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How To Brand Your Business For Success

By Leigh Burke on March 13, 2019

Having professional branding for your business is essential to projecting a positive, reliable image to you potential clients. Think about it, would you do business with a company that has a bad logo or website? If you look at the social accounts of a company does it give you more confidence if there is a consistent theme, colours and logo across all the accounts and their website?

The Logo

Creating a logo doesn’t need to be a massively expensive venture. There are plenty of options for creating one yourself, or you can hire a designer from a website like Fiverr.com to come up with some options for you. You want to make sure you have a high resolution version of your logo, and that it is a PNG file with a transparent background. If you have a tagline, it also pays to have several layout options, e.g. logo at bottom, logo at the side etc. as shown below.

Video

Video is an important element to engage your audience. To brand your videos and male them more professional, you should always include a short intro or outro (scene at the end of your video). This can be as simple as an animation of your logo with a short music jingle. Keep it short. Nobody wants to sit there for 5-10 seconds watching your intro. If you do have a longer logo animation, perhaps include it at the end as an outro. You can create these animations yourself with various software packages available online, or simply search “video intro” on Fiverr.com to find a virtual assistant to help you create your intro. Below are some sample intros created for Training Profits.

Ebooks, Reports & Courses

If you are producing eBooks, Reports or Courses, it is important to also brand these and create digital collateral that will help your audience associate the resources with your brand and also to raise the perceived value of the product or resource. People want to be able to visualise what it is they are downloading or purchasing. What is included? If it’s a course, are there worksheets, workbooks, videos, audio files? This can all be represented in a graphic. You can get your designer on Fiverr.com to create these graphics or search online for “ebook cover creator” and create these yourself. Below are some examples of what we created for our “Training Manifesto”. The original cover was created in Canva.com and then the flat file was turned into the various 3d graphics.

Social accounts

Most people know about Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. There are also other social networking sites like LinkedIn, as well as publishing sites like Medium, Reditt etc.

If you haven’t already registered for these services, I recommend you do so (even if you are not planning on using them straight away). A great way to check if your name is available on a particular service is to use a website like namechk.com. It will check your name availability across all the major social network sites and a plethora of other services. Register as many as you need, but make sure you register for the major ones mentioned above. In addition, on Facebook, register your name for a Facebook page and a Facebook group.

Once you have registered for all these services, log into each one individually so you can set up your branding. Your branding will include things like your profile photo, header banners etc. Each service has different requirements for size etc. so check what they are before you upload your graphics. On Canva.com, they have templates for things like Youtube cover art, facebook banners etc. Use these templates ot make sure you get the right size.

Click our social icons on the right (they’ll open in new browser tabs) to have a look at our current branding for each of the services.

Conclusion

As you can see , utilising Logos, Videos and Graphics within your business helps you portray that professional touch. Your audience is more likely to engage with you if you have consistent branding across your website and social accounts. If you haven’t already done so, jump on Fiverr.com and hire a designer to help you create some of the logos and graphics you may require. It’s relatively inexpensive, and you can start being more professional today.

6 critical success factors for your next IT Systems Training Program

By Leigh Burke on March 5, 2019

Training in an organisational context can take genesis from a number of different origins. Often there is an organisational drive to improve workplace practices, maintain current skills levels or some external driver such as government accreditation. These programs can be driven by the business or a dedicated Learning and Development business unit, often under the umbrella of Human Resources.

Another key driver for training and re-skilling is the introduction of new Information technology systems. As more and more systems move to enterprise level solutions, every area of a large organisation is touched by this technology. Often combining offline business processes and procedures with explicit steps required within the IT system, these solutions can be difficult for some employees to learn especially for those segments of the workforce with a lower level of IT literacy.

Where does Training fit in?

So how does Training fit into the overall Program of work? I’m going to focus on enterprise level IT system projects. Many organisations employ a project management methodology such as PRINCE2, or Agile. These are just different approaches to managing and implementing the project. Often there will be a dedicated project team consisting of a Project Manager, Project Coordinator, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), Technical Experts, Business Representatives, Testers & Trainers. Some of the resources may be dedicated, some may be part-time and working on several projects along with business as usual (BAU) activities – that is their day to day duties.

The structure of the project will include standardised documentation such as the business case, a project plan, a project schedule, work breakdown structure, along with other artifacts such as meeting agendas, minutes, status reports etc. that are produced as the project progresses and used to track deliverables and provide accountability. The project team will normally meet at least once weekly, supplemented by other meetings and workshops as required. The project manager will report to the sponsor and/or project board for guidance and sign off on critical strategic decisions. The trainer will align their schedule and deliverables with the overall project plan and schedule.

1. Engage your Trainer Early in the project life-cycle

The trainer is normally engaged early in the project to ensure they are available to attend key meetings and workshops and to give them time to learn the business processes, system and solution. This however is not always the case, and often the trainer will be engaged at a later date in the project often to save money. Training can be seen as an after thought where the end users of the system are just shown how to access the system and given their log on and then left to their own devices.

A good project manager will engage the trainer early on in the process to ensure a deep level of engagement. The trainer will need time to conduct impact assessments and training needs analysis (TNA). This process starts early on to ensure enough time to reach all the key stakeholders and impacted areas of the business. This is especially important for geographically dispersed workforces, as engagement with every area of the business will not only ensure inclusiveness but provide for a much wider level of adoption and take up when the system goes live. Make sure you also have contingency should you experience project delays or require post go-live support.

2. Insist on an Impact Assessments and a Training Needs Analysis

The training needs analysis highlights key areas of focus for the strategic approach of training as well as learning needs of the many varied audiences. These are also a way to help start to build a champions network across the organisation. Champions are the people within the organisation that you can call on to become key users of the system and help embed the change across the organisation. Special needs of the training audience will also be identified in these sessions e.g. ESL, ageing workforce, shift workers. The TNA can also shed light on logistical considerations like rooms and resources for training, access to facilities etc. The impact workshops themselves are generally a facilitated discussion where the attendees are guided through a series of questions about the proposed system and change that are designed to illicit discussion amongst the group and highlight any risks, issues and areas of resistance to the proposed change. These can then be documented and a mitigation strategy put in place to minimise them.

3. Get Business agreement on your Training Strategy and Plan

The trainer next needs to put together a strategy and plan for the training. The strategy is higher level. What is the training approach? Will we be delivering face to face training, remote online training via technology such as Webex, eLearning? Will we be using a train the trainer approach where we identify and train key users across the business who can then go and train other staff at their site? Do we need to assess staff as part of the learning process? Once some of these key decisions are made and socialised with the business, the trainer can begin to work on the training plan. The training plan will start to solidify what is happening and when. There will be a process to design, develop and deliver the training content according to the training strategy.

4. Schedule Subject Matter Experts to help the Trainer develop content

Training content development is normally done in conjunction between the trainer and the SMEs. The SMEs will provide the expert guidance and knowledge and the trainer will document and turn this information into relevant training modules in accordance with the training strategy and plan. SMEs can be technically or business focused, and often there will be a mix of both on a project to get a full end to end understanding of the technology and process changes that are being implemented within the business. The training artifacts are produced and then go through a review and sign off process. These training materials will include training manuals, quick reference guides, trainer notes, training slide decks, scripts, activities, session plans, online help and eLearning.

5. Provide the trainer with a fully configured system early on

An important dependency for the IT system trainer to complete their work is to have a fully configured system they can access to be able to step through each part of the program that they will be teaching. This is important from both a learning perspective for the trainer, but also for them to be able to document the steps involved and take screenshots and videos for the training materials. Some vendors provide out of the box training materials, often these will be generic in nature and not take into consideration any configurations, customisations, branding or business processes. The trainer normally gets access to this system during the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase, or just prior. Often this compresses the time available for training materials development. Remember to allow time for the review and approval process as well as printing of any physical materials. For eLearning, you’ll need to liaise with the Learning Management System (LMS) Administrator to upload and host the modules.

6. Leverage your Champion Network to facilitate training logistics, delivery and drive success

Once all the training materials have been developed for all the modules and courses, materials need to be printed, workbooks produced, rooms booked and invites sent out to participants for each session. This is a big logistical job that the project administrator can often help with, or the champions or admin staff from each site. If training is being conducted off-site, external training facilities will need to be booked. For all day courses, lunch can often be supplied for participants, along with things like snacks, mints, lollies, biscuits and water. Your champions have the local knowledge to pull this all together and help make the training sessions a resounding success.

When all is said and done, a talented trainer should deliver a successful training program. Of course the definition of “success” is subjective, so you’ll want to make sure you define that early on. Even with pockets of resistance across the business, with a dedicated team and trainer, success can be achieved. Of course having quantitative data is always more preferable, so make sure you have attendance lists for all training courses, feedback forms for all participants at the end of the course (or an online survey tool). If assessments are involved, make sure these are all tracked, recorded and reported as part of your project success. Finally, don’t forget to include your trainer in the post implementation review. Lessons learned are always good, but only if those lessons are taken and applied to your next project.

4 Tips for a Successful Training Development

By Leigh Burke on March 5, 2019

Successful training programs require the development of many different training artefacts and collateral. These include things such as training manuals, quick reference guides, slide decks, user guides, participant guides, training activities, lesson plans, training plans, eLearning modules and more. These materials are developed in association with the training professional and subject matter experts from the business.

1. Before any materials are developed though, the course curriculum, modules, structure, modes of delivery and content need to be mapped out in a training strategy, approach and plan then reviewed and signed off by the project sponsor, SMEs, key stakeholders and project team. It is critical to get the plan in place as early as possible and get agreement to all of the above to ensure the business is fully engaged and supportive of the plan for development of the materials for the learning program.

2. Quality materials should be aesthetically pleasing to the eye. The visual layout should be such that they are easy to read and digest, follow a logical sequence and highlight the key components of information required by the learner to meet the learning objectives. Templates and materials should follow visual and instructional design principles to ensure the quality of the items created is maintained to the highest standard.

3. To achieve a consistent look and feel across the suite of materials developed for the learning program, templates for common programs such as Word and PowerPoint should be used. The templates developed should adhere to the style guides and visual communications standards of the organisation they are being developed for. These are often available from internal communications or marketing teams and HR. Once developed, the templates need to be distributed to all the staff developing training materials for the program so that a consistent look and feel is maintained.

4. The review and approval process can be difficult and confusing if the process is not agreed and communicated up front to the entire project team. The best way to manage the review, update and approval of documents is to use a document management system such as SharePoint if available. This will allow individual team members to check documents out and lock them while they are updating or reviewing them. Be sure to get reviewers to turn track changes on on documents when they are reviewing. This will allow you to quickly track and accept updates. Alternatively, provide hard copies or PDF to reviewers, but always have an agreed review-by date for return of feedback.

Engagement with your project team, sponsor and key stakeholders is key for the successful development of your training materials. Agreeing content and process for review and approval up front will remove room for misunderstanding and reduce any likelihood of miscommunication amongst the team. Use templates and follow visual design guidelines to ensure a consistent look and feel for all materials developed as part of the learning program.

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