Onboarding Training Fiasco

Today, for some reason, I was reminded of a project at my old organization. That organization specializes in developing and delivering training courses, especially onboarding courses for other companies. We noticed at some point that although we provided that for others, we had never provided one for our own workers. Or if we had, and some departments had, it was ad hoc. 

Ergo, I was tasked to develop an onboarding for our own organization.

Here were the capabilities and expectations I had. 

I had a team of developers and designers. These folks were great. They knew how to write scripts, they knew how to develop courses, they knew how to make them look amazing, and to engage the learner. That was our job. And this team did it well. 

In general, providing that the client works well with us, we were able to produce courses in six to eight weeks. This team could churn them out and over the course of a year, they usually produced about 250 courses . . . or more. 

For our own organization? It took over a year. 

Trutfhully, I still don't think it's been rolled out. 

Working with the HR team was a challenge. Our own HR team was challenged by this word or that word. Are we sure a colon is right here? Is the term "work" correct? Additionally, they took FOREVER to give us feedback. 

The leadership was worse. We created a terrific 45-minute course with videos and slides, and questions etc etc. And then the CEO wanted to re-shoot his video because he didn't like the lighting. Or, should we include our VP of Marketing? Shouldn't she be in here somewhere? 

After a year of this, I went to the CEO and said, "Well, what we have is really good. I think we should release this as is, start training our people on it, and we'll make these improvements. But if we release it now, we start to train, cause right now we aren't training anything, and we'll also get some feedback about what's working and what's not. And we'll make these improvements and re-release in 6 weeks."

No go.

This was always something I was challenged with by this group. They never understood the iterative nature of the development process. I remember my first pitch included this same idea. A "soft launch." With this group, it went over like a lead balloon. In fact, that project never got off the ground, soft launch or hard launch. Just died on the vine instead. 

What I think is funny is that our organization was one of the worst to work with. Everything we complained about, we were the ones that did it the worst. And I don't mean my own course developers, I mean the HR group, the leadership, the project champions. They were atrocious customers. I also find it funny that there is this "last 5%" challenge. (I'll probably write more about this later). But so often people will work so hard to get that last 5% just right, when the pay off for that last 5% isn't worth it. 

We weren't aligned obviously. I'm glad I left. I wonder if that project ever got launched.