CTG Content Committee Spotlight: Nick Terry
/Nick Terry is the editor for the CTG Content Committee. Each month, our group scrawls out our pieces, and Nick turns them into well-crafted articles that make us look like we understand proper grammar. Nick is also Technical Director at Thermoplan USA. Over the last year, he has been working on the rollout for the Mastrena 2. These kinds of projects are starting to occur more often in our industry. I was curious about how the project worked for Nick and could he offer any pointers to our members.
Hylan Joseph: Can you describe the project you’re working on – The rollout for the Mastrena 2?
Nick Terry: Starbucks was really responsible, for the most part, for the project of installing the machines and the rollout of those machines. Our responsibility at Thermoplan was to get ahead of that rollout and ensure that we had people trained throughout that whole process so that we had support in the market when the machines landed. So, we did that in conjunction with the service providers. And the tricky part was that Starbucks, for financial reasons, needed to roll out the machines in this sort of a shotgun-type approach. We couldn't do specific cities at a time. So that meant that before any machines could launch, we had to train people essentially all around the country, which ultimately ended up being somewhere around 530 technicians trained in the span of a year.
HJ: How many machines were you rolling out?
NT: I believe they installed roughly 3,600 in that first year, which was really about 9 months of installations, and 12 months of training.
HJ: And how long is the project overall to trade out the machines?
NT: I think there are about 2-and-a-half to 3 more years left before all of the Mastrena 1’s are gone.
HJ: What are they doing with the old ones, once they pull them? Are they giving them back to Thermoplan or are they scrapping them?
NT: They are recycling them locally.
HJ: How did you organize and plan the project? Were there any specific computer programs that you used? This is a massive project.
NT: Yeah, mostly it was a lot of Excel and Smartsheets. I think Smartsheets was a big help because it's a shared spreadsheet platform that you can use if you are multiple organizations.
HJ: You like Smartsheets?
NT: It's functional. I don't love it, but it works. And it really is one of the best for sharing between organizations. So basically, how it works is that Starbucks would provide a list of stores that are open and the dates. Then we would look and see which service providers they needed to have trained for those stores and on what dates. Then we would work together with service partners in a different spreadsheet that was more like a roadmap to outline which regions needed training and when and who was going to facilitate that training. We tried to run it so that our trainers had one week on and one week off, so they were traveling for one week and home the next. We had a few times where guys had to be on the road 2 to 4 weeks at a time to be able to get it done, but we tried to stagger it and then build a schedule to fit that.
HJ: What were the hurdles you ran into during this? What were your learning lessons?
NT: One of the primary hurdles was making sure that the people were actually going to show up to the class. We capped the class, ideally at five people – we believe that's the number where you can really have effective learning – but we extended that to six because we knew that we were at risk of not actually being able to train everyone. We would schedule these classes to be full at six people and often a guy would travel to do two different training sessions in a week, which would lead to 12 people being trained. However, we would often end up with only maybe six or eight between those two classes instead of 12, which was really challenging because it became this tremendous waste of resources and those who didn’t show up were still going to have to get trained at some point.
Other than that, I think we did a lot of thinking ahead and strategizing about how this was going to be done. We had 10 machines that were in custom-built travel crates with a tool kit and spare parts. We sent one of those crates to every training facility so we could show up and have everything we needed. We didn't have to travel with tools, we didn't have to travel with a machine. We just showed up, set everything up, facilitated the training, and went home. We did a lot of thinking ahead and stuff like that to make sure that we didn't have a whole lot of challenges.
HJ: What would you say your top learning lessons were? Is there anything you would do differently? Is anything you would do in the future to improve the process?
NT: I think the primary way we could've improved the process is really involving all three parties in the decision process of who's going to be trained. So that Starbucks could determine that, yes, that was the person they wanted to have trained. I could say, yes, these are the people we need to be trained and we could play devil's advocate because, frankly, there are some people out there who had been trained a year ago and still haven't seen a machine – and that can be really challenging – but on paper, it looked like this person needed to be trained.
A deeper vetting of who needed to be trained would have been good. Probably a follow-up process as well, like three weeks before the training to make sure everybody was going to attend, or some sort of incentive to get people to attend. I think our biggest challenge was having people show up on time.
HJ: What was the skill set of the techs? Did you have any difficulty with techs showing up not knowing anything? Or was your training designed to simplify it as much as possible?
NT: Our training is designed to give people machine-specific knowledge to apply their existing skills. So, the idea would be that somebody shows up with previous plumbing and electromechanical troubleshooting experience. Espresso experience is great, but not required.
I think in that first 6-8 months where we were training primary people, like primary providers, we probably hit that 90% of the time. People had experience and were all versed in what to do. Then you start getting into secondary and tertiary providers, and that's where you start to struggle, where you maybe have some people who really had never seen an espresso machine before, but they work for the HVAC company that is also a contractor for espresso but they haven't actually done the work.
As we dug deeper, it got more challenging. In the beginning, we had a pretty good turnout of people who had knowledge and could be successful in the class. At the end of the class, there is a test, and at the request of Starbucks, we make the test fairly difficult. You have to score 85% or higher to achieve certification. If someone scores 60-84%, they can take the test again that day. 60% and below, you have to take the class again. We had probably a 97-98% pass rate. So I think our training was pretty successful.
HJ: What kind of advice would you give somebody who was embarking on this type of project?
NT: Like any other project, plan incredibly well. If you enter a project with a really solid plan, it's never going to go that way, but you at least have a framework that can be modified. If you enter the project without a plan at all, then you are totally making it up. And that becomes really, really challenging.
Whether it's embarking on PMs for one customer, but they've got eight sites and how do you track it, start with a framework and then you modify it as you go along. Or, if you’re launching a country's worth of espresso machines and trying to figure out how to train people – if you have a plan, you can modify it.