You have the plan. You are starting to execute the plan. You are on time. On budget. Things are awesome.
And then they are not.
Because training tends to be on the back end of projects, it also tends to feel the most pressure when other parts of the project go haywire.
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If you have been involved in ANY IT implementation project as a training specialist, you have likely experienced Fast Tracking. Fast Tracking is a schedule compression technique project managers use where activities that are normally done in sequence (say…system development and training development) are done in parallel.
As you might have experienced, this often results in rework, more than a few late nights, and surprises during training.
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Another technique is called Crashing – throwing resources at a task to get it done on time.
I don’t see this nearly as often. Partially because there often isn’t the money to do this. Partially because the amount of time and effort it takes to get the resources on-boarded often tends to negate the benefit of having the resources thrown at the task in the first place. Especially when this technique is being used as a panic response (vs planned).
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A third technique that is often forgotten in the heat of the moment is scope reduction.
But people expect X!!!!
Sometime, you have to reduce people’s expectations.
This is where going back to the OBJECTIVE – of the project and the training – is really important.
What do we need to accomplish?
What, with the constraints we are currently experiencing, can we do that will still accomplish the objective?
Create a video is NOT the objective.
What that video was supposed to accomplish is the objective.
You may need to (repeatedly) remind your stakeholders of this.
And you may find a solution that is more elegant and more effective.
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Oh yeah….and stick the reason for the panic schedule compression in the project documentation for lessons learned and future projects. Good to keep track of this stuff.
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