Partner’s dilemma

Partners play a vital role in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 landscape. Their jobs are not easy. They need to take their customers through a painful change management process and deploy new technology without disrupting their business operations. Partners and customers rely on each other to make better decisions throughout the project. Having a well-informed party on the other side helps both parties in this long journey. This is where online training can help.

It is in the partner’s best interest to work with an educated customer. Having well-trained project team members upfront will minimize design issues, increase the quality of the solution, and reduce the costly change orders. Partners can utilize on-line training platforms to get their customers up to speed quickly. These platforms should cover a variety of functional areas, provide easily digestible content, and also measure progress.

There are other ways that online training platforms can help partners in their deployments. Once the solution is built, partners can combine standard and custom content to create tailored learning paths for their customers. The solution can be introduced to hundreds of users across several locations at once. The training progress of all users can be monitored individually. The low-performing user groups and functional areas can be determined. Scarce training resources can be used in a much more targeted fashion to address the weakest areas. The on-line training platform can be used to assess the user’s competence with the new solution. An objective and quantitative baseline can be formed to evaluate go-live readiness.

Partners generally follow the train the trainer approach in their projects. They train the core project team members and key users who are then tasked to train the rest of the organization. In theory, this seems quite reasonable. In reality, customers have a lot of challenges in its execution. This approach assumes that the project team and key users are good trainers to start with. Knowing something and being able to teach it are two different things. Moreover, it assumes that these valuable customer resources have time to train others in the organization. This generally is the biggest issue because the same resources are sucked into ironing out several critical issues prior to go-live while working on their daily jobs. They can be easily overwhelmed. Even though everyone acknowledges the importance of training at the beginning, the execution is subpar in most projects.

At the end of the day, partners are on the hook for the success of the deployment. They are often stretched thin to address hundreds of tasks in these massive complex system deployments. Partner resources are best utilized to tackle the hardest and complex functional and technical areas. Having a solid online training platform supporting the partner in educating the customer is a great help.