Right Tools For The Right Job

Hello SimDevGroup Community-

Have you taken time to think about what tools you're using for your business training or leadership development programs? If not, we actually think this is good. Why? Because most people think heavily about getting the right training tools well before they have clearly defined the job. To take a step even further back, have you taken a look at the core set of business training program needs? Where did your training program come from? Did it come from a program that has been around for awhile, built up over a series of annual need changes? If so, we're guessing you have a few training barnacles. What are we getting at?

We recommend you take an hour or so, look at your most important business training or leadership development program and look at the following: The training program need, the training program goals, and then the training tools. If you instantly look at the latter two, you will wind up with an unfocused training program that is trying to fix too many needs (some of which may no longer be relevant).

This brings us to the final point... what training tools are you using? Are you using a little bit of a lot of things? If so, you're going to get the same results... a little of this, a little of that, and not a lot of focus. This is especially the case when it comes to creating a business simulation for training and development or leadership development.

We bring this up because we just completed a very long and painful exercise of really looking at our backend office systems (which are very complex due to software development). We took a hard and focused look at the tools we use to create business training simulations and/or leadership development simulation software. In the end, we cut out roughly 30% of our development tools. This created an amazing amount of focus and we felt like our development systems went through a very much overdue car wash. Feels great and productivity is already much better and with less complaining. We just decided to apply the same concept to business training and leadership development. Hope the idea got you thinking about how and where your current training and development program come from.

We'll be writing more specifically about business simulations soon.