Director of Store Systems

       A leader in video rentals starting from a single store in 1988, they have grown to become one of the world's largest video chains with more than 2,500 stores across the United States . The company has 28,000 employees and conducts business in 47 states plus the District of Columbia .

The Need for a Significant Upgrade
       When planning for a migration from their COBOL Point of Sale application to a .NET application, our client’s Director Team turned to the SMART team . Their SMART team had the necessary process and resources to meet their requirements.  New Horizons of Minnesota was chosen on their reputation and their track record of helping to identify the skills and competencies needed for their IT teams moving to new development and server technology. 

Definition and Assessment
       A key group of COBOL developers, engineers, data base administrators and tech support personnel with little or no Microsoft skills were required to quickly gain the skills and knowledge necessary to support their new .NET application.  For a successful Microsoft implementation, it was critical that this team’s skills were at required levels to support and fully utilize the application upon completion. To identify and then mitigate the skill gaps to increase the likelihood of project success, New Horizons of Minnesota's Readiness Team and SMART (skills, measurement, assessment and resource tool) defined the required skills based on future job role competencies and provided a web-based skill assessment process to gauge current skill levels.
      SMART combines a robust database with a formal methodology that defines & manages IT skills inventories. The SMART software is a .NET Application hosted at New Horizons of Minnesota and is deployed to each employee's desktop through an internet browser.
      Each employee in the key groups subjectively evaluated their skills in the specific technologies required of their project. As a starting point, SMART used .NET technology frameworks mapped to industry standard roles as a starting basis and then customized the competency requirements based on this specific project’s skill requirements.  Using the self-assessment data, a gap analysis was created. To mitigate the skill gap, SMART formulated dynamic education plans structured by role, by department or individually.  

Organizational Results
        Organization plans from SMART pointed to blended education solutions that included MELL, MS Press books, mentoring and Instructor-led training. Our client was able to leverage our assessment methodology and frameworks to rapidly create budget templates and education plans at a critical point in the project timeline. This helped to mitigate project risks and under utilization of IT staff.

Custom Solution for a Custom Problem
       Equipped with the gap analysis from the SMART assessment, New Horizons of Minnesota created specific education plans for each job-role group:  developer, database administrators and engineers.
      Based on these categorizations and on the information in its initial skills assessment, New Horizons of Minnesota focused first on updating the core developer team from their COBOL background to C#.NET.   The SMART assessment confirmed the developers had very little exposure to Object Oriented Programming, Design & Analysis. We delivered four OO overview classes for people who required an introduction and three OOA&D classes to the core developers whose primary experience was in COBOL.  The core developers then began a four week custom education track including five days of C#.NET Programming, two days of Windows 2000 Essentials for Developers, three days of Developing .NET Windows Applications with C#, two days of Transact SQL, three days of Building COM+ Applications & two days of VB Scripting. The training spanned a 7 week period between May and June 2003.
      The next phase will focus on engineers, database administrators and tech support personnel.  They will participate in three weeks of education during the 4^th quarter to meet their job role requirements.  Our SMART results showed that these three technology groups have solid background on NT4 but lack experience with Windows 2000, Windows 2003 and Active Directory.  We leveraged their current experience to accelerate the required time to cover each topic, consolidated topics to remove redundancy among the 25 days of structured classes, rearranged content to keep related topics together - this further accelerates the training time requirement. 
      Content was structured in a logistically favorable sequence.  This sequence allows for the Database Administrators and Help Desk Technicians to receive all their content in a continuous two or five day segment, respectively.
      Week one will include training from the Maintaining a Windows Server Environment and the Managing a Windows Server Environment courses.  The Engineers will participate in a condensed 5-day version and the database administrators and tech support team will participate in a 2-day version.   Week two will include training from the Implementing, Managing and Maintaining a Windows 2003 Network Infrastructure course.  The Engineers will participate in a 5-day version and the database administrators will participate in a 2 day version. Week three will end with a 5 day version of the Planning and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure and the Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure attended only by the Engineers.    
     If we compared the Microsoft classes in whole to our role-based custom courses, the developers would normally have had to take 25 days of classes, the engineers 23, the database developers 13 and the help desk technicians 8.  Because Microsoft courseware customization enabled us to bring the relevant modules together to create a customized course, we were able to save the company 8 days of classes for the developers, 10 days for the engineers, 8 days for the database administrators and 6 for the help desk technicians.

The Benefits of Customization
       For most staff in the IT groups, training days were cut in half compared to the days required to get the same training from publicly offered courses. 
      “Fewer days mean fewer dollars that the customer must spend thus producing greater customer satisfaction,” says Marti Rinker.  “We estimate that, when they bought the customized training program, our client saved up to 70 percent of the tuition cost of sending the same employees to public classes.”
      But the direct cost of training represents only part of our savings.  The customized courses cut the time that staffers were away from their jobs and the time it took for them to put their training to use.  Despite the training program, our client experienced no disruptions from the implementation of the training solution.
      Our client’s return on investment in training was easier to track thanks to the customized solution and the ability to monitor exact skill acquisition for specific teams and individuals with the SMART tool.