Training your team: what to get right first

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. If you only fix one thing about training your team this quarter, make it the first item below.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Start here

A tool nobody can use is not a tool. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Then this

Record the walkthrough so new staff can catch up. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Eventually

Training beats documentation people never open. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

What this looks like day to day

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. 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 you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.