comedian and it will be a lot harder for you to get work as a performer. Like any other small business, you are selling your product and you have to do that during business hours. You have to be willing to travel to some horrible places for a gig and you have to give yourself the time to write new material. In the same way, the people who are delivering training for you must be out there in front of people all the time. You cannot expect them to be successful as a trainer if you don't think it's a real job for them and you insist that they must work on other projects while trying to develop content.
In the same way, it is a special kind of person who opts for this lifestyle. Comedy doesn't pay particularly well when it pays at all just like training reaps very few professional rewards. Trainers are rarely promoted or even consulted when project teams are making decisions regarding the budget for a roll out. If money was set aside for training, the trainer isn't the one deciding how to spend it. Even though they are expected to train everyone all by themselves for nothing more than the cost of their salary, like any artist, they do it because they love it.
Comedy defensive driving isn't really that funny
Users have an expectation coming into training that they are going to learn how to do something that will make a difference in their day-to-day office life just like audiences come to a comedy show expecting to laugh. If you don't deliver on their expectations, then they have every right to claim it was a waste of their time and money. Think long and hard before you make training required.
Required training is like punishing someone for a speeding ticket. No matter how good you make it, people still don't want to be there and probably don't think that they did anything wrong to begin with. You can't target a required audience. Respect that and make it as short and painless as possible. If you can make it funny, that helps but it's still not going to please everyone until it's over.
Never break character
Don't bring bitterness into the classroom or allow a heckler to steal the show. It is okay to call the audience out for not laughing or thinking that something you just showed them is really cool, but don't ever derail your message by acting like you don't buy into the joke. Good presenters need to be witty and know the content well enough that they can ad lib to answer a user question. Either that, or they need to be so obviously new that the audience is rooting for them.
New trainers are great for a fundamental class because they will go slow which is the pace that first-timers need. Don't hesitate to put someone in front of an audience who doesn't have a lot of experience presenting because a targeted audience will identify with them. However, in an open enrollment situation where anyone could be in the audience, you need a seasoned pro up there who is not afraid to take a critical question offline. Whatever your style is, commit to it and don't be afraid to control the crowd. Training is a safe place for unhappy people to test the organization's commitment to change. Deliver relevant content and stand by the corporate objectives. 5/25/2009
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Training mediums include:
Training moment/tip of the day – incorporate into your weekly team meeting. Ask before each meeting if anyone learned anything that they thought was neat that week about the new technology that they’d like to share with the group. Just in case, have something on hand to share with the group.
Hands-on – too often, this is the only form of training that employees think will be effective and too much money is spent developing courses or sending people out to this type of training. Just as effective is an online seminar where attendees can practice on another screen as they are being taught. Training doesn’t mean that people have to leave their PC unless they are in a job role where they will be constantly interrupted.
Tip sheet – this is just as effective as hands-on training if you follow up a demo with a tip sheet with step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish the tasks performed. It allows you to cover more material in less time and people only follow up with the tips that were the most relevant to them. For more information on different types of training and the effort involved to hire someone to develop each one, refer to this archived blog entry on the ROI of tip sheets, scripted hands-off demos, CBT’s, and training manuals. Define training objectives and don’t focus all your money on training one single department. Instead, try to get all your end users to a baseline of competency.
Audiences and how they learn
Admin pros = hands-on learning, tip sheet or training manual
Don’t hesitate to customize existing training courses from other companies to suit their needs. This is the audience that doesn’t call the service desk, don’t feel they have the time to do CBT’s, and they need the time and attention of a live person to feel as if they have been trained. The good news is that they typically learn quickly – once they watch it and do it and take notes, they are good to go. If your business relies on administrative professionals, then hands-on learning is going to be expensive but it will be worth it.
SharePoint Admin = hands-on learning
Don’t train all admins on SharePoint administration – only the ones who will be engaged as a SharePoint administrator. This audience will also include IT people. Chances are you are going to have to develop custom training if you branded your environment or incorporated third-party web parts. Take this audience through the ‘why’ the company is transitioning to new technology as much as the steps to take to create and maintain a site. Have a style guide ready. Unless their entire job is going to be site administration, do not give them all the possible ways to do something. Teach them the one right way that you want them to create a library (metadata not folders, for example). Show them lots of examples and give them a sandbox they can continue to use after the event to test new concepts and web parts prior to rolling out to their own site.
Support = people who answer a lot of questions that people ask them. May not be considered ‘help desk.’ These are typically your tech savvy individuals, business analysts, consultants, and subject matter experts.
Empower this group via relationship learning. You can’t take them away from their job for an entire day because too many people rely on them, but you can publish blogs, create a best practices wiki, and give them access to add issues to an FAQ list. If you have to meet with them, then break up six hours of content over three days - two hours at a time. Mornings are better and spread it over two or three days – not two or three weeks. Follow up with a reference book with a good index.
By business process – teach one thing to the entire group (ex., audit, accounting) – here’s the integration point with your specific software. Pick one task, one activity – get the whole group together. You have to take the entire group offline to do this, so it’s a tough buy in. CBT and Video work well in this space. Process groups typically have to take other required CBT’s. Spend the money to customize and make as relevant and interactive as possible. Work with vendors to get emulators.
Business Analysts – They should attend everything but they learn best from documentation. Books are best for them. Don’t write a book for them – it costs too much money and takes too long to do that. Work with your book vendor and Microsoft rep to find a book that’s already out there.
IT – they write books but not a good audience for books. They have the books on their shelf but they are just using as reference. They learn socially. Give them a list of resource links on the internet and distribute to them as an RSS feed or Summary Links web part grouped by topic. MSDN subscriptions are not wasted on this group and they should be encouraged to join the SharePoint Twitter community. Send them to the five-day long boot camps and SharePoint conferences. It’s worth it.
Project Managers – they want their whole project team to be there and they want a discussion, not training. They love meetings. Don’t force a project management group into hands-on learning. Seminar-style works well. Engage them in the solution. Here’s what we think, will that work for your group? Gives you an opportunity to find integration points. Not just IT project teams – all project teams are focused on one task, so the rest of the implementation doesn’t matter to them. Think lean, don’t waste their time. Make the 6 hr course into 90 min PowerPoint presentation and be prepared to take notes and come away with challenges that they need solutions to.
Executives – one-on-one – 15-20 mins in their office, at their desk. Teach them how to approve a workflow. Admin sends it, Executive gets the email, clicks on the link, opens the document, then approves – all you need to teach them is where to click to approve. This is very resource consuming but very important because you have to get their buy in – so they can go to their managers and be a champion. Hands-on in tandem with their admin is the only way you are going to reach this audience. 5/17/2009This week, Laura Rogers and I worked on our slide presentation for SPTechCon in Boston. A popular topic for my clients this year is Office 2007 integration with SharePoint and I asked Laura a few months ago if she would like to co-present this topic with me. What we both notice is that Office rollouts are typically treated separately from SharePoint deployments usually because IT departments have different project teams for servers and clients. This unfortunately results in a lack of training for end users on the fact that Office and SharePoint were literally made for each other.
- Look across multiple SharePoint libraries for documents that are checked out to me
- Do a topic search across multiple RSS feeds
Skip to the next section if you really don't care why you would or wouldn't promote these activities in your company and just want to know how to do it.
Let's start by first understanding the similarities and differences between Connect to Outlook and View RSS Feed. No matter what library or list view you are in, when you click Actions-Connect to Outlook or Actions-View RSS Feed, you are getting all the documents from the allitems.aspx page. No wonder no one is telling you about this feature! Imagine the space you are taking up on your client PC to house thousands of documents in a team collaboration library.
Copies of SharePoint documents are stored in an Outlook .pst folder, so if you are in a company that does not allow you to use .pst's, then you are out of luck with the offline capability of connecting SharePoint lists and libraries to Outlook and for good reason - there is no way to see all the connections to Outlook from a SharePoint site. That means that in a content management scenario, this can be a real nightmare as you now have multiple copies of documents in local client .pst folders.
So why would I even bring it up? Because this is a search solution that increases user adoption of SharePoint and it is a good fit for companies who are not locked down by regulatory restrictions. If you are using collaboration sites with smaller numbers of files inside of document libraries or you lost the metadata versus folders battle, then this is a great way to show people how to interact with files on SharePoint sites without having to leave Outlook. And don't forget that even though multiple folders apear inside of Outlook, only one SharePoint lists .pst is created to house them all, so if you are successfully managing .pst files through corporate policies, default location of .pst's, and rights management, then Connect to Outlook is still a great tool to increase user productivity.
However, if .pst's are never an option for you, then you could still use the RSS feed from the library to house links to those documents within the Outlook client. If you do not write custom feeds for the libraries, then you will only get the filename with a link to the document which won't seem as relevant in this scenario but still something to think about as you try to find search solutions for users as the number of documents in SharePoint increases. Remember too that there is a separate RSS feed for each library view (modify this view - click the RSS button) which allows users to only bring over links to documents that are relevant to them.
This is a big deal for users who spend a lot of time accessing their email from Outlook Web Access via mobile devices because Outlook RSS Feeds are viewable in OWA. That means that they can get to SharePoint documents without having to navigate through the mobile page of the SharePoint site. Do you hear that? It's the sound of baby cherubs singing.
How to create a Search Folder in Outlook
There are plenty of instructions on how to connect to Outlook or add an RSS feed already on the internet but I couldn't find anything online that specifically talked about how to create a search folder for RSS Feeds or SharePoint lists. Feel free to link to your own article in the comments of this post if I missed one.
Search SharePoint Lists
- Connect your SharePoint libraries to Outlook.
- In Outlook, under SharePoint lists, right click on Search Folders, New Search Folder, then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the list and click Create a custom Search Folder. Pay attention to where you are in your Outlook navigation - there is a separate list of Search Folders included in the SharePoint lists .pst. Remember that Search Folders are accessible from Outlook Web Access but .pst's are not, so you cannot create a search folder for a .pst in your Exchange folder.
- Click Choose and name the search 'Checked out to Me,' then click Criteria.
- Go to the Advanced Tab and click on Field. Hover over All Document Fields and click Checked out to.
- Condition contains your first or last name. Make sure it is consistent with how your name is listed on the SharePoint site.
- Click Add to List, then OK. OK. OK.
- To test, check out a document from one of the connected lists then click Send/Receive in Outlook. Pretty cool, huh?
Go back and look at that list of Document Fields and imagine the possibilities of using Outlook as a scope search on libraries across multiple SharePoint collections. This can be a great interim solution after enterprise search goes live but before you have time to create specific scopes or it can be a permanent IT timesaver by eliminating the need to write custom scopes for smaller groups. By showing people how to use this functionality, they can create their own search portal and the best part is that it reduces the calls on the SharePoint server and pushes search back down to the desktop. Users love fast search that only return relevant results.
Search RSS Feeds
- Add RSS feeds to Outlook - even if you are not using the SharePoint library scenario, this is a great way to search across multiple SharePoint blog or news feeds for one topic like "InfoPath."
- Create a new custom search folder. Click Choose and Browse - make sure that only RSS Feeds is checked. Click OK.
- Name the folder 'InfoPath' and click Criteria.
- Search for word InfoPath in subject field and message body. Click OK. OK. OK.
These two scenarios show you the importance of training users on business scenarios that effect their day-to-day work and not just making them click through the new features of a product. Search folders have been around since Outlook 2003, so this is not a new concept but with the addition of RSS Feeds and the ability to connect SharePoint libraries to Outlook 2007, you can see the necessity of making sure that use cases are developed and tested around SharePoint and Office integration points. 5/7/2009Mike Gannotti and I have both changed our blogs recently and I wanted to make sure that I brought a video that we did together over from the archive. InfoPath is still the number one search item that brings people to my blog by simply answering the question, "What does InfoPath do?" Gannotti asked me to join him in his ongoing Backseat Driving series to answer that question as well as walk people through how to publish an InfoPath form to a SharePoint Forms library and program the submit button. Click here to watch the video co-starring Max and Sammy. 4/28/2009
When I was on the Office Tips and Tricks team at Microsoft, Evan Archilla wrote a script for us to use when explaining The Ribbon to users. In my experience, users respond positively once you explain why Microsoft changed the familiar user interface of menus and toolbars and replaced it with the fluent user interface of The Ribbon.
Here's the script:
In previous releases of Microsoft Office, people interacted with the applications through a system of menus, toolbars, task panes, and dialog boxes. While this system successfully provided access to a wide variety of features, it became increasingly challenging to add capabilities in a way that made it easy for people to take advantage of them. Finding and learning about new features took more time and effort than many people were willing to give. Many information workers found themselves using outdated and inefficient processes for completing tasks or sacrificing their document potential altogether.
For example, the original Microsoft Word 1.0 contained 50 menu items. In contrast, Word 2003 contained almost 300 menu items. Likewise, Word 1.0 shipped with 100 commands. Word 2003 released with more than 1,500 commands. Making these advanced features easier to find and use was a key goal in the design of the 2007 release.
That last paragraph is the key - 1500 commands! I like to add some proof to this message by asking the audience if they knew that they had the ability to save document versions in previous versions of Word. Of course, this functionality is not in Office 2007 and users rely on SharePoint to version their documents but it's a great way to prove to your users that menus and toolbars were hiding features from them. If you're doing a demo, then show them where Table of Contents and Watermarks are in Word 2007 - two other features that few users knew how to do in previous versions but they've been there the whole time. In just a few minutes at your next staff meeting, you can turn around people's perceptions of The Ribbon. Rejoice at the fact that Header and Footer is finally back on the Insert tab and use this chance to remind them how cool Live Preview is. Right click on any command and add it to the Quick Access Toolbar - I'm surprised at how many new Office 2007 users haven't added any buttons to the one toolbar they do have.
Your power users will be the most frustrated since they're the people who have had the menus and toolbars memorized the longest. Direct them to the command reference guides at office.microsoft.com. These allow users to click in an Office 2003 screen on the button they want. Then, the screen fades to an Office 2007 screen and highlights where the button is on the ribbon. Try it! What I'm trying to say is that The Ribbon is such a silly excuse to avoid deploying Office 2007 and it's not going to take millions of dollars to train everyone. |
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