Post Mortem Project Learning Opportunities: Lessons from the rear view mirror

The challenge? Train a large number of people (1500) spread across the country in a new customer initiative. The challenge to the challenge? The same as every project-cost! Face to face training would take people out of their stores, thereby decreasing interaction with the customers or resulting in only training half the number of employees reaching customers because the other half was needed to ensure customer needs were met during the training. Add to that the costs of renting a facility, paying the trainer, ensuring all pre-work was completed so that the participants wouldn’t be lost with the material to be covered in a short amount of time and it quickly snowballed into a budgetary nightmare. But then the idea was posed to offer the training virtually-allowing participants the ability to participate from their stores, taking only a small part of the day to devote to learning and then immediately applying the practices learned. In addition, travel expenses for the trainer, rental fees for the facilities, and loss of revenue during training all became non-issues. And in fact, adoption would rise as the training would be available to a wider audience ensuring that all members of the organization would be exposed to the learning opportunity and be able to implement new practices as a team.

Overall, the project was wildly successful. Rather than training the minimum of 1500, we trained well over 3000. The new initiatives in customer service were adopted and implemented quickly, but more than that, participants had an opportunity to learn and apply over and over again as the training was completed over weeks rather than over hours. This lead to a greater feeling of success amongst the participants and a renewed interest in training and adapting as a whole.

When I think on the success of this project, there are many factors that come into play. First and foremost, the process did not happen overnight. There were long hours spent researching strategies and methods, finding the best tools to deploy training and the right methods to ensure understanding and application. In addition, time was spent learning about the end user. The challenges faced on a daily basis that had to be overcome before the new initiative could begin to even be practiced, let alone adopted. And of course, stakeholders across the company had to be willing to take a risk on a new endeavor, one that was not tried nor yet proven in the field. Communication across the company lead to a large list of concerns and even negativity over the changes being proposed in the delivery and seemingly “hands off” approach. As a result, pilots were held. Test runs were completed in the short term, and lessons learned were implemented into the larger plan. The pilots yielded valuable data as to length of webinar, information shared, capabilities of the chosen platform with varied numbers of participants. But the overall deciding factor was in the feedback from the participants, and the data showing the initiatives were taking hold where they were being trained.

As with any project, we know that there remains a look in the rearview mirror, seeing where we’ve been. With knowledge in hand post-deployment, some of these issues come to light in ways that hadn’t before. For example, the lack of attention paid to accommodations for out of country participants within the platform. Another challenge was that while business is conducted the same way across the system, there are certain societal constructs and cultural practices that are incompatible with the system as a whole. With hindsight, we can see that adjustments could have been made to ensure the training was applicable to all parties at all times and in all ways by setting up regional opportunities for training. Another issue was long term adoption. Over the course of the five weeks of training we saw great results, but within twenty or so weeks post training, those results were tapering quickly. Follow ups to reinforce practices and to correct errors within the processes would have been valuable adds to ensure long term success.

As we prepare for another virtual training deployment, all of these factors and more have been considered in the process. However, I am quite certain that post-project we will still be able to identify growth opportunities and ways to improve upon the project. In fact, I hope we never stop looking for ways to improve and identifying new solutions and adaptations to make learning and training more accessible to wider audiences.