Most change management and systematic improvement efforts acknowledge that new approaches must be both comprehensive and affordable; both require sustainability - solutions that will scale to communities of different sizes, and self-correct over time. To achieve sustainability, solutions must be implemented through an aligned set of plans and processes, and these practices must be supported with proven procedures, templates, tools, and training which are appropriate to the audience and situation. Unfortunately, investing in such infrastructure is generally not affordable for single projects - payoffs from this infrastructure are generally only realized in the long-term (as additional opportunities to apply the corresponding new approaches are identified). As a result, such investments often are subject to short-sighted budget-cutting.

Project managers need proficient individuals and they need them to be available just-in time. Effective training programs are the seeds for developing candidate team members and developing this proficiency. The purpose of training should be to satisfy these needs, and help individuals to get to the point that they can figure out the rest of the details for themselves. This includes teaching these individuals how and where to find the details that aren't taught in the classroom, or require proper interpretation on the fly.

The following should be considered as an acceptance test for such infrastructure. The infrastructure should reliably ensure that:

A qualified candidate, who is expected to perform assigned work within a designated set of roles, will be able to:

1. Locate and understand the applicable requirements, processes, standards, and tools (collectively, the 'means of production') for performing their assignment
   
2. Determine their required approach and tasks for completing their assignment from this information
   
3. Understand how their work will be measured, and how outcomes will be evaluated to support the business
4. Identify, arrange for, and participate in appropriate training for processes, standards, and tools that will be needed to complete their assignment, after accurately assessing the gaps between their existing competencies and what will be required to complete their assignment
   
5. Following this applicable process and tool guidance, standards, and training, plan an approach that will accomplish their work within the required timeframe
   
6. Obtain approval for their approach and plans as appropriate for their assignment
   
7. Implement their approach and plan, transforming inputs and available resources into required work products
   
8. While performing this work, periodically assess progress and the remaining work, and communicate this status to affected stakeholders
9. Identify and resolve issues which are encountered in performing this work
10. Provide feedback to process and standards owners to correct or improve the means of production
    
11. Obtain help when appropriate.

The above collection of use cases implies that an overall package of support infrastructure must be accessible, be well integrated with daily operations, and be useable by the many stakeholders which need it. These objectives are not easy to achieve, and are often overlooked in project planning, as well as in capturing the total cost of ownership necessary to implement sustainable improvements.

While only a portion of this required infrastructure is embodied in training, it has perhaps the highest leverage of any of these elements. Training should reveal the complexity of the job itself, and educate users about how activities on the projects interact, and how their roles in a value stream play out overtime - and how that can affect cost and quality outcomes. This training should focus on what individual roles should do, and enable them to recognize and discriminate effective and ineffective practices. More importantly, training should help the students understand how well they should perform particular activities. How much time should they expect to take on an activity? How should quality outcomes be measured, exactly? What should they do when they receive inputs which are out of specification? Where should they turn for help if they don’t think they’ll be able to achieve a functional or performance specification in the time that they have allocated for it in their schedules?

This training should also include a session on ‘first principles’, covering foundational ideas such as ‘don’t send quality problems downstream’, with elaboration of how to put such principles into practice. Such goals may seem obvious when considered within isolation, but the question is, what should individuals do when there is a conflict between two competing goals, such as schedule and quality? People need to have a clear understanding and appreciation of how to make such tradeoffs, and what they can count on (response time, follow-up, etc) when they encounter similar problems outside the classroom. Training should be focused on the behaviors and skills which are critical to achieving throughput and quality targets, with guidance for how to 'close the loop' with their project's stakeholders to assure that optimum decision-making and results are actually achieved (and enhanced through practice) over time.

Practitioners want training that is coherent, accessible, comprehensive, and proven to work. Too often, training is obtained from many different sources, which results in a patchwork of material that has uneven delivery and content. Until robust training is available, teams will struggle to achieve proficiency, which impacts others on projects who must help these individuals, and increases the potential for rework.

Ideally,  training should describe the means of accomplishing objectives in a way that will improve their willingness to be accountable; this will be possible when the details of how to accomplish their work can be provided by reference to well-scoped and clearly delineated supporting guidebooks. Ideally, this material would be written for consumption in units of 1-3 written pages, since otherwise, the material will be difficult for the average user to comprehend, plan, or apply consistently. Training courses need to draw on such controlled material and put students into practical settings, showing them how to apply their knowledge, both individually and in team settings. It’s very important to look at such training holistically, from the perspective of the end user of that training. This all requires a more reflective consideration of how to approach training, and a robust plan for implementing an integrated training approach, driven by what the ‘customer’ needs, rather than just by when training is scheduled. Unfortunately, training is too often an after-thought, and left for a training organization to figure out for themselves, as opposed to expecting it as a deliverable from each development project, where it should be created and validated, along with new process and tool functionality.

As such training is designed, it should be structured so that it can be delivered in sessions of one hour (or less), with each of these sessions providing a means to check that the key learning objectives have actually been achieved. This demonstration should test the ability of the student to apply their knowledge to a series of unique situations. Such training should also be designed so the sequence of learning objectives is defined and captured in a series of courses, so that people can enter that sequence at different points in the curriculum, as their needs dictate. It also should be possible to ‘test out’ of taking some of those prerequisites, if equivalent experience can be demonstrated.

Training should also enable customization, so classes or individuals can progress through the material for different scenarios (new users, prior users in need of competency updates, or experienced users who need to adapt prerequisite training to a new situation, for example). Such flexibility is required since not everyone is going to be available to be trained all at once, and ideally, since all training should be accessible just-in-time for individuals in multiple levels within the organization.

There also needs to be a robust basis for institutional learning and improvement of the underlying processes and approaches which are being taught. Processes and supporting documentation need to be sufficiently robust so that the outputs of processes can be independently evaluated with respect to standards for those results. If key learning elements are not captured and communicated in written documentation that defines such standards, but instead is transmitted through oral, instructor-led training sessions, the effectiveness of the instructor in communicating their subject matter expertise will typically vary form session to session. As a result, the effectiveness of knowledge transfer to students may not be reliable. Without detailed documentation, it can become quite difficult to improve the infrastructure for training, or evaluate the effectiveness of two different approaches for accomplishing the same set of training objectives. You can’t write a problem report against what someone may or may not have said in class. As a result, the better the scripting is for your training, the more likely it will be delivered consistently, and the more reliably that outcomes will be achieved from this training over time. This is why it is very risky to employ ad-hoc training by subject matter experts - often such experts have no experience in teaching themselves. Different instructors can take different approaches in how they explain things, or may decide to ignore selected concepts in the interests of managing their time, and when they do, expecting them to deliver a consistent experience will be wishful thinking, unless things are well scripted, integrated across the curriculum, are delivered regularly, and have appropriate levels of oversight.

Checklists are an extremely useful means of focusing attention on the critical elements of performing activities and reinforcing key criteria. Use them in as many places as you can, and provide students with walk-away materials that help to reinforce those key learnings. Without them, people may not know what the standards are for their work.

Real-world examples should be used in delivering the training. You should not just teach the ‘happy path’ in performing an activity, but should also include representative samples of ‘hard’ scenarios which demonstrate the kinds of challenges that have caused people problems in the past. You should also explain how such problems can further lead to more expensive and time-consuming rework, if not properly done, and how such problems can affect many different players, and requires considerable effort to resolve downstream. Select these problems from the areas which have most frequently resulted in the most serious consequences in the past.

Finally, there needs to be a means of identifying individuals who need ‘recertifying’ as the approaches you are utilizing evolve over time. In other words, if an individual takes training in one month, and the course material, approaches, or tools are updated sometime in the next quarter, both a focused list of changes, and the individuals who need to be made aware of those changes, should be identified and informed of the need for recertification. Without such material, in a large community of practice, imagine the challenges of figuring out what to do when a problem with material is encountered at an after-action review. Are you fixing the right problem, or just rolling out a workaround? Was an obsolete version of an approach in use, or did a group try to use something that wasn't yet approved for broad application? What did the training material say, and what should it have said? Which version of the training materials were we using?

The underlying infrastructure which enables individuals to develop new competencies must itself be monitored by an effective, closed-loop measurement and review process, and reinforced by a support network that assures that problems are addressed in a timely fashion, that users receive help for problems they encounter in practice, and so that the causes of problems can be systematically and effectively resolved for future development efforts.

If the above goals can't be achieved, organizations that are attempting to roll out complex activities (i.e. those organized by multi-role, coordinated process and tool innovations) should determine how to represent, communicate, and manage the very real risks of not having sufficiently competent individuals and organizations to achieve the required outcomes. The mitigation of such risks should take account of the resulting impacts on planned development and execution efforts, which typically will requires adding more people and more time, which both will result in added cost. If key productivity enablers from available processes and tools have been validated, and can be demonstrated through training modules, consistent application of these enablers will more likely be achieved and sustained. Closing this competency gap can result in significant cost reductions - but only after the investments required to harvest this potential are captured, and after they are given time to bloom and grow.