Project management: should future users train together?
When a project introduces equipment or a process, training is often scheduled around individual availability. The more precise management question is whether people who will have to solve problems together should also train together.
What the literature establishes
Diane Wei Liang, Richard Moreland and Linda Argote (1995, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin) compared group and individual training before a group assembly task. Groups trained together performed better, and the findings supported a mediating role for transactive memory. This refers to an organisation of knowledge in which members know, among other things, who holds which expertise: learning together therefore involves more than receiving the same content.
Knowing who knows: a distinct resource
Kyle Lewis (2003, Journal of Applied Psychology) developed and validated a field measure of transactive memory encompassing specialisation, credibility and coordination. Having different kinds of expertise present is not enough: their holders must be identified, their knowledge considered reliable, and its use coordinated. For a project, this mechanism suggests that training can also make visible the skills that participants will be able to draw upon.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that all future users should attend every session together. These studies do not justify that rule: attending a presentation together is not the same as learning to draw on one another's knowledge. The more relevant consideration is to include a shared exercise when future work will genuinely require several kinds of expertise. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot guarantee
The assembly experiment reproduces neither the qualification requirements of an industrial process nor the consequences of a production error. The field study validates a measurement instrument, but does not in itself establish that group training will cause better performance in every project. Individual certification remains useful for checking learning; on its own, it does not indicate whether the group can locate the right expertise.
A practical check in Neuchâtel
In keeping with SHR's Project Management programme, a project commissioning inspection equipment in Neuchâtel's microtechnology, watchmaking or precision microelectronics sector could include a simulation involving production, manufacturing engineering and quality staff. Before and after the exercise, present comparable anomaly scenarios outside production and ask each participant to identify the appropriate expert and the information to pass on. Measure the proportion of correctly directed requests against a rubric approved beforehand by the technical leads, retaining the answers for verification. An improvement would indicate better routing towards available expertise, without in itself demonstrating improved production quality. To go further: explore the Project Management training in Neuchâtel in the canton of Neuchâtel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Project Management in Neuchâtel
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