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Develop your own training strategy for your Dynamics 365 implementations

  • Article

In this section, we discuss the creation of a training strategy to ensure the readiness of every person who is involved in your implementation. We review high-level objectives, identify risks that might arise during implementation, and share best practices for you to keep in mind as you develop your own training plan.

Objectives

  • Determine your training objectives and what to avoid.
  • Create a training plan.
  • Establish the scope of your training (who, what, when, where, and how).
  • Learn which training materials to consider and the different delivery approaches.
  • Identify assumptions, dependencies, and risks in your training plan.
  • Understand the ongoing training process, and explore best practices.
  • Read more about product-specific guidance that is related to training.

Introduction

At its core, the goal of a training strategy is to ensure that all relevant users are educated about the new solution and know how to do their job. In this way, the implementation project results in successful user adoption.

Training isn't the only factor in meaningful user education and adoption. The ultimate why in the development of a training strategy should be to empower users to do their work successfully in the new solution. As part of user adoption, organizations should strive to train in a way that gives users confidence in the application. The training should inspire a sense of delight in users as they use the system.

In this section, we cover several high-level objectives and examples of more organization-specific objectives that should be included in your organization's training strategy. A proper training strategy should center on the creation and execution of a comprehensive training plan. Furthermore, that training plan should be aligned with the broader training strategy of your Dynamics 365 implementation. We discuss how to create an appropriate scope for your organization's training. We also guide you to confirm the different groups of users that must be trained.

We cover training subjects that should be part of your organization's overall project plan, and the best way to keep your training plan and project plan coordinated so that you avoid significant issues. This section also dives into guidance about different types of training materials and their effectiveness. We describe how to create a training delivery plan and conduct effective training that can serve all your users (both before and after the system goes live).

Dynamics 365 is an ever-evolving and ever-growing product. Therefore, training is an ongoing process that requires constant adaptation and updates, and we cover how best to prepare your organization for this continual update process. We also recognize that the training strategy and guidance can vary, depending on your choice of a Dynamics 365 application. We provide suggestions about how best to adopt a training strategy across customer engagement apps and finance and operations apps.

Finally, we discuss best practices by highlighting the behaviors and strategies that we have seen organizations successfully use when they develop a training strategy. Near the end of this section, we share our collective experience about these best practices, in the hope that you carry them forward in your own projects.

By following the guidelines that are laid out in previous sections of this guide, your organization should be well on its way to rolling out a successful Dynamics 365 application that meets the needs of your business and users. Successful training of users in the use of modern technology is integral to any organization's training strategy. Your users should get to know the business processes that they must incorporate to do their jobs safely and efficiently.

Training objectives

When your organization begins to develop a strategy for user training, and a plan behind it, one of the first things that it should consider is the set of training objectives. Definition of the objectives of a successful training strategy is key. It can help shape the crafting of a training plan and lead to a more successful rollout of the training itself.

At a high level, every training strategy for Dynamics 365 applications should include some version of the following objectives. Many change management objectives can also be addressed by ensuring that your training strategy explicitly addresses these training-focused objectives:

  • Employees gain the knowledge that is required to use Dynamics 365 applications as a part of their day-to-day jobs in a safe and efficient manner.
  • Training should be meaningful and not overwhelming, and should give users an efficient way to do their jobs.
  • Training should help support business goals for the application. (In other words, employees should understand the why behind training materials and scenarios.)
  • Training should be inclusive of everyone (for example, both experienced users and new hires), so that all users of your application receive the education that they require to do their jobs.
  • Training should be an ongoing process that doesn't stop when the system goes live.

Your Dynamics 365 implementation has other training objectives that are specific both to the applications that you're developing and to your organization. It's important that you work to define these objectives, because they, together with the more general objectives of training that are outlined earlier in this section, should formulate the what of your training strategy goals. An effective way to evaluate your organization's training goals is to follow the philosophy that is represented by the acronym SMART:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Realistic
  • Timely

Although it might not be possible for every training objective to meet every one of these metrics, we recommend that you create training objectives that are relevant to your organization's goal of user adoption, and that fit the outlined criteria.

What not to do

As a counterpoint to the recommended strategies, let's briefly discuss the training objectives that an unprepared organization might create.

In this example, the organization creates the following objective:

Objective:

Dynamics 365 Field Service users should be trained on the mobile application.

Although this objective captures, at a basic level, what must be done, it falls short of accomplishing what a proper training objective should accomplish. When this objective is rewritten based on the criteria that are listed earlier in this article, and separated for increased detail and specificity, it becomes clearer:

  • Objective:

    100 percent of Field Service technicians attend the in-person mobile training session or view the complete online seminar series prior to system cutover.

  • Objective:

    All Field Service technicians finalize the work order completion process on their mobile devices without assistance. They can complete the lead-generation process on their mobile devices in under three minutes.

The rewritten objectives also serve as good examples of training objectives that are specifically related to the application that is being deployed. A poorly written training plan often doesn't include application-specific objectives. Not only do they not follow the SMART philosophy, but they also aren't thorough enough to capture the essence of the goals of training. Clearly defined and measurable training objectives also help an organization determine the effectiveness of its training. It's easier to judge the success of training in your organization if you can track it against objectives that have been well written. Later in this section, we discuss specific ways to assess the effectiveness of your training. This process starts with the creation of proper training objectives.

To achieve training success, it's important to ensure that your users are comfortable with the most challenging obstacles to user adoption. Although your training objectives don't have to directly reference specific tasks or challenging business processes (in fact, such a high level of specificity isn't useful), they should reflect knowledge of areas of your application that might require more attention from a learning perspective. The previously used example of a mobile application objective is a good illustration of this strategy. Because we recognize that Dynamics 365 mobile apps can represent a significant change in business processes for users, they might require more attention from a training and user adoption perspective. Therefore, a key objective should be that all users receive proper training on this specific job function.

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