In the Drupal community there are several options when any individual wants to brush up on their Drupal skills. But, what do you do when you want to train your entire IT team on Drupal and when each of those team members is at a different skill level? This is the challenge that Golf Channel faced and they were able to find a solution when with the FFW Center of Excellence.

With the golfing season already underway Golf Channel had little time to train its web services team on Drupal and the latest PHP best practices. NBC Sports affiliates had been successfully using Drupal for their high profile sites like the Olympics and Comcast’s Regional Sports Networks. Golf Channel turned to us to deliver a rapid and structured training program.

After gathering the requirements, FFW Center of Excellence built a custom training program designed to help the Golf Channel team understand basic and advanced concepts, expose them to hands-on experience, and build the confidence they needed to begin contributing to the project upon launch. Combining a set of existing training modules, and a consultative approach to understanding and analyzing team development, FFW Center of Excellence helped the Golf Channel team to meet their goal on time.

FFW Center of Excellence surveyed the team on their individual strengths, needs and upcoming requirements. Upon completion of analysis a comprehensive training plan was developed. Two trainers spent a week at the network’s world headquarters in Orlando, delivering structured training, meeting with each team member, and responding to training feedback on a daily basis.

“I really liked how we were able to customize the course to our needs … We came in with a few very high-level goals: PHP, Drupal, Modules, and were able to interactively expedite our learning objectives.”

– Chris Payne, Senior Director, Technology at Golf Channel

By the end of the week each team member was deconstructing issues in the issue queue, significantly increasing productivity, working constructively through bugs and feature requests that ranged from simple to complex, and planning how the team could begin to take on transition and enhancement immediately after hand-off.

If your organization could benefit from some customized, multi-level Drupal training, let us know. We’ll work with you to build a training program that will teach all levels of your IT team to become proficient in Drupal best practices.