Every change leader at one time or another is faced with selling training to the big guys. And what happens? The training budget, if you have one at all, is the first to be cut. Why? Because the leaders just don't know what they don't know. They don't know what happens to their troops when new systems are installed or new processes.

Let me tell you what that means. Imagine the proverbial four box quadrant with all four boxes of equal sides. There are two boxes on the bottom with two boxes sitting on top, one on each. We've all seen it. One popular quadrant is the time management matrix. So imagine you're looking straight at the four boxes. The bottom left box we'll call number one, the bottom right number two, the top left number three and the top right number four.

Along the bottom two boxes runs a continuum from one to ten that represents a person's skill on the job. That is their basic competence. Running vertically on the left side bottom to top is another continuum from one to ten, starting at the bottom representing a person's experience, meaning years in the business. So if you are with me, the bottom represents a person's skill or proficiency, zero being no skill and ten being highly skilled. Up the left side the other continuum is a person's experience, zero being new to the job and ten being a person with years on the job.

If you take an organization that has been relatively stable, systems in place for some time and people in place even longer it is easy to demonstrate the value of training when making large scale systems or process changes. Let's look at two different people that are impacted by the coming changes.

Fred, we'll call him, has been with you forever. He has many years experience with what he is doing and has been using your system since you implemented it five years ago. If we give Fred a score for experience, let's say it's a nine. Fred's skill with the systems we'll say is an eight. His score would then place him on an axis that is in quadrant four, top right. He is an asset to your organization in this area.

Now let's look at Freda. She is new to the company but has experience in the business, yet the systems are somewhat new to her. We give her a seven for experience and a five on your systems. That places her in quadrant four like Fred, just not as high. When you do the rest of your team you find most in quadrant four, top right. That's not surprising since your organization is stable.

Then in comes a new CEO like many that I have seen and you've been going crazy getting ready for the past year and a few months to implement SAP. When you flip the switch on SAP, and let's assume just for giggles that it actually works, haven't seen that yet but let's just say it does, what happens to Fred and Freda?

With a new system everything is new. So Fred's experience in the industry remains the same but is impacted by a new way of doing business so instead of being a nine, he drops a couple places to maybe a six. Now when it comes to skill he is certainly no longer an eight but a two or three dependent totally on how much training he is given. Usually training is cut, is unrealistic and everyone in the joint is now a two or three. So which quadrant is Fred in? He is now in quadrant one on the bottom left … some experience that helps but no skill.

Freda is in the same boat only worse. Everyone in the place drops into quadrant one because they are instantly stripped of both their experience and skill. Draw this out on a piece of paper for your outfit and you'll see the people drop from the right top quadrant to the bottom left and that means you have problems running your organization in the meantime.

In the consulting world, working on ERP project implementations and large scale process change, it happens all the time. How long does it take for people to get back up to quadrant one where they are comfortable and capable … the true answer is, it depends. But for super users, those who spend their day with the systems, we've seen it take up to a year with the best cases being six months to full proficiency.

You can't eliminate the problem entirely but you can mitigate the damages. First, make sure that the new system is adequately tested and not thrown on to the street in an act of anticipated heroism. Since we know in eighty percent of the implementations we see that this isn't going to happen, the only other thing you can do outside of group prayer, is to make sure that you have real, detailed training, well in advance and with time for key users to become believers in the system and drive it through. If you do, you'll cut the learning curve in half.

Understand that you can't fight this; it is just the way it is. We've found that by drawing this four box diagram and plotting your people on one slide and then showing them all in quadrant one on the other, it helps the big folks get their minds around the problem. Now I said it helps, it isn't an end all. You have to fight for training or pay the terrible price of enduring the pain of the learning curve as everyone travels back up from the bottom left box, quadrant one, to the top right box, quadrant four. The choice is yours.

Ed Kugler