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FORMULATING A TRAINING PLAN 
A training plan for a new production system defines the 
curriculum design required to prepare the system users. 
When system implementors are preparing or selecting 
courses, the managers accountable for producing skilled 
users must monitor the process. This monitoring assures 
the expected instruction is delivered and the appropriate 
benefits received. Initially, administrators are primarily 
interested in defining and managing the schedule and 
resources required to develop the production system. 
Almost immediately after the general question about 
resources is asked, hundreds of additional questions turn 
up. How many people will be trained? How many shifts? 
How much equipment? What job skills are required prior 
to training? What tasks will they perform? How long will 
the courses be? How many courses will be required? 
What order? How will success be measured? What is the 
availability of facilities, equipment, and materials for the 
instructors and the students? How many weeks will the 
instructors be preparing or presenting individual courses? 
How many days at each site? How many hours will the 
lecture rooms be used and when? The process of 
developing a training plan makes these items known and 
causes a suitable sequence for addressing them to be 
defined. 
Preparing a training plan was a required part of our 
contract. Rather than simply present a completed 
document at the appropriate time, we found that 
establishing a multi-organizational planning team 
produced a better curriculum design. Perhaps even more 
important, all organizations through their team members 
gain a vested interest in its content. Throughout the 
process, the planning team can regularly review and 
respond to the recommendations, reactions, questions, 
and issues. A mix of system integrators, training 
directors, and program administrators from each 
production site ensures the effectiveness of the decisions 
and actions. Plus the inherent tension between the 
perspectives and objectives of the representatives can be 
employed to improve the quality of the plan's content. 
A training plan should include discussions about the 
training approach, the applicable documents, and the 
individual course descriptions. The training approach is 
driven by the interplay between several aspects of 
production. These aspects are the production operations, 
the personnel, and the production implementation 
schedule. Since the final acceptance testing of a large 
system may take several months, training schedules must 
avoid training all the potential users too early. The 
individual on-site production studies and tests can take 
several weeks or months to complete. The system 
implementors are interested in completing the contractual 
training requirements, but production operators should 
not be trained until just before they begin to use the 
system. Therefore, our training approach was to instruct 
personnel who participated in the on-site testing and 
integration acti ¡ties; i.e. they continued to use the new 
system after completing the appropriate training 
course(s). This provided each production site greater 
flexibility in scheduling training for additional personnel 
and in implementing new production activities. 
Whether a system implementor elects to develop courses 
or use existing courses and materials, the training plan 
should discuss the individual course descriptions. These 
descriptions outline what topics must be addressed for 
each course. The discussion should include the course 
length, the number of students for each site, the methods 
of presentation (lecture, lab, class discussion, etc.), the 
prerequisite courses, the major topics, the equipment, the 
materials, and the documentation. (See Table 1 - 
Individual Course Descriptions) If there is no written staff 
plan for the system, this may be an excellent place to 
cover the skills, experience, and education the students 
should possess prior to training for production. We also 
found that distinctions between what the instructors and 
the students need for both lectures and labs were 
necessary in order to handle preparations smoothly. 
Establishing agreement upon the criteria for evaluating 
students' successful completion of the course is very 
important. Once the actual instruction begins, the 
assessments of student progress can become extremely 
sensitive for the students, the instructors, program 
managers, and administrators. That is because the 
completion of some major program milestones with 
associated payments may ride upon the outcome. 
Table 1 - Individual Course Descriptions 
• Course Length 
• Number of students (per site) 
• Methods of presentation (lecture/lab ratio) 
• Prerequisites; previous courses and/or experience 
• Major Topics 
• Lesson Outline and Objectives 
• Standards and Measurements 
• Documentation List 
• Equipment and materials; in lecture and lab 
• Schedule; course preparation and platform time 
Although a course outline which covers each lesson's 
objective and content should be included, we found it 
worthwhile to publish the training plan prior to 
completing this portion. When we finished developing 
the lesson content for entire courses, we updated the 
training plan. This approach allowed the developers and 
the planning team to focus initially upon scheduling and 
facilities logistics and then shift to reviewing subject 
matter content during the early stages of content 
development. Within each outline, we also included a 
figure that showed the daily hours of lectures and labs. 
This figure was especially useful for logistics people who 
schedule conference room usage, or system 
demonstrations, or maintenance activities. (See Figure 2. 
Production Manager Course Outline Example). This is 
also an excellent time to prepare estimates of production 
volumes and schedules for graphics, printing, and 
shipments.