Ariel's Services: Training and Coaching

Ariel Services: Training and Coaching

Every organization contemplates it sooner or later. You want to build your organization's skills in designing the kind of intuitive, innovative interfaces that can really deliver business results. But without help and dedicated effort, you know that isn't likely to happen. Many companies find themselves asking these questions:

How can we become more self-sufficient?
How can I get my staff to think about design like Ariel's team?
How can we limit our financial commitment and still get work done?
How can we limit the risk of falling into a "Knowledge Trap" with our consultants?

It's a natural cycle that nearly every company goes through. During periods of growth, they look outside the organization for additional resources to help get the work done. But eventually they look back inside and wonder where the specialized skills are.

Ariel's Coaching Program can help you, just as we've helped many Fortune 500 companies such as MetLife, Payless ShoeSource, and Southwest Bell.

How does the Coaching Program work?

Ariel's Coaching Program is flexible and driven around your needs; yet it contains the structure required to ensure that the knowledge is not only learned, but also demonstrated and applied.

The goal of our Coaching Program is to help your team learn how to create intuitive, user-friendly, and intelligent business software systems. Most often we find that organizations cannot do this because:

The staff never learned the necessary skills.
The staff falls back on traditional and comfortable design methods when the project is pressured by deadlines or budgetary concerns.
There is too much turnover on the project team.
As a company, you have gotten caught up in the continuing drive to "just get something done" and temporarily lost sight of the bigger picture.

Our Coaching Program will take your team through a specific process that ensures success when implemented properly. By learning this process and employing it on future projects, your team will begin to develop the skills necessary to "Design with Humans in Mind."

What occurs during this activity?

Many companies do not feel the need for a Coaching Program until they are experiencing some sort of business "pain." At that point, it is imperative for them to make the commitment. Unfortunately, this usually occurs during a critical development project.

Ariel's Senior Consultants can be a team coach and develop a customized, hands-on training solution that allows your staff to increase their skills as they are completing critical project work. The consultant will coach your staff as they conduct, design, or develop:

Structured observations
Interviews
Focus groups
Performance Support Mapping™
Collaborative design sessions
Rapid interactive prototypes
Usability and performance testing
Design requirements and specifications

In addition to the coaching activities, we can offer a formalized training solution. Classes on our performance-centered design methodology are available from Ariel's Technology Transfer Division.

What will I receive at the end of this engagement?

Since this solution is tailored around your needs, you define the final deliverables. The engagement may be as simple as providing guidance for a single, short-duration project or as in-depth as serving as a coach on a long-term, multi-project development team. Typical deliverables could include:

Reports detailing the performance of teams and individuals
Evaluations on work derived from project teams
Plans or recommendations that relate to:
- Personal and team improvement
- Design and application improvement

How will I benefit from the Coaching Program?

In today's fast-paced world of weekend retreats, large conferences and seminars, accelerated classes, and conveyor belt training programs, it is no wonder that corporate America is fearful of accomplishing major change in an efficient and economical manner. Your organization will benefit from the Coaching Program that Ariel provides by learning how to:

Retool your development, training, and knowledge management organizations.
Create the desired results in your own business environment.
Get work done while accomplishing these goals.
Create self-sufficiency and an in-house capability.

Your business environment is filled with obstacles:

Runaway requirements and analysis.
Tight development budgets.
High turnover and tight labor markets.
Rapid changes.
Demands for increased productivity, accuracy, and customer service.

Ariel's proven process lets you meets these challenges and achieve a return on investment that will please bottom-line conscious executives. Call us today to schedule a demonstration showing the before and after states of several applications that will help you realize the difference you can make when you Design with Humans in Mind.