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PPM Insights: CAPA Can Integrate with Your Adoption Approach

By Anon Anon posted May 24, 2018 08:34 AM

  

Many of my posts are about how PPM adoption generates business value. In this blog, I will highlight a popular but sometimes underutilized product called CA Productivity Accelerator (CAPA), which facilitates rapid, sustainable user acceptance via system training modules.

 

CAPA has been around for many years, and its use ranges from scaled point-of-need system training to a full turn-key training solution. I’ve seen customers gain high value from this tool when thoughtfully used as part of an overall training approach. I’m reminded of the Microsoft Office paperclip - which filled a vital role: supplemental quick, focused training.

 

As part of a PPM organizational readiness approach, CAPA can be an on-demand complement to ecosystem education and hands-on training. When I roll out implementations, I refer to CAPA as my first line of support. Once solutions are operational and users are interacting with the software, CAPA can be valuable for quick answer to a system question, like: a task not done often and thus easily forgettable; or an activity a user has just started to perform. While not a holistic training/adoption/change management solution, it’s an important part of your organizational readiness approach.

 

As discussed in previous posts and presentations, the out-of-box CAPA modules are for out-of-box system capabilities. If you modified your environment, CAPA may not match up with it. For that and a number of reasons, there is a trend to standardize on leading practice and out-of-the-box system functionality, thus enabling customers to leverage CAPA fully. That said, CAPA can be customized to match your environment.

 

Here is how PPM users access CAPA: from anywhere in the system, users can select the “Learn” menu item and be routed to CAPA, which will pre-populate its training library to the current location:

 

 

CAPA organizes short content exercises that users can filter for and take on-demand. This offers a powerful support for nearly any system topic. The training and interaction is organized by a simple method - the same method I use when creating and conducting custom hands-on training:

  1. See It! – automated demo with steps
  2. Try It! – manual demo with steps
  3. Know It! – manual demo activity quiz
  4. Do It! – manual production update
  5. Print It! – printing the demo steps

 

 

Here’s a white paper I find valuable, as it describes on-demand training components and reminds us of this truism: “We forget up to 70% of what we learn in training if we don’t apply it within two weeks.”

 

 

In addition to CAPA being an on-demand option, I include it in my hands-on training classes as a reference. If users are able to rely only on CAPA for training, here’s the path of the proposed curriculum, organized by persona:

  • Navigate to PPM and select “Learn” in the top right menu
  • Select a discipline (links below) and scroll to the “Lessons Included” section
  • Go back to CAPA and use the action bullets from the “Lessons Included” section as your guide: Filter for each bullet within CAPA and take the short course 

 

When I work with PPM customers, I refer them to the capability-based (persona) disciplines. These are organized as a formal training program, but can be taken a la carte with current CA PPM CAPA licenses.

 

 

 

Many organizations are moving toward simplicity, out-of-the-box functionality, and leading practices when initially implementing PPM solutions or when maturing an existing solution. As part of an organizational readiness approach, training is not only a nice-to-have, but vital to success. CAPA is a great first-line tool as part of an operationalized process for supporting the solution.

 

For more, check out the PPM Insights blog series. I encourage you to participate in the best-in-class CA Communities site, where we have access to peers, events and support. You can also reach out to CA Services for individualized business outcome references and analysis. Feel free to post in the comments section of this blog or contact me directly via email and @PPMWarrior.

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