To TRAIN is to INVEST in Quality

When I was reviewing for my PMP exam, I was happy to be reminded that training for people involved in a project is part of the 'preventive cost of quality'.

Training is a cost that companies pay for quality, to avoid future headaches and greater costs of nonconformance and rework.

This was a good reminder for me and I thought of sharing this reminder with others as well.

How do you view training?

Oftentimes, training is not a priority. Companies need to generate profit to survive.

Training requires money and time. Companies pay the speakers and trainers and there are costs involved with training logistics. It is also not surprising that work time lost because of training can sometimes be viewed as money lost or opportunity lost.

The PMBok idea of categorizing training as 'cost of quality' is a good and refreshing perspective not just for the companies but to the trainers and trainees as well.

Invest well with training...

Like in any financial investments, if you don't know how to invest well you will reap loss instead of profit.

So how do you invest well with training?

Plan it well I am working on the assumption that there is a budget for training every year. For sure budget differs but how do you maximize the budget you are allotted?

Work within the budget. If you don't have money to hire a prestigious speaker, look into the pool of people with similar expertise. Make use of local talents. It might work and if it doesn't, provide a detailed report to management to plea for a higher budget next year.

Planning it well also means that you prepare the relevant training for the people. Is the topic timely? Will it provide the necessary knowledge and skill set to prevent a potential risk identified in a project?

Study when is the best time to conduct the training and who are the attendees.

Evaluate if it is working Good that the training went well and everybody is happy and satisfied but how do you plan to verify that training met the objectives? Identify a specific time point to evaluate the effectiveness of the training provided.

Collect lessons learned I have to give credit to where credit is due. PMBok kept hammering the importance of collecting lessons learned. I am just putting a simple twist by applying it to collecting and documenting lessons learned of how the training plans, projects or programs in a company worked.

Lessons learned can be in an excel format or word format but the idea is to maintain a historical database of how training was done in the past. We continue what is working, provide a solution to areas that we can still improve and stop whatever is irrelevant and non-value adding.

Lessons learned is the treasure chest of any company.

Note: Published with the permission of the Author. This article was published in LinkedIn last November 5, 2017 in https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/train-invest-quality-zohra-jane-esperal-msc-pmp-/

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