Case study for Dynamics 365 implementation project training strategies
A midsize global fire protection company has earned a reputation for providing maintenance and service of the highest quality to its customers. During its 75-year existence, this company has built its business organically through natural growth, marketing, and geographic expansion, and also through numerous acquisitions of smaller fire protection companies. The company recently hired a new chief information officer (CIO) to replace the one who retired after 15 years in the job. The new CIO had extensive experience working with Microsoft and software as a service (SaaS) products. The CIO's immediate focus was to consolidate and modernize the applications that employees use to conduct their business.
In the training plan, the company included a mix of high-level and detailed training objectives. The high-level objectives included these goals:
- Don't allow access to the live system without a solid training program.
- Prepare a core team of trainers to help support the initiative.
- Continue to receive feedback and improve the training approach.
- Develop the training materials early, and schedule classes early.
- Prepare all business users to use the relevant Dynamics 365 application efficiently, and address any key business process changes that are required in their job function.
Specific objectives were centered on business processes such as Prospect to cash (for example, "All sales team members should be able to execute the standard Prospect to cash flow on their own"). Their specific training objectives, listed here, helped support business goals for the application:
- Increase sales by 10 percent year over year.
- Improve productivity by 25 percent by measuring work order completion time.
- In the Accounting business department, increase user satisfaction (covered in an annual poll) by 10 percent, and increase user competency (measured by metrics in the application) by 15 percent.
The team understood that to ensure successful training and achieve meaningful user adoption, they must begin planning early and set up a strong team to support it.
The team benefited from using a change impact assessment matrix to understand the changed business areas, topics, and affected user groups. The matrix helped the team prepare and prioritize training sessions.
The company had experience developing and conducting trainings for previous projects. They knew that they wanted to incorporate various learning modalities: written documentation, videos, hands-on learning, and multiple training labs that use real and recognizable data.
The company's legacy application infrastructure reflected the way that the business had grown. The back-office system ran on an on-premises application that had been used since 1990. Front-office users (salespeople and field dispatchers) and field technicians didn't use any application. Instead, they were still using pen-and-paper-based methods. Because of the number of acquisitions that the company had made over the years, these methods varied, sometimes by business unit and sometimes by other organizational structure. No overarching governance model consolidated the different methods.
As a result, employees who were in identical roles used different methods to accomplish their day-to-day work. This discrepancy in job execution versus job role could be attributed to the fact that many employees joined the organization via acquisition and had never been required to change. It was necessary to capture all "as-is" processes and assess the impacts of moving to the new application, from both a technical perspective and a business process change perspective.
Given the numerous challenges of supporting a wide variety of applications for all users, the company used the Business process modeler (BPM), task guide, and custom guided help features for content development and user training. By having all business processes documented on one platform, the organization gained a single source of truth. Task guides not only provided consistency to all the business processes that were used across the different departments, but they also made employee orientation and training a smoother experience. Task guides were also embedded in the product help experience to provide a 24/7 interactive help experience.
The company set itself up for success by clearly defining all these processes and the group of users that had to be trained. Its subsequent training delivery was a smooth process that included all user persona business processes.
Because of the evolving nature of Dynamics 365 applications and organizations, and also the fact that the project was being rolled out in multiple phases, the company developed an ongoing training process where training was carried out, reviewed, and updated as a cycle. A well-structured and well-organized ongoing training plan was especially critical for this organization, because it used several interfaces (desktop and mobile applications) that released new versions of their application at different points during the year. Therefore, it was even more important to have defined training cycles.
In addition to planning for the April and October releases of the application, the organization needed a plan to move its technicians to the new version of the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile application that was available. This transition required a project of its own and a separate training plan.
Formal feedback was recorded after the trainings, and Microsoft Teams channels were created so that employees could continue to provide feedback to the team. Users were encouraged to share knowledge, ask questions, and suggest improvements to the training materials. The team was also able to collect feedback and create metrics by using help desk tickets. This approach helped them identify areas of the application that users found challenging.
The organization determined that mobile Field Service technicians were logging more tickets than other application users. By learning the types of tickets that technicians were creating, trainers were able to pinpoint a specific area of the work order process that had to be made clearer during training. Adjustments were also made to the training materials.
During the initial days, one of the objectives, "Don't allow access to the live system without a solid training program," was difficult to meet. However, over time, the company learned that it could achieve a significant reduction in business process issues by making sure that every user received adequate training.
During the first few months, an evaluation of key performance indicators (KPIs) showed that the organization was on track to meet all the detailed objectives that the team set.