Blessay: IT Training Lessons From the Olympics

While the cur­rent Olympics is about as inter­est­ing as review­ing fire­wall rules, the cur­rent suc­cess of first world nations shows that money CAN buy you suc­cess. I’m hop­ing IT Managers can learn train­ing les­sons from this.

The Changeup

The British Olympic team was expec­ted to win about fif­teen gold medals and about thirty in total. Last count it was more like thirty or forty and more are expec­ted. On the radio this morn­ing they were ask­ing ques­tions about how this out­stand­ing improve­ment was achieved.

The answer was money.

Yep, thats right, the British gov­ern­ment setup a massive train­ing pro­gram for all the Olympic grade ath­letes and fun­ded it to the tune of about £500 mil­lion (USD$1 bil­lion). This allowed the Sports Management to hire coaches, nutri­tion­ists, physio­ther­ap­ists, etc etc etc, and put them into a fully ded­ic­ated pro­gram to loc­ate, train, pol­ish ath­letes that will win, and win big they have.

The ath­letes were also fun­ded to have time to do train­ing. By giv­ing them fin­an­cial sup­port, ath­letes could spend more time per­form­ing a wider range of train­ing activ­it­ies. Athletes have also talked about access to bet­ter food, sup­ple­ments, advice. I am sure you get the idea.

Technique, its all about tech­nique, and some technology.

But spe­cific­ally the greatest improve­ment was in tech­nique. Most of the sports that the British Olympic team have made vast improve­ments have involved care­ful atten­tion to tech­nique and tech­no­logy. Cycling, Swimming, Yachting, Shooting, Rowing are all sports where men­tal and phys­ical tech­nique are prime cri­teria. Add in the right tech­no­logy with the best bike, swim­ming suit, boat and you have a win­ning formula.

These sports mat­ter mar­gin­ally less for phys­ical cap­ab­il­ity, aptitude or some fluke of genet­ics (think track and field or mara­thon run­ning), than the care­ful applic­a­tion of know­ledge, sci­ence, train­ing and discipline.

What can Network & IT Managers learn from this ?

Its pretty simple. If you want a team that out­per­forms, that can win and win big, then you need to cre­ate a pro­gram that provides a train­ing facil­ity (like the British Academy of Sport) and resources that sup­port the pro­gram. Like any sports pro­gram, it should have the fol­low­ing, clearly defined goals:

• selec­tion criteria
• suc­cess criteria
• resource alloc­a­tion
• fail­ure cri­teria process

Your guid­ing prin­ciples need to be based around know­ledge, train­ing and discipline.

Selection Criteria

Establish guidelines for select­ing people to enter your train­ing pro­gram. On what basis would you con­sider someone to com­mence CCIE Study ? Is Routing and Switching rel­ev­ant to your team ? You could have a require­ment for Security skills.

Olympic ath­letes have to com­pete and meet a min­imum grade to get entry to the pro­gram. Once in the pro­gram, they are required to meas­ure pro­gress and demon­strate res­ults. Then they must qual­ify for the Olympics.

Use these con­cepts to estab­lish the selec­tion cri­teria for your team members.

Success Criteria

What is suc­cess ? What are the qual­i­fy­ing cri­teria to con­tinue in the train­ing program ?

In my case, I expect my staff to pass the Cisco exams for a given sub­ject. Thus, if I send an indi­vidual to a Cisco BSCI course, I meas­ure suc­cess when they pass the BCSI exam. If they don’t pass, I am not likely to select them to be on the team because they didn’t learn something.

What about ask­ing the their peers if their know­ledge has improved ? This would be roughly equi­val­ent to a train­ing or prac­tice competition.

Resource Allocation

Give care­ful thought to alloc­a­tion of train­ing resources. Those people who are likely to give me res­ults, are those I select to be on the train­ing pro­gram. In this case I am look­ing for indi­vidu­als who are:

• work­ing in key areas
• show the abil­ity to work hard
• demon­strate hunger
• have motiv­a­tion
• have per­sist­ence
• have dis­cip­line

But you will have to take the time to con­sider the resources to give them. Training is a buy­ing decision as ser­i­ous as your next IT pro­ject. Textbooks, train­ing courses, lab envir­on­ments, VoD mater­ial, and even time off from work are pos­sible, but which is going to suit this per­son AND the technology.

For example, there are almost no text­books on Load Balancing and Application Delivery Controllers. It may be that the only way to learn is to build a lab, pre­pare a train­ing plan and mon­itor progress.

Failure and Penalty Process

This is the hard­est topic. When a sports per­son fails the qual­i­fic­a­tion, the pen­alty is clear. But when my staff fail to com­plete my suc­cess cri­teria, I need to have a pen­alty. But mod­ern Human Remorse sys­tems make this hard to achieve.

Typically, I look for bonus plans and recog­ni­tion to achieve this. If you can qual­ify, you will

1. receive a bonus,
2. be avail­able for selec­tion for the next phase
3. be recog­nised for that achievement

If someone fails an exam, then they might pay for the second attempt. If they need more train­ing, I will review that on a case by case basis, but it isn’t going to be easy to con­vince me that you are dif­fer­ent from thou­sands of other men­dic­ants. Special needs doesn’t wash in mod­ern IT.

Commitment — it goes both ways

Now, I assume that you have already cre­ated a team of com­mit­ted people. You can’t insti­tute a train­ing pro­gram that requires your ath­letes to com­mit sev­eral hours a day without provid­ing incent­ives or a goal. Most import­antly though, I believe that train­ing requires a com­mit­ment from the indi­vidual and from the company.

The indi­vidual should be com­mit­ting to:

• Study at night or weekends
• to use the resources that are avail­able, to ask for those that are not
• accept the lim­it­a­tions of the pro­gram, and work around them

Not every pro­gram is per­fect, but the indi­vidual needs to be flex­ible and open to get­ting a result.

But the com­pany needs to make a com­mit­ment back to their people. In short, if you com­mit to offer­ing a train­ing program:

• make sure that your people go to the courses, force them if you have to, don’t accept excuses from your­self or from them.
• make the busi­ness under­stand that train­ing breeds new cap­ab­il­it­ies, faster pro­cesses, bet­ter res­ol­u­tion times, lower cost designs or bet­ter features
• make sure you pay for what is neces­sary, don’t pay without check­ing its rel­ev­ant. Blind train­ing is worse than no training.

Is it real­istic ? Maybe.

Olympic ath­letes are com­pet­ing to win medals, recog­ni­tion, enjoy­ment and their own per­sonal suc­cess. Can Network staff can get this at work ? Absolutely, although cor­por­ate struc­tures don’t nor­mally work this way, it can be done if man­agers can think creatively.

As a man­ager, I need to to remem­ber that for every Olympic ath­lete, there are at ten who didn’t make it, that failed to con­tinue with the pro­gram. Not every mem­ber of my team is going to be a CCIE, or even CCNP. In fact, a team needs to con­sist of dif­fer­ent people, with dif­fer­ent skills, but that’s a blessay for another day.

You must be care­ful about the train­ing pro­cess and ensure that people are tak­ing train­ing that is rel­ev­ant. Not because the money may be wasted, but it can cre­ate poor opin­ion within the team.

Training — it works

You def­in­itely will not see the res­ults of train­ing in a few weeks or months. But it won’t take more than a year and you will find your net­work works bet­ter in many ways. The thing I liked most was that my people get excited about work­ing with me long term, they know that are oppor­tun­it­ies. I like that they have to work for them, and “show me what they got”.

Try it out, the Olympic athlete’s train­ing pro­gram for IT people. It works.

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