Systeme Platform:
launching support and training from zero
In October 2022 the Russian division of Schneider Electric passed to a new owner and became Systeme Electric. The old product left with the old owner; in its place came the domestic Systeme Platform. Nobody knew how to train or support it: no materials, no processes, no people. Eight months to make that exist.
The terms of the problem
This is not a story about a large team and a generous budget. It is a story about one person covering two functions at once and building so that the system works without them.
Support in four tiers
The key decision: do not hire a first tier, but hand it to the company's existing contact centre. A short dedicated course for agents and a bank of ready answers were written for exactly this, so that routine questions close without an expert.
The answer bank was produced in two forms at once: a document to read and a series of short videos for those who will not read. It is the same move that worked earlier on the video channel: a routine question is closed with a link rather than a call.
Training as a production line
A course here is not "deliver a lecture" but a pipeline: shooting plan, filming, editing, revisions, lecture notes, workbook. The result is that a participant starts on the day they ask, rather than waiting for a group to fill up.
- Main developer course: 58 video lessons arranged in six parts
- Advanced course: 20 lessons. Operating system course: 9
- First in the new company to launch paid multi-day training of forty hours
- By the time other divisions were only starting, the track had earned over a million roubles
- Test on the learning portal: theory
- Oral examination: understanding rather than recall
- Practical examination: work in a real environment
Getting the participant to the finish line was a separate problem: a reminder three days before the start, weekly Monday sessions, a group chat for questions between classes. Virtual machines for practice are prepared in advance, both local and cloud-based.
Designing the department
In spring 2023 I described the group that had to grow out of one person: three roles, their duties, areas of responsibility and, above all, mutual substitutability. Not a staffing table but a construction in which one person's holiday does not stop the work.
- Head of the group. A planning horizon of eighteen to twenty-four months, annual goals for each person, coordination with adjacent departments, reporting in which failures with root cause analysis sit next to the wins
- Training expert. Ready to deliver training on the day it is requested, complete theory, prepared virtual machines, a production cycle for video lessons, getting participants to the end
- Technical support expert. Working with versions and distributions, a link to every tier, escalation to the vendor, support levels with defined parameters
The head's document contains a section that job descriptions usually lack — reflection: put yourself in the customer's place, review your own mail and calls, look at how competitors solve the same problem. Plus a requirement to develop in at least one adjacent field in parallel.
A three-year growth model
Attached to the role descriptions is a financial model: the share of revenue the track spends on support, and hiring tied to hitting the sales plan. Headcount grows not "when it gets hard" but when revenue reaches a defined level. If the plan is missed, the group stays as it is, and that is written down in advance.
Working across the seams
A launch group can do nothing alone: training depends on the training centre, support on the contact centre, sales on commercial control, delivery on logistics. So a separate document maps the adjacent departments: eleven links, and for each one what is needed from it and the measure actually agreed.
This is the same move I later used at the next job: first write down exactly where the process tears between departments, then go and negotiate specifics rather than "improving collaboration" in general.
Processes and audit
- Thirteen departmental processes described, approved and defended at an external management system audit, one hour each
- Two of them are mine: Training and Technical Support
- As an ISO 9001 internal auditor, audited four units of the group: HR, service, the plant, the warehouse and certification. Three weeks of work
- Thirteen sets of meeting minutes from those audits
The internal auditor certificate was earned back in 2021 at the previous job, and it came in useful here: a company that had just separated from a global holding had to confirm its management system from scratch.
Launching the product, not only supporting it
Beyond training and support, tasks landed on me that are normally done by other people: registering the product with the patent office and entering it into the national register of domestic software. Eleven abstracts on platform components were written by me, the package was filed, the certificates obtained.
Plus promotion: the company video channel, materials for partners and for internal sales, articles and news. The channel is still alive, with around fifteen hundred subscribers and some fifty videos, part of them filmed and edited by me.
What the numbers show
My own statistics table, kept from October 2022 to June 2023: five snapshots across seven metrics. Not a report upwards but a working instrument, to see whether the track was growing.
- 201 participants on the introductory course and 106 on its self-paced version
- 58 video lessons in the main course, 51 video answers in the support knowledge base
- The participants' chat grew from 45 to 95 members
- Performance against targets for the first half of 2023: 78 percent
Why I left
I spent eight months in the new company. It was already a different company: a different owner, a different product, different rules. The launch problem had been solved, and what came next was working alone with no prospect of expansion — the very expansion I had described in my own development plan and for which there was no budget.