Training the second line: who actually keeps the system running
Power users get trained. The people who inherit the system eighteen months later usually do not — which is when platforms quietly decay.
Implementation training almost always targets the launch cohort: the power users, the project team, the department champions. Eighteen months later, half of them have changed roles, and nobody trained their replacements.
01Train roles, not people
Material written for a named individual leaves with them. Material written for a role — "fees officer", "timetable administrator", "systems owner" — survives turnover and forms the basis of induction.
- A one-page task card per role, kept in the system itself
- Recorded walkthroughs of the ten most common tasks
- A quarterly refresher owned by the internal systems owner
- An escalation map: what to try, who to call, what to never touch
The measure of handover is whether a new joiner can complete a month-end task from the documentation alone.
02Make the second line visible
Identify, by name, the two people who will keep the platform running when the project team is gone — and give them time in their workload for it. Unfunded ownership is how a well-built system becomes a legacy system in three years.