Let’s take a look at Penny’s workplace. She is a learning lead on a new systems implementation.
She’s in a meeting and three times already it has been mentioned that the system won’t support a process, so let’s create a workaround and train them on that. None of the processes on the surface look like they would have workarounds that can be easily trained. Especially not along with everything else that people need to know ready for go-live.
One or two could be incorporated but three or more is creating challenges, especially since there could probably be better ways to implement if we had the time. Which we don’t.
The fourth training issue is added about half way through the meeting. Penny thinks that at this rate the training time will need to be doubled to accommodate all these workarounds.
Penny has a choice to do one of the following:
- Speak up and propose a new plan to examine each process and see if it can be implemented in a different way that won’t impact the training session even though it will take time to solve
- Keep silent and work out a way to train all these workarounds within the existing timeframes
These are the sorts of trade offs people are making all the time in organisations. We are time poor but do spend more time now to maybe save time later knowing that something else will have to give? Maybe a drop in quality of another task or not doing a nice to have task that would have a positive impact on morale.
Penny chose to speak up about those workarounds. She proposed a meeting to discuss and examine better ways to implement the workaround. There was push back due to the time constraints but she highlighted that having too many workarounds in training would potentially impact adoption and risk failure to the implementation overall.
She got her meeting and after the review none of them made it into the systems training. One major workaround was for a government regulation that no longer existed! So she was able to retire the out-of-date process instead of wasting time building into her training.
Overall the time she saved the organisation made taking the time to review incredibly worthwhile.
Now not everyone would make this choice, they would probably stay silent and let the workaround multiply but as you can see, if you take the time now you may actually save yourself and the organisation more time in the future. Each decision is a potential trade off.
If you don’t have someone like Penny to stand up and take the time in your organisation and your learning is just a bloated knowledge transfer session you could never possibly remember, then you might want to access the free changing with confidence mini course.
You could also read my book, Changing with Confidence. or book a call with Adrian.
