In today’s competitive business environment, training professionals are under constant pressure to deliver more training, in greater quantities, and in less time. Challenges include global competition, reductions in corporate resources, and the ongoing need to retain talented and skilled people.

Traditionally, training departments were often separate from their organization’s day-to-day business. Multi-day live classroom training was the primary approach. This was expensive from a dollars and resource perspective, and difficult to schedule because of travel arrangements and other work commitments. Management frequently viewed training as necessary, but costly.

Distance education was a step in the right direction. It reduced travel costs, and eliminated some, but not all, scheduling issues. Other initiatives such as web-based training, mentoring, blended learning, and just-in-time learning were also beneficial. However, this was like picking the low-hanging fruit on a tree. Additional savings and improvements would require more innovative approaches.

Besides efficiently delivering training, today’s training departments must be tightly aligned and integrated with their organization’s business goals and needs. The common goal is to drive higher performance and create strong business results by improving employee performance.

Lean Six Sigma is an improvement process designed to help organizations meet their goals and their customers’ needs.

An early innovator was Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a quality improvement pioneer in both Japan and America. His 85/15 rule stated that 85% of problems were built into the way work was done, and only 15% was the fault of individual employees. 

One central theme of Lean Six Sigma is that unnecessary complexity adds cost, time, and waste. Another is that only customers can define quality. Anything that does not meet a customer need can be considered a defect. In addition, low quality and slow processes make their corresponding services and products, expensive. By focusing on improvements to the process flow, we can improve training development speed, quality, and integration with organizational business goals.

This presentation examines the challenges of training in today’s competitive business environment. It focuses on a systematic approach to training program development using the principles of Lean Six Sigma.

Examples will include self-paced web learning portals that provide structured training paths as well as access to additional resources such as recordings of knowledge transfers, departmental sites, documentation, and wikis.

A long-standing problem at PTC, as with other companies, has been our limited ability to reuse common content among different document deliverables. To reduce cost and improve the re-usability of our documents, we needed a single-source XML authoring environment to create modular content to be used by multiple authors across multiple courses and published in multiple formats. Attend this session to learn how we: used the single-sourcing capabilities of Arbortext to deliver nine deliverables from one source, used a DITA-based solution to modularize course design and facilitate content reuse, adopted a dynamic publishing solution to provide us with course consistency.

With the release of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite, “single sourcing” took on new meaning. Where it once seemed almost magical to create print, web, and PDF products from a single source file, the Adobe Technical Communication Suite added video, 3D graphics, and Help capabilities to the mix.

The Technical Communication Suite had been announced but not released when ImaCor LLC began developing their echocardiography hardware and software documentation. They were intrigued by the possibilities of an integrated application suite and gambled on the software sight unseen. The bet paid off. In addition to the print manual required for FDA approval, the ImaCor documentation project yielded:

• An interactive PDF-based user manual with 3D graphics and video components
• Product spec sheets with 3D graphics
• An embedded software Help system with video components
• A web-based Help system with video components
• PDF and web-based training and marketing materials with 3D and video components

This presentation looks at the real-world trials and triumphs of employing the Adobe Technical Communication Suite to produce a broad range of materials in multiple media. Specifically, it considers:

• Project planning
• Skills development
• Learning resources
• Lessons learned

Join me in exploring how the Adobe Technical Communication Suite promotes new levels of creativity and unprecedented effectiveness in technical and instructional materials.