In Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain, we talked about the need to do more with less in this ever-changing volatile environment. That post set the tone for helping your organization achieve a foundation around training and development and ensuring you, as a practitioner, have a seat at the decision-making table. The following model was created to help depict a fast way to roll out training initiatives for your organization.

When you are establishing or developing a training program, your site is most likely in a static or reactive phase. (Being in a reactive phase means that there is no or minimal vision and that resources are inadequate or barely cutting it and content is nonexistent or extremely scattered.)

Step 1. Locate the following information:

a. vision and strategyb. your sites key performance indicators.

Look for poor-performing indicators. At this point, you are looking for quick wins. What areas is your company suffering in based on data? Are any of these in part to human behavior? Can any of these indicators be influenced by development or training? Start here.

A good example of an indicator that you may be able to influence that is tracked due to government requirements, no matter where you work, is safety. Have there been any incidents recently that are trending and seemingly mindless? Mistakes like these usually can be influenced by refreshed and an increased rigor around safety training.

Dont try to do too much at oncegather your list of areas that you can impact and drill down a little further. After looking at your list of priorities, decide:

Who is the biggest customer? This could be an issue that affects the entire facility, or an issue that influences the largest department, or a department with the most money. (We need wins and to team up with those that can make that happen.) When you identify your biggest customer, sit down with them and complete a training analysis or a general interview to understand their pain points and use creativity for how training and can provide a solution.

Once you have narrowed who youre going to help and how you are going to help, you need to pilot and deploy.

After communicating to the stakeholders and the second- and first level-leaders, its time to pilot. We dont want to roll the program out to the entire group without ironing unseen kinks in the program. The best way to do that is to test the program on a smaller group. It is in this phase that you need to get, keep, and build engagement. During the pilot group, its best to get as much communication about the program as you can, and if the audience mentions any outstanding concerns, make sure you close those concerns before you deploy to the larger audience. This smaller pilot group is going to be a part of your success champions, and the goal is to get this group to be your advocate to the larger deployment audience.

Once you have tested your program on your pilot group, its time to deploy. Make sure youre ready; the biggest item here is the metric are we reporting on.

This may seem as if its oversimplifying the issue, but the foundation is clearget buy-in, determine priorities, pilot and deploy, evaluate, and determine next priority. Whats more, always align to strategy.

Read the original:
Operationalizing Training in Manufacturing: Part 2 - ATD