Organisation

Medium sized educational services and publishing supplier

Configuration

750 staff, mostly administrative, marketing, educationalist and customer service.

Culture

Risk averse, conservative, and very aware of staff development and customer service.

Brief

Operational area seeking a tailored training programme for new supervisory and management staff. Typically young on first promotion from administrative and operational positions.

Develop a programme to be delivered over a six month period which will provide the participants with five basic skills:

• Project management
• Presentation skills
• Team leadership
• Resource management
• Communication

No formal assessment, informal assessment by interviewing participants and line management

Approach

Work with senior line management and training manager (HR) to develop programme.

Programme proposal included scope, constraints, objectives, costs, project plan, measurements.

Delivery

A project manager/training co-ordinator was appointed to deliver all elements of the programme and guide the group through the project.

Date and Duration

2000/2001, 9 month programme

Methodology

Set of training exercises and courses devised around the lifecycle of a real business process project. Title of project defined by line management.

First task of group to define Terms Of Reference/Project Initiation Document for Project and define reporting/management structure for project. Each phase of project was then used to define and deliver one to one coaching and group training events to meet basic skills objectives of the programme.

Outcome

Group worked very well together and the final report of the team was delivered as a senior management presentation and written report on time and on budget.

Feedback from participants was very positive and all believed they achieved their personal objectives. Feedback from training manager demonstrated a similar conclusion.

Problems and Concerns

Single largest area of concern was over the pressure on the participants to complete the programme/project with the time constraints and maintain their commitment to their on-going day job. This required a degree of negotiation with their line managers, and an element of lateral thinking to accommodate the contradictory demands of the project and their normal work.

Additional benefits

Team building across functional groups

Identification of IT development requirements

Costing models for resulting recommendations

Negotiation skills development