Standardise or Bespoke

Have you ever attended a training session and thought “Why am I being taught something I don’t use?” or “I/my team does not work like this”.

This is something that sits in the back of my mind when I am preparing for any training session. I want to make sure that everyone attending my sessions is happy with the content that I am teaching and that it is relevant to them, as much as I can.

This can be made more difficult when training people with different roles or in different teams where they are likely to use the systems differently. With this in mind, it is more of a challenge to make the session fully relevant to each attendee.

In certain situations, I can make some sessions 100% relevant to the attendees. Particularly, where I am asked to create bespoke training, allowing me to research and investigate the firm’s specific ways of using that system, and to design a more useful training session.

Bespoke Training

This month, one of my clients asked me to train their staff on billing in their Practice Management System (PMS). This was supplemental to the training delivered upon implementation of the PMS, around 5 years ago, but usage had not been reviewed or trained on for a while, apart from for new starters.  

The client initially wanted to train everyone the same way, to make sure everyone is using the system correctly. They saw billing is a key element of the PMS, and they wanted to make sure they are not missing any time-saving or functional tips.

As I have been working in the legal industry for a long time, I recognise that each team has a different approach to invoicing and although the system is the same for everyone, some elements of the process are more or less relevant to each team. For example, some teams have fixed fee matters, others bill monthly, and others bill at the end of the matter, so you can see that with standard training, some elements would not be relevant for all of the attendees.

Bespoke training for each team would mean that each attendee would be trained on the elements in the billing area that would be relevant to their team; meaning that the training will be more efficient and beneficial to everyone.

I discussed both options with my client and we agreed that bespoke training was the best approach.  Given this decision, the next step is to run Team-based billing discovery sessions so that I can develop a deeper understanding of how they bill, what elements of the system they may or may not be using and how we can make best use of the system features available to them.

After these discovery sessions and the delivery of the training, their team’s processes will be documented to help support the current staff, and to educate any new joiners to the teams.

The Benefits of Bespoke Training

As well as having relevant training, there are some other benefits to bespoke training such as:

• The combination of familiar processes and training tailored to those processes helps to embed training more quickly.
• The attendees will be switched on and understand how important this training is as the training is aligned with their day-to-day work and tasks that they encounter.
• The discovery sessions are invaluable as this may be the only platform for the team to get together and talk about their use of the system. Also, a lot of knowledge sharing happens in these sessions, because when people are sharing their frustrations, someone in the team may already have a solution.

Standardised Training

This is a more generic approach, where the same content and delivery method are used for all teams, regardless of their specific needs and preferences.

Although it sounds like standardise training may not be as beneficial as bespoke training, there are certain instances where this type of training is more appropriate, such as implementing a new product or process to a firm. There may be no prior knowledge of the product or process and therefore no differences to take into consideration.

Standardised training is also useful where you would like to embed a standard way of working and to ensure that individuals and teams aren’t using outdated or non-compliant processes.

Benefits of Standardised Training

Standardised training will:

• Keep training costs down as there is no work going into discovery and adapting training to meet everyone’s needs.
• It ensures consistency, conformity and compliance across the firm and avoids any confusion as everyone is trained in the same way.