Post Go-live Support, Hypercare, Post Implementation Period, it doesn’t matter what you call it, the period of time directly after an SAP go live until your users are proficient enough to stand on their own and begin to use the standard support model is critical to ensuring user adoption and project success. 

Ensuring users feel supported and well prepared for the new system is critical to guarantee adoption of the system. Unfortunately for the implementation team and for your budget, this usually involves resources onsite and the associated travel costs and the lost opportunity for those resources to be doing their normal work or beginning their next project.

Training Strategies

An effective training strategy can help to ensure user adoption.  But as any experienced SAP implementation specialist will tell you, when project timelines get tight and tasks need to be cut or compressed to make the deadline, training is almost always the first thing to go.  Additionally, other factors can lessen the effectiveness of traditional classroom training.  

Factor #1 – Amount of time between training and usage

Several studies have shown that the average trainee will forget 70% of what they have learned in a traditional training class within 24 hours.  This is what is commonly known as the forgetting curve. Training strategies such as spaced learning have been used over the years to combat the forgetting curve.  These strategies attempt to reinforce the topics covered in training periodically over time to more effectively establish the knowledge with the trainee. Realistically, this type of training strategy would only be practical for organizations with large change management teams.

Factor #2 – Design or process changes between training and go-live

In a perfect implementation, before training documentation is completed and delivered, user acceptance testing will be completed and no additional changes of any kind will be allowed to the design.  In many projects, however, changes are happening right up until go live. In this case, the training documentation will naturally be out of date or incorrect. Retraining end users may not be an option.  Distributing new documentation to these end-users to learn themselves may not reach all of the impacted users effectively.

How Employees Learn

Today’s employees prefer to learn in a different way.  In addition to the factors discussed above, the effectiveness of traditional classroom training is lessened further by your employees’ learning preferences.  In the 2018 Workplace Learning Report from Linkedin, we find that 68% of employees prefer to learn at work, while 58% prefer to learn at their own pace. Additionally, 49% of employees prefer to learn at the point of need, meaning they prefer to learn while doing the job.  This is where traditional classroom training falls short.

Solutions for Today’s Employee

OnScreen’s Digital Adoption Platform provides instruction and assistance exactly how today’s employee prefers to learn – on the job, at their own pace, at the point of need.  OnScreen provides context-sensitive guides, in the employee’s own business language, directly within the SAP application, only when needed by the business user. Use OnScreen as a supplement to classroom training for larger projects, or as a replacement for classroom training for smaller projects.

Reduce Training Time

Classroom and eLearning training development can be costly and time-consuming.  A 2017 article by the Association for Talent Development estimates anywhere from 25 to 40 hours of development to deliver 1 hour of classroom training.  That same study shows the average time to develop 1 hour of eLearning content to be significantly more (from 40 hours up to 140 hours depending on the type of eLearning).  It’s easy to see why a reduction in training development time can be a real benefit. OnScreen authors average 27 minutes or less to develop a single OnScreen guide equivalent to 30 minutes of classroom training. 

Get Users Productive Faster

Of course, the ultimate goal for any training program is to get business users productive as quickly as possible.  OnScreen allows business users to confidently perform business processes in the SAP system while knowing context-sensitive assistance, in their business language, developed by their own subject matter experts is only a button click away.  Check out more details and customer stories at OnScreen.us and schedule a demo today.