Before you invest in training your team

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Before you spend anything on training your team, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• A tool nobody can use is not a tool
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Where it usually goes wrong

Record the walkthrough so new staff can catch up. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Training beats documentation people never open. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

In practice

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about training your team before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Record the walkthrough so new staff can catch up — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.