Background

After completing an internal review of their communication systems, The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) recognised a need to have one single, unified communication system for all of its collaboration requirements. This included a system that would enable both external and internal calls, conference calls, and chat functionality across the organisation.

CAA chose Skype for their needs, as it was a collaboration tool that was already being used across the organisation. However, as the tool would now be used in a different way to before, CAA sought additional support in rolling out the system, and delivering user-focused training to ensure best practice across the workforce.

The organisation was extremely keen to deliver high-quality training to its workforce, but didn’t have any expertise or resource available in-house. As a result, they elected to collaborate with an external training partner, and having already worked with Underscore on its recent SharePoint Online training, decided to engage the team once again to deliver the required Skype training.

Solution

Underscore worked in partnership with the change management team to develop a series of training programmes to be delivered across the organisation. These included face to face sessions and virtual training. The purpose of the training was to showcase the functionality of Skype, and ensure that all employees were using the features in the same way, following best practice guidelines, as set out by CAA.

In addition to the formal training sessions, Underscore also ran a series of ‘help-desks’ where users could seek support for specific challenges they were facing. These were run on an informal basis, as drop-ins, and proved to be a popular means of resolving common queries.

Challenges

Being a large, diverse and geographically dispersed organisation, CAA wanted to develop a training package that could be easily scaled up and delivered to its whole workforce with minimal disruption to business as usual. To enable this to happen, Underscore developed both face to face and virtual training sessions.

Both formats covered the same topic and enabled users to ask questions and engage directly with the training session, however, the virtual training option allowed users to attend from wherever they were based. This helped reduce the need for travel, and minimised the need for time away from the office.

Feedback and Outcomes

One of the main outcomes CAA was hoping to achieve as a result of the switchover included financial benefits to the organisation in being able to remove desk phones, and also cost savings as a result of cancelling their conferencing contract with their current provider. The tool also helped to increased collaboration across the organisation’s workforce.

Helen Jackson, Change Manager at CAA offered the following feedback:

“I have had a great experience working with Underscore. Right from our first conversation where I had an indication of the training I wanted to run, but not concrete specifics. Susan our trainer, worked with me to design and scope bespoke training that met our needs. I really appreciated Susan’s advice and guidance in this process from her extensive experiences – as it meant we ensured we had the right amount of content, messaging was pitched at the right level and the sessions were well timed and a good length.

In organising the training sessions Underscore were as professional and as flexible as they could be to meet our needs for training delivery days. Susan was always on time and left plenty of time to prepare for the sessions. Susan was happy to adapt to the array of technology in our meeting rooms and always did so with a smile.

The quality of the pack produced for training was to a very high professional standard and gave confidence to attendees that we were covering the right material. The sessions were run at a good pace for our colleagues and gave a great balance of theory and hands on practice time.

Susan was also fantastic following the running of training session by feeding back the Frequently Asked Questions to the project team. This gave us indication of the areas where we needed to tailor and focus our guidance material going forward, and Susan even followed up with individuals who had asked her questions – providing a personalised service.

Overall, the training sessions were to a very high standard and exactly met our needs. Colleagues left those sessions ready willing and able to use Skype, which is a key enabler to us transforming to a new unified communications solution for the CAA. This key change, wouldn’t have been successful without Underscore’s support and expertise.”

talk to us about bespoke virtual training for your business
back to all case studies