A short guide to training your team

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Everything we would tell a client about training your team in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Why it matters

A tool nobody can use is not a tool. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

How to approach it

Record the walkthrough so new staff can catch up. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Common failure modes

Training beats documentation people never open. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

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
• Training beats documentation people never open — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.