In my work with Life Sciences companies, I’ve found that most companies today use Read & Understood training extensively.
In theory, this simplifies initiating new team members and keeping your existing staff up-to-date. No quizzes or tests to create; all QA managers have to do is publish a document and send it to those who need that information to get their job done right.
In practice, though, there are a lot more inefficiencies and waste than meets the eye. I found this out firsthand when I was asked by a large company to implement a systematic, hands-free Read & Understood system. They wanted to make it easy for QA to deploy training materials and for staff to access, review and confirm.
Initially I thought, “How hard can that be? After all, it only takes seconds to assign a page for training, right?”
It was my own underestimation that helped me uncover the gaping hole in this traditional training approach – and led me to develop Radbee’s Read & Understood Training Genius for Confluence.
The problem with traditional Read & Understood training
When it comes to Read & Understood training systems, bureaucracy is a burden that weighs on QA managers and team members alike. The larger and more complex an organization, the easier it is to get stuck in a slow-moving system that limits effective training and jams compliance.
So, for example, at the organization where I had my light bulb moment, QA managers routinely spent upwards of an hour to onboard employees – just to locate and manually assign necessary training pages. Considering that this company made tens of new hires each month and had other significant staff movement (i.e. promotions, leaves of absences, etc.), who needed to be trained at any given moment was a moving target.
Beyond staff changes, training documents also evolved over time. It quickly became clear that administering an organization-wide training program to auditors’ satisfaction was a full-time job. There was no time leftover for QA managers to ensure the quality of the actual training materials – which would in turn would support happier, more competent staff and higher quality products.
The road to a better training process
Better training, management and compliance was on my mind as I worked on my enterprise client’s Read & Understood system issues. Up close with their obstacles, I began to see significant opportunities for improvement.
First, we needed to truly automate the Read & Understood process in order to end the bureaucratic, administrative log jam and free up QA managers’ time for more important work. Staff would also enjoy a personalized view of their training obligations, with automatic nudges via email from the system to complete anything outstanding.
Added to the mix was central reporting capabilities from an easy-to-use dashboard to simplify the auditing process by making real-time, accurate compliance reports instantly accessible. All data could also be exported to Excel and used as a powerful management tool to track KPIs, including how quickly people train and which departments are more responsive than others.
This was the genesis of the Radbee Read & Understood Training Genius for Confluence. Featuring hands-free assignment, all QA managers need to do is define their training matrix rules, and the app takes it from there.
If you’re like my client, and the burden of bureaucracy is crushing your QA system efficiency and destroying company resources and QA managers’ morale, then I invite you to explore the Radbee Read & Understood app on Atlassian’s marketplace. You can also contact me for more information.