AGILE: It is all about trust

The owner of a small software company once came to me with a unique problem. As well as selling software he also provided training and support in how to use it.

But what he couldn’t understand was why the training often worked well and sank in, but in other cases, didn’t, meaning the client's subsequent use of the software was patchy, or floundered altogether.

Understandably, his focus was on getting to the bottom of the variance in the customer experience, and how his company could address that by improving the delivery of their training.

My response was to ask if [he thought] the problem wasn’t his training but rather of the organisational cultures of the clients he was working with.

From the look on his face, it seemed he hadn’t. I went on to suggest that if his software was high quality and the training provided consistently, then perhaps poor uptake could be due to the clients' staff and culture, and an