Task: Develop Training Materials

Having the correct amount and type of materials available to adequately train end users and supporters of an application is necessary to promote usability and to achieve the desired business value. If a course ceveloper is available, they can assume most of the burden of creating the training materials, lab exercises, and workshops for delivery of those courses to either end users or support personnel. If a course developer is not available, development team members should take the time to properly develop a suite of training materials for the feature set developed during a release.

Although different parts of training materials should be created during feature development sprint/iterations, the bulk of the work (and the integration of the materials) usually is reserved for the release sprint/iteration that occurs immediately before a scheduled release.

Determine scope of training materials

Consult the program manager and deployment manager to determine the extent of training materials required for this release. Depending on the contents of the release, more or fewer training materials might be needed to support both end users and IT operations support personnel.

Training materials generally consist of a combination of:

Presentation slides
Handouts
Training aids
Hands-on labs and/or exercises
Quizzes or tests
Practical application workshops

Training materials often are grouped into modules, each with a set of learning objectives and competency assessments.

Develop user training materials

Leverage all the user documentation that has been prepared previously or is in the process of being prepared. The table of contents of the user documentation will provide a starting point for developing a training course framework and a lesson plan.

First identify the learning objectives of each training module, then reuse as much user documentation as is possible. If tutorials were documented within either user or support documentation, they are a good source of content for training modules.

Develop support training materials

In many cases, IT support personnel are experienced enough to require minimal training on a product release. However, where the product is new to the support organization, or the support personnel themselves are inexperienced or unfamiliar with a particular technology, support training becomes very important to the success of the product rollout.

Using the support documentation as a guideline, identify the parts of the product on which IT support personnel will need to be trained. Identify training modules and document learning objectives for each module, then leverage as much of the support documentation content as you can to create your training materials.

Perform quality review

As user and support training materials are developed, plan and conduct a quality review during the release sprint/iteration to ensure that the materials are of sufficient quantity and quality. Update and improve the training materials based on the results of the quality review.

Perform dry run

Before formally delivering the user or support training, plan a sprint/iteration task in which representatives of both the user and support communities are invited to participate in a dry run of the training materials. Use the feedback obtained from these sessions to improve the training materials during the release sprint/iteration.

Deliver training materials

When the final user and support training materials are complete, deliver them to the deployment manager for integration with the training materials from the other teams participating in the program.