Monday Midmorning

Jason was stumped. He knew Sam wanted to reduce the time the Backend group spent supporting the Operations group. And he wanted to move training over to Operations. But he wasn’t sure how. Jason frowned as he entered Sam’s office for his one-on-one.

“Sam, I understand you want to reduce our Operations support time, and training is a big part of that.” Jason said. “If I just drop the training, all hell will break loose, and the situation will actually become worse.”

“You’re right,” agreed Sam. “We have to find a way to transition the training out of your group and into Operations where it belongs. How did you come to have responsibility for the training?”

“I know it doesn’t look like it makes sense now, but it did at one time. My group used to be Operations. When Operations became a separate group, the old director promoted Clyde from my group. Clyde is a great guy—but he doesn’t plan ahead. I took over training in self-defense. If I don’t train the Ops guys, they don’t get trained.”

“I can see where those decisions made sense at the time,” Sam said. “It was the right thing to do to make sure Operations had the information they needed about new releases. It seems to me that the company is in a different place now. It’s a good time to reexamine where the training function really belongs.

“What options have you considered to move training out of your group?” Sam asked.

“I thought about meeting with Clyde to tell him he has to do the training,” Jason said. “But I don’t see how anything will be different with Clyde now than it was before. I can’t just drop it; that’s too painful for my group. You could talk to Clyde’s boss—that might work.”

“Yeah, that might work, but maybe we can come up with some other options,” said Sam. “Is the training for new hires written down?”

“Part of it is. But some stuff changes with every release,” Jason replied.

“Do you write down the release changes?”

“Some of it,” Jason said. “We write down a lot of it, but as we make improvements and fixes, it changes, and we don’t always keep up.”

“The fact that some of it’s written down means that we could do a train-the-trainer in Clyde’s group for a lot of the new hire training. So, maybe we can eliminate 75% of the new hire training?”

“That sounds about right,” Jason said.

“How much time would that buy you?” asked Sam.

“We’d save about twelve hours every time they add someone new. We’d still spend about four hours, but maybe we could batch it and train the new hires in groups.”

“Could anyone else do the training aside from someone in Clyde’s group?” Sam asked.

“Actually, the tech writer who wrote the last release notes asked how we were going to train the Ops staff, and he made some really good suggestions. Maybe he could do it.”

“It sounds like we have several options now: you talk to Clyde, I talk to Clyde’s boss, you approach Clyde about trying train-the-trainer, or we talk to the Tech Pubs manager about having his guy take over the training,” Sam said.

“I think I should talk to Clyde first about doing train-the-trainer,” Jason said. “He might go for that.”

“Let’s make that one of your action items. Next week we’ll talk more about moving the release training off your plate.”