An international oil company, headquartered in California, is one of the world's largest integrated energy companies, conducting business in more than 100 countries. The company is engaged in all aspects of the crude oil and natural gas industry, including exploration, production, manufacturing, marketing, transportation, chemical manufacturing, and sales.

The energy company had a large-scale training challenge. It needed to train over 80,000 end-users and 4,000 IT support personnel on Windows Vista and Office 2007. These professionals were dispersed across more than 1,300 locations in over 100 countries. They did not have a corporate-level learning and development office. Each office site, or regional operating unit, made its own training decisions.

The company needed a consultative approach with each unit to "sell" the training to each site or region. They also required massive schedule coordination across the company, as the training at each site needed to be conducted within 1 - 2 days of end-users receiving their new hardware platform. The company had executed similar learning projects in the past with poor results. But with this project, failure was not an option.

The energy company engaged us to develop a training program focused on teaching the new Vista and Office software features to ease the students' platform transition. ​​

According to the client, "The learning experience, not just the information, would be critical to success. Great learning experiences are created by quality, skilled instructors who do more than simply present information."

We assembled a team of experienced and certified Microsoft instructors who were familiar with the client's corporate culture, as well as how different user groups used the Microsoft Office platform.

We then designed a training strategy to minimize business operation disruption and customized a configuration of training schedules for the sites. Our team consulted with each individual site to understand their unique needs, and then prepared the instructors accordingly with "Train the Trainer" sessions. Through analysis of the schedules and unique site needs, we proposed multiple training delivery modalities including instructor-led Classroom and Virtual Classroom e-Learning, on-demand e-Learning, one-on-one mentoring sessions, and special VIP-level training.

The client identified three factors for determining project success:

1. The training had to be useful, targeted, and delivered with minimal disruption to business.
2. Instructors needed to deliver a great learning experience.
3. Training needed to be consistent yet flexible to address the variance in learning styles and schedules.

We delivered on all three factors, resulting in improved training ROI for the client. Users who completed the training program reported more satisfaction (70%) with the new desktop environment than those who were not trained (55%). Most telling is that 94% of users trained stated that their training experience made them feel better prepared to immediately use their new desktop applications.