Written by Lauren Gelfound, Oracle University Senior Marketing Manager, for Cushing Anderson, Program Vice President & Guest Blogger
The migration to cloud causes enterprises, work
teams and individuals to work differently.
Cloud application typically offers a more
efficient workflow, streamlined access or seamless data integration; however,
the enterprise can only realize those benefits if its employees adopt the new
processes - and that almost always requires new skills.
In a recent blog about why Cloud applications
require training, I described the reasons why training is essential to
experience the the benefits of any new application, cloud or on premise.
Beyond that imperative of training to use an
application, the impacted roles must adopt the new process and avoid falling
back on old ways of doing business.
The goal of almost all business related training
isn't simply to transfer skills or knowledge, but rather to get the learner to
use that knowledge to adopt the new process or tool.
But adopting new processes
is at its core, a change management exercise.
Cloud user training reinforces the critical elements
of change management to support adoption. These elements include:
The benefits to the enterprise and specific
audiences. Change management
professionals maintain that the most effective way to create organizational
change is to help the effected organization understand the benefits of the new
approach. Understanding the expected vision helps create shared expectations
and a common purpose throughout the organization.
How processes or relationships are expected to
change.While training often
focuses on the new “to be” workflows, it's essential to acknowledge and bridge
from the activities the organization is leaving behind. This establishes and reinforces the benefits, but also explicitly describes how the expected
workflow differs from the prior workflow.
Describes target performance standards for
groups and individuals.With every new process, individuals will be concerned that they
won’t be able to live up to the new expectations or they “won’t be able to
change.” Part of that worry comes from ambiguous expectations.
Combining training with change management
elements creates a powerful, multi-dimensional state-of-the-art approach to
effective user adoption.
But two elements require a bit more explanation:
leveraging performance standards and maintaining skills to sustain benefits.
Leveraging Performance Standards to Target Training
Performance standards are scary.
Just like key performance indicators (KPIs), or
service level agreements (SLAs), performance standards are inherently
judgmental – an organization (or individual) either meets the standard or does
not.
Properly calibrated performance standards help
an organization communicate organizational expectations and target training to support
achievement of those expectations.
IDC research has found that increasing project
spending on training and adoption from 4.5% to 6% of project budget improves
the chances that the new application will meet its performance targets by 30%.
But
spending by itself is insufficient. Training and change management
communication must target the right populations of users.
Understanding the expected standards are
important to help determine when training is appropriate for each individual.
At the same time, well defined performance standards can help the enterprise
intelligently intervene when performance changes.
Enterprises are using adoption monitoring tools
in cloud based applications to identify when individuals or teams are not on
track to meet performance expectations.
Enterprises that cannot monitor performance have
higher-than-necessary error rates or inefficiencies. And, users are frustrated;
either frustrated because they can’t meet the performance standard, or
frustrated because they believe the performance standards are not achievable
and unrealistic.
When an organization effectively monitors team
or individual performance, it can then provide targeted remediation – office
hours, Q&A sessions, individual or team training, or even change the
process flow – to improve performance.
By monitoring adoption, the application
management teams can effectively identify:
- Errors caused by a breakdown in training
delivery
- Errors caused by "difficult"
steps
- User adoption of new processes
- User efficiency of completing complex
tasks
- Specific training needs for users, groups
or locations
Maintain Skills to Sustain Benefits
But once an organization is “trained” on a new
cloud-based application, the job is not done. Skills and performance degrade
over time without ongoing training. This is due to:
- Processes
changing: Cloud-based applications are constantly changing processes,
features or capabilities of the application.
- New
hires coming onboard: a new team member is typically not fully trained for
their new role.
- People
changing roles: individuals get promoted out of roles they are completely
familiar with and take on roles with which they are less familiar.
- People
forgetting: for tasks or processes that are not done regularly, it is easy for
staff to revert to old ways of completing a step, as they forget the subtleties of
particularly workflows.
All of these combine to cause “knowledge
leakage” in organizations that don’t regularly train their teams.
Knowledge
leakage can cause a team to lose up to 60% of its original capability in just 3
years. And a team can lose up to 75% of its capability in 6 years without
continuous ongoing training.
The remedy involves taking a new approach to training:
- Training needs to be continuously
updated and continuously available
- Updates
need to be easy to consume and focused on the new content
- Team
members must be able to monitor their own performance against organizational
standards
The benefits of training are worth it.
75% of well-trained
teams that use cloud-based enterprise applications (finance, supply chain, HCM,
etc.) report improved workflow, compared with 55% of teams that are not
well-trained.
Recommendations
Cloud and cloud-based applications may offer
many benefits, but are highly disruptive to existing processes.
IDC analysis has
determined that even small amounts of additional training can improve a team’s
performance. The addition of just an hour of training per significant process
or workflow over the course of a year can dramatically improve a team member's
understanding of his or her role and others' roles on the team.
IDC believes that with the dramatic increase in
the use of technology for many roles, knowledge workers should get a minimum of
10 hours of job-role related training every year to remain current.
And
additional training is necessary when organizations are changing applications –
like moving to cloud-based applications.
Additionally, enterprises should do the
following:
- Incorporate
change management components within user training to facilitate smooth
adoption of new tools.
- Establish
and communicate performance standards and fully prepare users to meet
those objectives. This is most effective during the early stages of
migrating applications to the cloud.
Fully train new team
members, new hires, promotions or transfers on their responsibilities and
expectations early in their orientation to the new role.