Training and technical support
for EcoStruxure Building Operation

Before and after

High performer status in the company HR system for five consecutive years, from 2018 to 2022. A Leadership Versatility Index assessment run by Kaiser Leadership Solutions in 2020 put overall managerial versatility at 84 percent.

Architecture of the training system

The courses form a ladder: from an introduction explaining what the product is and who needs it, through to networks and integration, where a participant connects the system to third-party equipment over open protocols. Alongside the ladder run branches for specific jobs: building services, field devices, customer demonstrations and sales.

Several seminars were built or thoroughly reworked over this period: thirty presentations and three workbooks of two hundred pages each. Twelve training rigs were assembled for them and thirteen workstations reconfigured.

Three formats and what each is for

Classroom seminars

The format that existed before me and stayed after. It gives hands-on practice on real hardware and room to work through unusual cases, but it is bounded by the schedule, the classroom and geography. The work here came down to cutting the wait and eliminating half-empty groups: from two or three months to one month, and to two weeks by the end of 2021.

Live online sessions, from April 2020

These appeared out of necessity, when classroom teaching became impossible. They brought an unexpected side effect: groups grew from six or eight people to twenty-five, because the limits of seats in a room and travel to Moscow disappeared.

Self-paced format, from November 2020

The most valuable of the three. A participant starts at almost any moment and learns at their own pace, while the instructor is freed from repeating the same material: over twelve percent of instructor time was released. Seven of the ten courses were fully converted to this format.

How you check that someone actually learned

A separate problem, usually solved in corporate training with a single final test. One test is not enough: it measures recall on day two, not competence a month later.

What the measurements showed

Over three years, 504 feedback forms were collected from seminars where I was the instructor. The form was filled in after the session, participation voluntary.

• The instructor knows the subject well: 4.96 out of 5
• The content matched expectations: 9.29 out of 10
• Objective usefulness of the training: 9.0 out of 10

Separately from the forms, I commissioned an outside company to call partners and hear what people do not write down right after a session. The result: eighteen strongly positive responses and five strongly negative ones, four of those five problems closed within two months.

Support without tickets

The classic ticket-based scheme produced a first reply in one to three days. Instead of speeding up ticket handling, I built a professional community: three topic-based chats of one to two hundred people each, joined by both partners and end customers.

• First reply cut from one to three days down to one to twenty minutes
• Support runs in the background, twelve hours a day, seven days a week
• Any member may answer, so the quality of answers improves on its own

The instruction as a genre

Six instructions of my own authorship on network diagnostics and configuration. Each went through several revisions: the network optimisation guide reached its third version, the protocol diagnostics guide its second. These are not write-once documents but working tools, revised as new cases arrive at the support desk.

The "what this means" block appeared once it became clear that an engineer on site does not read front to back, they look for an answer. The link to the primary source is there so they can verify a claim rather than take the document on trust.

Work beyond training

A project to remove a systemic problem

I led an A3 project on supply logistics: from describing the current state through root cause analysis to countermeasures and follow-up. Eight meeting minutes and eight recorded walk-throughs by stage, so colleagues could repeat the method on their own problems.

Internal audit

Trained and certified as an internal auditor of the quality management system to ISO 9001:2015 in April 2021. Ran a full audit of the sales process: preparation, document checklist, report, corrective action report.

Digital champion

An additional role inside the company: webinars and one-to-one help for colleagues on digital tools. Separately, a forty-five minute talk at the Innovation Summit Moscow industry conference in 2021, a room of forty people plus a live stream.

Training infrastructure

A twelve-seat training room designed and built for the job: a server holding system images with network boot, so that all machines could be restored to a clean state in ten minutes before a new group. Two configurations were worked out, and the one cheaper to maintain was chosen.

This is not hardware for its own sake. While the room was restored by hand, a full day was lost between groups, and the schedule was limited by that rather than by instructor availability.

Video channel

I created and ran a video channel for the track: organic growth to 1,130 subscribers in two years, no paid promotion, an audience of partners and customers. The channel closed together with the company's departure from the Russian market, which is why there is no link here.

The point of the channel was never subscriber count. It was that a routine question could be answered with a link to a video instead of an hour-long call. The same move was later applied to the F.A.Q. knowledge base at the next job.