Deliver & evaluate training | best practices – Google Apps for Work User Manual
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Change Management Guide
69
Phase 2: Early Adopter
Deliver & evaluate training | Best practices
Best practices and advice for Early Adopter training:
•
Train your trainers. Give your trainers an opportunity to use the
applications beforehand and deliver practice sessions. While they
may be skilled trainers, they need time to prepare.
•
Test your training. You’re about deliver training to many users. Take
a few minutes to test your set-up. Can you access your demo
account? Do all the trainers have separate or shared accounts?
•
Prepare for local training. This is likely the first time you’re
delivering training at regional or remote offices. Are your webinar
sessions at local-friendly times with international dial-in numbers? Is
the right material translated? See what lessons can be learned for
your regional training during your Global Go-Live.
•
Track attendance and usage. See what percentage of your Early
Adopters joined a webinar or attended a class. Use Google Analytics
to see which of your site pages receive the most and fewest views.
•
Find someone to manage your logistics. Small but important tasks
that make your training work—reserving rooms, sending out training
reminders, and letting the trainers know their training schedule.
Often you can find someone in your organization and local offices
who’s an expert at managing the logistics—an office manager,
executive assistant, HR coordinator, or project manager. Their
assistance can make the training efforts run more smoothly.
Anticipate needs, then test, test, test
Learning from Solarmora, a fictionalized company
The Early Adopter training was going according to
plan. Andy’s Google for Work partner trained the
company’s help desk on the new support
processes. Executives and administrative assistants
who were part of the Early Adopter group also
completed their specialized training.
Finally, all users had the option to complete Gmail
and Calendar eLearning courses. Initially,
completion rates for the courses were low—with
only about 25% of Early Adopters completing these
courses.
Oops! Andy didn’t promote the training as well as
he could have.
A member of the Change Management team
suggested that people were unaware of the training
since the courses were only mentioned once at the
very end of a long email.
The Change Management team brainstormed ways
to promote the eLearning courses: a poster,
another email reminder, and a note about
eLearning in the email signatures of members of
the project team. They decided to implement all
their ideas to see which worked best. With this new
outreach, they saw the completion rate of the
eLearning courses grow to 75% of Early Adopters in
only two weeks.
“When we train the help desk, we try to
ask them questions that the average user
will ask. We sometimes bring a new user
into the class to ask questions. Those
questions are a true example of what
could happen at Go-Live.”
—Jorge Sanchez, Online Services
Coordinator, KIO Networks