Rollout and training
By Redaktion techport.ai, IT-Beratung · Last updated on
Between a configured system and a used system lies the part that project plans budget most tightly. Training is often treated as an appointment: one day, everyone involved, four weeks before go-live. Then daily work begins and half of what was heard is gone, because in the training it had no occasion yet.
A rollout succeeds when people learn exactly when they can apply what they learn, and when someone is reachable afterwards to answer their questions.
How you notice it
- Workarounds appear after go-live because one step is unclear.
- The same question reaches IT thirty times in the first week.
- Training was organised by department although the tasks cut across them.
- Nobody knows how many people actually use the new system.
Why this happens
Training effort is underestimated because it appears in offers as a line with a few days and because it looks like a cost block without a visible result. On top of that comes the timing error: training happens when the system is ready, not when people need it. And training happens on a clean example case while daily work consists of exceptions. What is missing is the connection between what the system can do and what the individual has to do tomorrow morning.
How we go about it
- Plan by role. We structure the introduction by activity rather than by department: who enters orders, who approves, who analyses. Each role gets exactly what it needs, not the complete function overview.
- Practise on your own cases. In training we work with real examples from the company, including the special cases that occur most often in daily work. Participants work in the system themselves rather than watching.
- Train close to go-live. We schedule training so that as few days as possible pass between learning and applying, supplemented by short guides for the screen alongside. For larger groups we train contact people in the departments who can help on the spot.
- Support and measure after go-live. In the first weeks we set up heightened support, collect the most frequent questions and fix their causes. In parallel we measure actual usage and talk to the areas where it does not materialise.
What you gain
- A system that is used after two weeks rather than after six months.
- Fewer requests, because causes get fixed instead of symptoms.
- Solid statements about adoption rather than assumptions.
From our projects
The questions from the first two weeks after go-live are the most valuable feedback of the entire project. Collected and grouped, they typically form five to eight themes that account for the bulk. Almost always a part of them can be resolved by changing a setting, a label or a form rather than by more training. We therefore deliberately plan capacity for adjustments in the first four weeks. The second finding: contact people in the departments reduce the number of requests to IT considerably, not because they know more but because the threshold to ask them is lower.
Häufige Fragen
Are videos and guides enough instead of classroom training?
For simple workflows yes, and they are useful for reference anyway. For anything requiring judgement or driven by special cases, practising together is markedly more effective, because that is where the questions arise that nobody could have written down in advance. A good combination is short classroom sessions for the start and brief guides for daily work.
How do we measure whether an introduction succeeded?
Through usage and effect rather than satisfaction. Useful measures are the share of active users per role, the share of transactions running in the new system rather than the old way, the number of support requests over time, and the business metric that should improve, for example throughput time or error rate.
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Further reading
Back to the field Rollout and Change