Planning your myTrailhead strategy

Day 2 - Planning your myTrailhead strategy.
When planning a successful Salesforce myTrailhead strategy, there are three things to consider - your content, your audience and your myTrailhead goverance. Lets take talk you through them.

So, if you read our blog from yesterday, you now have a good understanding of what myTrailhead is and how you can structure the learning content you are planning for your team.  Now is the time to get organised and to start thinking about what your content needs to look like.  At this stage, we aren’t going to be talking about what you should be writing as we are more focused on how you set yourself up for a successful myTrailhead launch.  Additionally, there are many best practices around myTrailhead that we can help you with but, for now, we are actually going to get you thinking about three things:

Think about your audience

This is perhaps the most critical step.  You need to take the time to understand your audience and we don’t just mean make a list of their names!  Think about the following:

• Which roles in your organisation make up your audience?
• What is the profile of those people – are they technical?  Are they sales-driven?  Do they currently use Salesforce (if you are using myTrailhead to teach Salesforce) and to what level?
• What are their goals from the training – what will they want to achieve at the end of it?
• What are the organisations goals for them in taking the training (and this may be completely different from the previous point!)?

Once you understand your audience, this will set you up for the next thing we need to be thinking about….

Think about your content

Now we understand who we are talking to and what we are looking for them to achieve, we can start to think about how best to talk to them.  The things we would focus on here include:

• Tone of voice:  will the ‘traditional’ Trailhead informal tone work best or is the audience more professional?  Is it technical training so accuracy of terminology and a more professional tone is appropriate?
• General approach of the content:  Are we following a set process that has its own chronology; can we use story-telling techniques to convey our message, do we establish a problem statement and resolve it?

It is common to see ‘scope creep’ during projects like this – this often happens during the content development phase and is where you start thinking of other things you can cram into your units & modules and you start to lose sight of what the content was set up to deliver.  In our workshop, we would introduce you to how we help you stay focused on your audience throughout the planning, content development, and editorial phases to retain that sharp focus. 

Think about your myTrailhead governance

One of the great things about the myTrailhead platform, when compared to LMS and eLearning platforms is the ability to quickly and easily keep it updated.  It really is a simple process of producing a new version and releasing it to replace the previous content.  It is also seamless in that no loss of access to the content is suffered as you go through that process.

However, as easy as that may be, therein lies the danger.  Do you want to constantly release new versions of content to make minor tweaks and changes, and who takes the decision to do so?  This is where your myTrailhead governance comes in to play.  You will want to answer some key questions here:

1. How often do you want to release new materials?
2. Who makes the decisions on which content needs to be updated?
   1. Is it worth putting together a Content Board/Steering Group to ensure that myTrailhead remains current, relevant, and on-brand?
3. What process is followed for releasing new content
   1. Who will review/produce it?
   2. Who holds editorial responsibility?
   3. Who holds the release responsibility?

In our strategy workshop, Stimulus will work with you to answer these questions and build out a governance framework for your company.

Once you have completed all of the above, this should give you all the information on your next step – building your myTrailhead team.  You will need a blend of technical knowledge (for setup, user permissions, screenshots, etc); writing skills; and creative skills (for badge art, supporting graphics, etc).  Click here to see how we can help you!

Now you have your strategy in place and you have your team together, so you are good to go to the next stage – see our next blog in the series to start creating your content!

We also have a myTrailhead webinar on the 17th March where we will explain what myTrailhead is and how it can benefit your users. Don't miss out, register to attend.