Friday 8 May 2009

Who trains the trainers?


Now as a person whose job it is to advise people this is a interesting issue for me to talk about, but a fair few times recently I’ve been to training events where the experts brought more barriers than solutions. The two that stand out relate to experts in the judicious management of a development project...

Ever the optimist, I’d thought that experts in procurement law and project management might have a view on how to achieve a better outcome from the processes.... but when asked about incorporating, benchmarking and assessing the potential quality of the product both shied away and exhorted an auditable concentration on various readily measureable elements that have no lasting benefit for the building owners and users. One such expert enticingly offered up a wee workshop on determining “customer quality expectations (CQE)” - those factors that determine what the project needs to achieve - and defining the “acceptability criteria” that reflect these. Great stuff if he hadn’t then refused to address the primary CQE as he could not see a numerical way of defining it!

In both my recent disappointments the expert’s focus was avoiding claims, not getting a result you’d actually want; one which is worth the effort and expense. With such messages being relayed across the country it’s no wonder that overstretched and underappreciated people often choose simply to follow the advice given in the training their leaders have bought and paid for. ..

Perhaps, instead of helping client bodies gain the confidence to value what they aspire to, we should instead be training the trainers not to undermine what good clients have set out to do...

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