IEMP In Practice features NASA Centers' 'real life' experiences and tangible examples of how Centers are benefiting from an IEM program component that is operational or activities at Centers in the midst of implementation. This section will include best practices and lessons learned that NASA Centers and other agencies can apply as they plan and manage similar programs and implementations.

Anyone who's spent time on the inside of an Integrated Enterprise Management Module can understand how learning a new project can be overwhelmingly intricate and complex. Imagine training others while you're still becoming accustomed to a new module's inner workings! So, as a way to "dip the toes" of the Goddard Training team into the elaborate waters of IEMP's future projects, the change managers created a kind of formal training orientation between project managers and the Goddard Training Office.

Goddard's IEM Projects Office began facilitating the special meetings between IEM Project Managers and the Goddard Training staff at the beginning of May 2005. This special venture, created by Goddard's Change Lead, is considered to be a "pre-emptive strike" on behalf of the IEM Projects Office to formally educate the Goddard Training Office prior to the implementation of the program's future modules. Consequently, Goddard designed the meetings with the philosophy that a well informed Training Office can better design and deliver sustainment training. The sustainment training will take place subsequent to a project's go-live date, and will support both new and existing end-users for each IEM module.

To date, all the meetings between the program managers and the training team have been held on-site at Goddard. During the meetings, each IEM Project Manager at Goddard delivers a general overview of his respective module's capabilities, requirements and roll-out timeline to representatives of Goddard's Training Office staff. The Training Office, in turn, can ask for clarification on any detail of the project. As a result, the team members can begin to work with each module's project team, and start to identify the long-term training requirements after the go-live period.

Ultimately, the Goddard IEM Projects Office reports that they believe these meetings are the first step towards building a solid training infrastructure before a module's go-live date. This, the team reports, seems to be the key to ensuring a module's successful transition. The by-product of the effort is two-fold; strong, healthy relationships between all partners (Project Office, functional owners, and training experts) and better prepared end-users. To date, the feedback has been positive, and the Goddard training team seems to feel more educated in their level of project understanding. With that, it seems, the Goddard Training Team is ready and waiting for the arrival of future projects' implementation. With all this preparation, the Goddard Training team appears to be right on course to carry out strong sustainment training for its IEM modules.