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Scenario-based training for Office 365

Structuring our courses around scenario-based training is pivotal to us at Coach Office 365. In this blog article I will describe why and lay out the benefits of using use-case scenarios for helping people adopt Office 365.
Scenario-based training for Office 365

What is a scenario for Office 365?

Let’s start with investigating what we define as a scenario. 

A scenario starts out with a strong people-centric approach, and leaves out the technology for the time being.

We start with describing a situation at work, where usually there is one or several people who want to accomplish something.

It could be: “I have to schedule a meeting with my team members, and allow for a structured approach to communicating before the meeting, run the meeting and take meeting notes that we can use to steer our actions after the meeting“. How could I best accomplish this in Office 365?

Or

I have to record the decisions that we take in our management board, and communicate the decisions to the relevant people in an easy way

This approach is usually what IT projects do initially in their pre-study phase, and the needs analysis feeds into a requirement specification. But when the system has been configured, and it is time for the end users to start using the system, the common approach is still to train people on “how to use [the specific system] to accomplish your goal or task.” In this way a lot of training approaches are technology centric. And why is that? 

Well, I can see that we are not able to let go of the analytical understanding of the system (what button give what respons) to let the people who will use the system the freedom to discover what it can do to help them achieve their goals. A common objection I hear here is “but the system has been designed on the basis of the organization’s goals and strategy, not on the whims of individual staff members. We have to teach them how they should work in the future”. 

As a trainer, having spent much time interacting with the end-users of organizations, I have very rarely met staff members who are not interested in learning how to work more productively in the role they are hired to do. I believe that this is an intrinsic drive that we humans all have, and that can be trusted in when we develop our training strategy for Office 365. In the cases that this is not true, it actually falls more on the leadership of the organisation than on the technology. 

Here are some more resources on how to work with scenarios for Office 365:

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