Software Upgrade – Training Considerations

Over the many years in the IT training industry, our clients have benefited from using our experience to assist or manage the training work stream for their software upgrades. Be it standard Microsoft Office or bespoke systems, our team of trainers and project managers will ensure the training provided exceeds the expectations and objectives set out.

The purpose of this document is to offer guidance through the task at hand and underline the importance of having an experienced training consultant or partner when upgrading software versions.

Example Upgrade: MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007

Overview:

Ok, so the business and your IT department have decided that upgrading to MS Office 2007 is the way forward. With such a major upgrade, you are wondering how this will affect the business, the users, workloads and general user response to the new system. With respect to the training requirement you want to ensure users daily productivity is not negatively impacted by too much wasted time trying to make sense of the new software.
With the upgrade already costing so much, many companies will refrain from spending too much money on training; if any at all and certainly want to differentiate upgrade training from the normal business as usual cycle of training events.

Is it your intention to offering hands on training for all or some of the employees?

Maybe you are considering short demonstration sessions only for 40 or 50 people at a time run 3 or 4 times a day?

Are you going to train certain key departments first eg Service desk before everyone else?

Are you going to consider creating super users who might help with some of the training themselves by cascading the information to their colleagues?

Are you going to upgrade in a “big bang” approach or gradually department by department.

If you are providing upgrade training, what are your objectives for the training?
Is it to:

Provide users with just enough knowledge to get them through the upgrade without a riot on your hands
To reduce the number of support calls expected to the Service/Help desk
Minimise the impact of everyday business tasks
Provide users with the chance to increase their own skills and possibly cover general training as identified through reviews.
Use the opportunity to identify current skill level and how that can be improved to increase user productivity.

There are many other reasons which could be listed. For many companies, option A and B are the most frequent. They are also the reason why so many upgrades are met with objection and seen as a waste of time, money and resources. The following needs to be considered when deciding on training for the upgrade.

Identifying Training Needs
Course Durations
Course Materials / Support Materials
Go-Live – Floor walking, Helpdesk Assistance

Identifying Training Needs

With many software upgrades, training is often delivered in short sessions whilst the user’s PC is upgraded. This might be ok to give the user some starting point, but does it really help them sufficiently? After the short training session, they return to their desk and find that they are spending hours more on performing routine tasks. This in itself has a cost associated, never mind the time wasted and backlog of work. Also, running the same session for each person might not be useful at all, as shown in the case studies to follow.

User Case Studies

User 1:
If I was a finance analyst and spend 90% of my time in MS Excel, then understanding changes in Word is not worth an hour of my time. I would rather spend more time on Excel. This is where I will benefit from the upgrade and ensure I can continue to perform my tasks and perform them more efficiently.

Although it is not always possible to create a tailored solution for each person or business unit, it is well worth grouping delegates depending on the application usage percentage. For example, ensure Finance users are all upgraded in the same time, therefore training can be tailored for finance users and focus more on the application mostly used, like MS Excel.

User 2:
Most upgrade training sessions training will cover enhanced features of an application, e.g. Excel 2007 PivotTables. If you were an existing user of PivotTables, that would be really useful. If you are not an existing user, you will a) not see the benefit, b) might be completely lost, as you have never used it before, and c) loose interest as the training is focussed on something you never use or need to use.

At Mouse Training, we provide a free Training Needs Analysis to identify what tools you currently use, what tools might be beneficial to you going forward and help you to identify your future training needs. In this scenario, you might also find more benefit in attending a standard course, e.g. Excel Intermediate, to simply enhance your skills.

Whilst these are only recommendations, spending some time with the business to identify requirements will help your staff get the most from an upgrade and minimise the impact on daily tasks.

Course Durations

Users will inevitably take longer at first to complete routine tasks until they are comfortable with the changes. This can be reduced by spending a bit more time on training. The argument against this is that it will cost more money or might slow down the roll-out plan.

OK, although this is true, you have to keep track of the cost and time lost due to lack of knowledge on the new version. Spending just a minute to search for and remember the location of a tool used on an application all adds up in lost working time over a period.

Comparing this to the time spend on training and the cost, it soon negates and repays itself with interest!

At Mouse, we are experts in creating tailored training courses to meet your user’s needs and focussed sessions with the correct content.

It might be a point in time to get a snap shot to see what skills are present in the organization and decide to what extent the upgrade programme would be used as some small part of any attempt to map these results to what the organization needs each team and individual to be ideally capable of achieving.

Course Materials and Support Documents

Remembering every topic covered on a training session is rarely possible. Therefore, having support documents and training materials will be invaluable when users return to their desks. You do not need full 100 page + documents. Providing users with a Quick Reference Guides could be really useful. Short quick steps to commonly used functionality will be more read than long, boring documents.

We have created various Quick Reference Guides for our clients on bespoke and standard applications. If it’s a bespoke system, we can even write custom help files for the application. See our Technical Authoring page

Go-Live Floor walking / Helpdesk Assistance

Go-live date could be as stressful for IT support staff as it is for the users. If you were the helpdesk manager, you will brace yourself for an influx of calls and emails and is of course normal during upgrades. This in itself could affect your service levels of other call types of a more technical nature.

Help desk staff very seldom know how to deal with “How do I…” questions on applications, as they field more technical calls than application usage calls.

At Mouse Training, we have provided help desk managers with extra trainers to assist them with calls during an upgrade to deal with all the application calls and ease the pressure of a software upgrade on help desk staff.

We could also provide on the day floor walking to assist users at their desks with question they might have.

With so much to think of simply from a training perspective, do you have the skills in-house to deal with the training part of an upgrade? If not, why not see how we can assist you in any of the above mentioned areas. Please contact us if you would like to discuss your needs or would like some free advice on managing the training work stream.

Either way even if you want to do the training yourself contact us anyway and we will give you materials to help with the upgrade gratis.