What to ask your agency about training your team

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on training your team, these questions are worth asking early.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

A tool nobody can use is not a tool. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Training beats documentation people never open. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• A tool nobody can use is not a tool — 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.