Our product training materials had fallen behind as we had delivered so much new functionality in the last release in particular and allied to that our thinking on how to manage projects with SharePoint has evolved with so many customer experiences and projects. So we decided that in July (usually a quiet Summer month) that we would catch up. I volunteered to help out as I had lots of ideas. In the end a few key members of our team decided to take vacation (as you would in the Summer!) and thus the project suddenly got bigger!! I have to say that I was thrilled by the time we got the project finished. The content will be super useful - but boy was it a work load!
Our first decision was what level to pitch the training at. In keeping with the "line" thinking at BrightWork - we decided that not all people need all training as they know SharePoint and Project Management pretty well. So they were more to the "left" of our traditional line where a light touch was important. On the other side of the training line - some people needed lots of training as they are new to SharePoint and their project management thinking is not as evolved. So we decided to deliver a "Short Course" for those who want a quick start. We then divided the longer training into the four main project management roles: (i) Team Member, (ii) Project Manager, (iii) Program/Senior Manager and (iv) Project Office Team/Administrators.
Our second decision was what type of content to produce. In the end we decided for each training module that we'd deliver three pieces of training content: (i) a training guide/document; (ii) a training class delivered as a downloadable movie and (iii) a training slide deck. And we chunked the training movie so it could be consumed in smaller chunks (5 to 10 minutes at a time). You can see two screen shots below.
Our third decision was how to deliver the training - as we felt that feature training would be a bit boring but would not have much context for those not thinking project management day in and day out. So we agreed that we'd deliver the training framed as a simple and generic project management process. This way the training hangs together as a story. For those who have a process it would be very easy to understand. For those who did not have a project management process it would be a "freebie" - they could take and reuse any piece of the process that they liked.
Our last decision was where to place these training materials. That decision was easy enough. A few months ago we had revamped our Online Customer Support Center and after the revamp it now included (i) a Demo Center, (ii) a copy of the full Help online, (iii) some extra resources, (iv) more importantly an online forum to ask questions and finally (v) a product and templates downloads area. Adding the training here made it very available to customers. But there was another benefit. When answering online support questions we could answer the question in the forum and link to the relevant section of the online help and also to the relevant portion of the training. All boats were lifted by the new tide.
Back to the point of the article! It was a long time since I had personally been involved in the specification and delivery of training and I had completely forgotten how much work was involved! However as with most hard projects there are rewards. In this case the rewards were many: (i) the project finally ended and I got the free time back!; (ii) I got a chance to "brain dump" lots of experiences into the training to make them widely available and (iii) most importantly our customers have really a really great training resource that is very flexible in how it can be consumed. I am sure these training materials will keep evolving and improving but the Summer effort was worth it!
