Currently, I am involved in an adoption programme to help our users make Office 365 their own, so that they can take advantage of the toolkit and make their work more effective, more efficient and easier. We offer class room training sessions, in addition to things like information pages and webinars. Let us look at three aspects of this training that work well in our organization.
1.Training based on user scenarios
We don’t just teach our users to push the buttons in the Office 365 applications, what options there are and how they work. Our approach is to teach our users how they can perform their jobs better using Office 365. For example: to collaborate safely in construction projects, discuss plans, manage their team tasks, meet online to save traveling time, share their notes
And yes, this implies that we teach them how to use tools like SharePoint, Teams, Planner, OneNote and Yammer. But this way, the user can see what’s in it for them, and apply what they learn to improve their actual work.
2.Practical exercises in playgrounds
In these sessions, we have small theoretical part explaining about our business challenges and the cloud. We show in a demo how you can perform the user scenarios. But the main part of the sessions consists of practical exercises guiding the participants through the scenarios.
To facilitate these scenarios, we create for each session a playground Site / Team / Plan et cetera with sample content. Here, the training participants can do the exercises and explore, without risk. The playgrounds remain at their disposal.
3.Sessions per business unit
We are trying to improve the collaboration within the organization, so we want colleagues to learn together and to discuss how they can improve their particular processes. After all, our business units have different specialties and they have different challenges. And the people in that business unit know better than the IT guys from head quarters what is important for them.
We not only organize our training sessions per business unit, but we also tailor our sessions to the needs of those units. The basics of many scenarios may be similar, but the priorities are different as are the specifics.
