Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

I work in the technical training department of my organization. Part of my job is to educate our field  engineers on various critical maintenance activities involved in our equipment’s by developing  procedures in the form of videos and documents then share them to the engineers working in the field.  Since some of the activities are critical for better function of our equipment we have internal portal to  keep track and make sure all the engineers who required to perform those critical tasks are completed  these courses. But we still have been hearing from the field that our equipment are not performing  optimal and also there were incidents of damaging to our equipment’s during the critical maintenance  activities.

I went to the field to investigate this issue and found out the engineer who were performing these  critical maintenance activities were skipping various steps that is recommend in my procedure. When  asked I was told field engineers thought it those steps were not deemed necessary.

Selection

My team has been already involved in educating other groups for a similar issue in the past. During our  internal team discussion, we decided to use learning launch tool since this appeared to be the well  suitable for our problem.

Application

Instead of just sending the procedures in the form of videos and documents I decided to go to the field  with all the necessary tools, 3D printed model of our equipment’s and various exercise materials. I also  prepared questionnaire table which contained various questions regards the challenges faced by field  engineers and other useful information to make the session more interactive as well as practical.

On the day of our training we divided engineers 5/training session. I had explained field engineer’s  importance of each step in technical details. Later I let them try to perform the tasks by using the 3D  printed models which helped them to get trained hands on. I also carefully watched them practicing the  activity to made sure they are performing all the steps with an excepted precision.

Next day same engineers performed the same task on the real equipment, after testing found out the  equipment outperformed and local team was praised by the customer.

During my QA session I learned there were multiple opportunity to reduce the duration of the  maintenance activity which adds up to significant cost savings.

Insight

By applying learning launch tool, we have learned that the interpretation of our procedures might be  vary based on the engineers who is performing the task. Also learned there is better understanding  when the field engineers get a chance to practice the task hands on rather than watching videos or  reading documents.

Going forward we are planning to have more hands-on training for the field engineers, especially for the  newly joined engineers.

This exercise also helped to understand the field engineers needs and challenges they are facing while  performing various tasks. We also learned multiple design changes that will improve our equipment’s  performance.

Approach

I already identified improvement that can be made to my last learning launch session. We are already  identified multiple locations where they are facing similar issues. Plan is to conduct similar trainings for  our field engineers in those location with planned improvements.

