Douglas Audirsch

My Work at Baker Hughes

The Project I was on at Baker Hughes required me to design, develop, and lead a global training effort for an enterprise-wide software rollout to 12k+ users.  There was nothing in place when I started and the software was in the early stages of being built.  It would be a "build the plane in flight" experience.  I began by identifying the training challenges in this project:

• Global, remote workforce

• 2/3s of remote workers worked in the field without wifi or cell signal

• Software would be constantly incomplete and changing

• 10 different product lines, each with tremendous variety and inconsistency in their own processes and software

• Resistance to change

• Rollout coming on the heels of Baker's split from GE

• No support from corporate training department - one man band for the project's training

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Some of these challenges turned out to have significant silver linings such as:

• Remote workforce made for fewer training hurdles since attendance at classroom events was eliminated

• The huge variety in old processes lightened the workload as understanding the former processes was not feasible

• The split from GE and its processes made it easier to introduce new standardized processes

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Champions/SuperUsers

The approach I took was to train champions who were each dedicated to a specific product line.  Then have them recruit SuperUsers from within their product line and train them.  These SuperUsers would then be responsible for helping train the users in their region.  I trained the 10 product line Champions and the140+ SuperUsers who trained the Regional SuperUsers and End Users.

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Bringing it all together

Bi-monthly I conducted a series of live, global training web-conferences that included ~800 active users across all product lines.  I created an agenda of important issues that needed addressing and ensured this was communicated.  I recruited some SMEs who then conducted the exact same session in Russian, Spanish, and Mandarin.  This was intended to ensure that the major learning items where being addressed globally with a consistent message.  The local SMEs addressed product-line specific items and the hands on daily use questions.

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Resources

I created all of the training content for the project and housed it centrally to ensure consistency in training and communication.  Over 300 Word documents were housed in a SharePoint site and well over 100 Videos were stored in Microsoft Stream.  Teams was used to communicate with our Champions/SMEs and email was used to communicate with all registered users.  Content was also inserted into the software itself in the form of in-app popup guidance, as well as links to the content housed in SharePoint and Streams.  Eventually, I was able to use the documents and videos previously created and build them into an eLearning experience accessible with the program itself removing as many hurdles to training as possible.  I also ran an intranet page posting consistent articles on the current status of the system.  

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Tools

The software I used to accomplish all of this are as follows:

• Camtasia - for creating training videos

• PowerPoint - for creating animations, slideshows, and visual documents (Quick Reference Cards)

• Word - for step-by-step process explanations

• OneNote - organizing my notes and source material

• SharePoint - hosting our Training Repository with Word document content and Stream links

• Stream - hosting our video content

• Paint.net - creating and editing images

• Audiotonic - fine-tuning audio narration and background music and sounds

• Yammer - social media announcements and interaction