How to get training your team right
The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. The short answer to training your team is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
The reason this keeps coming up
A tool nobody can use is not a tool. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Record the walkthrough so new staff can catch up
- Training beats documentation people never open
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Training beats documentation people never open. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
What to do next
How to tell if yours is fine
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
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.