One of the most common challenges that I have seen during my career as an implementer of Dynamics 365 products is how to get end users to engage with their application in a productive and meaningful way. I am often asked some version of the following question:
We’re not seeing the expected adoption and results from our application that we expected. The issue isn’t bugs, or system performance, or even UI gaps – people just aren’t using the application. Why is this?
In my experience, this problem is at its core, a change management issue, and one of the central components of a comprehensive change management strategy is a well-defined training strategy.
In order for your organization to successfully deploy any new technology to its user base, it is necessary to do more than create a working application that meets the requirements of necessary business processes – you must train your users properly. Furthermore, educating users on how to follow certain steps to complete a task should be only part of the training your employees should receive.
The Dynamics 365 Implementation Guide provides a comprehensive view into how your organization should structure its implementation based on the time-tested Success by Design framework. Our FastTrack team which co-authored this book understands that a successful training strategy involves more than running trainees through a series of test cases on a webinar to teach them their job.
A sound training strategy starts at the beginning of a project and runs all the way past go-live. It incorporates a well-constructed training plan that considers the multitude of factors that organizations encounter during IT modernization projects. The Training Strategy chapter (chapter 19) in the Implementation Guide discusses these factors and more and summarizes steps that can help your project team create a successful training plan.
As a next step, we highly recommend checking out this chapter of the Implementation Guide if this blog post resonates with you and seeing what the rest of the book offers as well! We look forward to hearing from you and making improvements in future versions of the book based on your feedback.
-Jeremy/The FastTrack for Dynamics 365 Applications Team
