If you are planning a Salesforce training session, I want you to pull out a piece of paper and a pen, and do these 2 things...

First - draw the current reality

Turn your paper so it's landscape, and draw a line down the middle. On the left-hand side, draw a picture of what the current situation is in your company. What isn't working? Why are you doing the training at all?

If your Salesforce reports are completely inaccurate, and management can't accurately budget, you could draw something like this...

I'm the new co-treasurer at our local school's PTO (Parent Teacher Organization—what used to be called the PTA).

Here's a recent exchange I had with a friend who used to be the treasurer for our local school's PTO. 

Me: "So, what does the treasurer for the PTO do?"

Previous PTO Treasurer: "There are a lot of things. For example, when you do the daddy-daughter dance..."

[after 40 minutes explaning what a treasurer does]

Me: "Oh wow! That's a lot. So, are there any procedures for how to do all of that?"

Previous PTO Treasurer: "Not really...no..."

After that, I felt like most employees starting a new job—nervous.

What am I supposed to do?

I volunteered to be the PTO co-treasurer for the next two years.

And right now, no current member of the PTO actually knows what a co-treasurer does. Which means that no current member of the PTO actually knows what I'm supposed to do.

Fortunately, I am friends with the previous treasurers. And they live down the street from me. So we are going to have several long talks.

And I am going to be creating a lot of training docs in ScreenSteps.

And on this blog, I am going to be journaling my experience so you and I can discuss lessons learned in a very candid way.

I admit it - I have run my fair share of terrible, boring, ineffective training sessions that made my co-workers cringe.

When I was fresh out of college, one of my responsibilities at my new job was to get new-hires up to speed when they began working on my project. I typically followed these 10 guidelines:

While discussing best-practices for end-user training with Mike Gerholdt, Salesforce Admin Evangelist, he brought up a great point.

If you only focus on the technology, users will feel disconnected from the process. 

The business process informs the technology and the technology supports the process.

Sometimes, we focus too much on "teaching the technology" and not enough time explaining the process so that the technology -- and the inputs needed -- feel natural.

We couldn’t agree more; however, this brings up a new kind of challenge - what is the best way to teach a business process to end-users? A process map will scare most away, and paragraphs in PowerPoint put everybody to sleep.