Forum Discussion
Do end users need formal training on Office 365 apps?
HI Graham McHugh - This is a great question. I'd encourage you to redefine what "training" means in our current environment. What we find is that many people are unlikely to attend an actual class but the demand for short videos that are task or scenario based is high. Think "playlists" like on Spotify or on your music library. People need to know something exactly when they need to know it so we're going that direction overall.
That being said there is always some demand for virtual or instructor based training that helps people "get" the basics of what the new experience is. 45 minutes seems to be a sweet spot for these trainings. The virtual version is good because we find people stop and start the trainings to try things in the product. Also it's a best practice to establish internal Champions and these folks usually are highly engaged in more in depth training.
Remember all training needs to be in the context of what's in it for the users themselves. What I think is super cool may not help someone else in a particular role. This is why we're so fond of the playlist model and integrated this into our Custom Learning for Office 365 training site template which will be broadly available in Q1/CY19. This SharePoint Online site template with a custom Webpart will allow you to customize the playlists, included products and look/feel of the experience and it's easily pinned in Teams. We'll announce its availability here and in the Driving Adoption community as well.
At the end of the day this is our chance to increase the digital literacy of our workforce and (as I always say) get people to STOP emailing that spreadsheet around! Hope this helps.
I'd like to echo a couple of the other answers here. I love training classes - both as a student and as a teacher. However, I must acknowledge that the traditional instructor-led training scenario is only effective for a small section of users - the ones that have the basic skills, aptitude, interest, and daily hands-on justification for it. That means it just doesn't work well for most end users. It's too much investment in time, and it's too much material for them to remember.
That being said, you have to find a way to let users know what their missing and grow their skills as they need them. I used to lead a team at Visa that did a bunch of things to build interest and skills in the overall user population.
We did 45-minute live webinars on a monthly basis, and we recorded them to make them available on-demand later. They needed to be short, simple, hands-on, and focused on a business problem / use case - not a feature. Most users don't care about features. They care about pain points and how to ease them.
We purchased a contextual help system that provided a self-serve help tab that served little help items that were always relevant to what the user was currently working on. We bought one that had a variety of built-in help content in different formats- quick reference cards, videos, walk-throughs... We also found it very powerful to create some of our own help items to address governance, common tickets, and customizations. Because these are consumed while the user is in the middle of something else, they have to be bite-sized (< 2 minutes / 1 page) and focused on one thing each.
These kinds of things are most impactful if the support team is aware of them and invested in them. Every time we interact with a user is an opportunity to offer them some help. Questions that come through emails, phone calls, tickets... all of them are opportunities to direct someone to one of these resources that might actually help them. It all increases exposure and builds momentum.
We also did 1-hour Ask-Me-Anything sessions we called 'Office Hours'. We put a member or two from our team in a conf rm / Skype bridge at a consistent time every week, and then we evangelized it to death. We found that users LOVED this one. Started a lot of power users just by answering questions about 'what do I use for this' or 'how do I do this'. It also wound up saving our team time. We found that the daily barrage of email and phone calls dropped noticeably, because people knew there was a way they could talk to us on a regular basis.
Lots of good ideas there, Eric -- thanks. Would you mind sharing which contextual help system you purchased? And would you recommend it? I think it's important to make it easy for users to learn about the various apps. To that end, https://office365trainingportal.com/ makes it easy to access the major Office 365 resources from one central location.
I think Microsoft offers some great resources to help users. The problem is that it's scattered around lots of places. At least in my experience, a lot of times when I find something good, it's when I'm looking for something else.
The site you linked is an improvement - it aggregates some of their help content. A lot of the official one-off articles / videos that you find when Googling aren't in there, though. It also requires that the users have enough interest to go to that site and look for an answer. The new help panel that MS is providing with the '?' button within the O365 UI is nice too - but it's search driven rather than being truly contextual. The user has to know what something's called and then manually scan through a long list of possibilities to find basic answers. That's fine for the kind of user that is personally invested in the platform, but for the average end user who only cares about what they're trying to accomplish right now - I think it's less than optimal.
The contextual system we chose at Visa was VisualSP, but there are a few out there to choose from. (Full disclosure, I joined the VisualSP team when I left Visa. I respect the neutral nature of forums like this, so I'm only mentioning it by name because you asked.) The advantage of a context-driven system is that the user doesn't have to go look for help in a separate site or filter through a bunch of unrelated tutorials to find the one they want. It delivers only relevant help items directly to the user while they're working in the platform. I think it's super powerful when you start to create custom help items, too. Custom solutions you build, governance details, common questions your users ask... You can publish them to users when and where they're likely to need them. If you start directing people there when they have questions, then they start to find answers on their own, too.
VisualSP looks like a useful product -- obviously a lot of work has gone into it. I think one of the biggest challenges with developing training/support content for Office 365 is how rapidly it is changing -- for example, the architecture and functionality of modern SharePoint sites is drastically different from classic SharePoint, and requires a whole new way of planning/implementing (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/information-architecture-modern-experience, to name a couple of big changes).
Keeping up with the changes is challenge enough for tech-types, for non-techie end users it's a very confusing time, with multiple apps that do similar things (for example, Yammer, Teams, Skype). Which is why I think it's important to provide end users with quality training (a combination of the many suggestions in this thread), resources, direction, and, perhaps most importantly, the time to learn.
