Having a stable training environment is important for successful training. A lot of time will be wasted in training if the training environment is not in good working order. Take a look at the following tips, which should be kept in mind when managing your training environment:

• You need to treat it like production; many people will be using it at the same time, and you want it to be stable while the training is going on, or when the users are practicing after training.
• Keep it updated with the latest code and data. Have a communication plan for any downtimes for deployment, to ensure that the users are aware.
• Have it available for the users to practice after training.
• It should share an integrated environment with other applications. For example, if you plan to use Dynamics CRM in production for order entry and integrate it with Finance and Operations for the fulfillment, ensure that you have the training instance of the CRM connected to the Finance and Operations training environment. This will ensure an end-to-end training experience for the users.

Even once training and testing areas are planned, they are incomplete without planning for change. Hence, change management is key in such an important initiative, and many organizations start preparing for it even before the project starts. Let us get into the details of change management in next section.