Recently, a telling photo made the rounds of our community. It showed a successful looking executive using a BlackBerry to keep on top of business. He was standing next to a beautiful 80-foot yacht named "Change Order," and behind the yacht was a dinghy, appropriately named "Original Contract."
If nothing else, this photo reflects what's wrong with the psyche in the world of federal acquisition. We just don't seem to be able to get what we need because we insist on defining what we think we want. Time and time again experience has proven that detailed specifications are at best correct only for a relatively short time and at worst way off the mark.
Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to user training during the deployment of major systems. Training requirements in solicitations usually focus on classroom- or computer-based training education rather than on outcomes that meet end-user goals. The attitude is, "Training? Who cares about training?" Training is just a means to an end, which is how people perform once a system is deployed. Folks in that business call it "human performance." In our business, we conduct acceptance testing by having the developers who know all the ins and outs of the system confirm the adequacy of their own work or use third-party testers who do pretty much the same thing.
Actually, training, in its classic context, probably is the least important part of any major deployment. Much more important is whether the user community accepts, understands and uses the new solution effectively.
We all acknowledge that training efforts usually fail for several reasons: 1) the students come unprepared to be trained, 2) they are taken out of their already pressure-filled jobs so they don't want to be trained and 3) because it will be six months to a year before they see the final new system (with all of the changes that happened after the training) in operation.
Generally, the solution is to have the systems integrator that is developing the solution teach the customer how to use it. Foxes guarding the hen house? In most cases, the integrator would seem to be motivated to have less-effective training in order to allow for more billable labor hours, right? Unfortunately, the measures of success for the training usually have nothing to do with the success of the deployment, but with attendance at classes or grades on exercises.
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