Training your team: the questions we get asked most

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. The questions about training your team that come up most often on our calls.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Do we need to care about this?

A tool nobody can use is not a tool. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

How do we know it is working?

Training beats documentation people never open. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The short version

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. 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

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.