The same course across your Italian sites, without ending up with three different courses_

Why the same course lands differently in three sites

Sites that belong to the same company rarely work the same way. One has been there for twenty years and has its own routines, another opened after an acquisition and still runs a different system, a third is small enough that three people do everything.

So the same session lands on three different rooms. The one with long habits will ask why it should change. The acquired one will hear head office talking. The small one will worry about who covers the desk while they sit in a classroom.

None of this is a reason to run three different courses. It is a reason to design one course that can carry three sets of examples. The mistake I see is the opposite: one course, one set of examples, taken from whichever site the person designing it knows best. The other two sit through a demo of somebody else’s work.

What stays identical, and what each site changes

Fix five things and the rest can breathe.

▸ The objective, written as what people do differently afterwards, not as topics covered.

▸ The structure and the number of hours, so the sites can compare notes without discovering they got different deals.

▸ The tools and the vocabulary: if one site calls it a request and another calls it a ticket, the shared prompts stop working.

▸ What participants hold at the end: the same playbook format, the same draft usage rule, the same plan for the first weeks.

▸ The measurement, so that a month later you are comparing the same things.

What moves is the content of the exercises: each site works on its own documents, its own customers, its own bottleneck. Same agenda, same slide count, different paper on the tables.

One cohort per site, or mixed groups?

Mix the first round. Put people from all the sites in the same room, two or three per location, and you get the one thing a multi-site rollout needs: people who now know each other and can call across the company when something does not work.

Run the later sessions by site, because that is where people work on their own files and their own bottlenecks, and because travel stops being worth it.

There is a version of this that goes wrong: the pilot runs at head office, with head office documents, and is then repeated at the other sites as a road show. The people in the second and third room can tell the difference, and they disengage politely.

For groups above twenty, split them. Two rooms of fifteen with the same agenda work better than one of thirty, because the second half of the session is hands-on and one person cannot reach thirty tables.

Italian, English, or both?

Deliver in the language of the room and keep the shared documents in one language, usually the group’s working language. That way the sites can exchange prompts and procedures without translating twice.

If your group language is English and your Italian sites work in Italian day to day, the honest arrangement is Italian in the room with English material. Everyone gets the training in the language they think in, and the artefacts stay comparable across countries.

Where head office insists on English in the room, ask the participants first. Sometimes they genuinely prefer it, especially in technical teams that read documentation in English. When they do not, the session becomes a language exam and the content comes second.

I deliver in both, so this is a decision about your people rather than about instructor availability.

What “the same course” means for the material

One master set of material, plus a short annex per site with its own examples. The annex is the part that makes people recognise their work; the master is the part that keeps the company from ending up with three unrelated methods.

Put the prompts and the procedures in one shared place, not three. The first time a site solves something well, the other two should find it without asking. This is what turns three trainings into one capability.

Agree who owns that shared place before the first session, and give them twenty minutes a week for it. Without an owner it drifts, and within three months each site is back to its own folder.

If you use an external trainer, settle in writing who keeps the material and whether the annexes can be reused for the sites that will be trained later.

How do you tell whether it worked across all the sites?

Measure the same four things at every site, a month after the last session: how many people used the tool on real work in a given week, how many shared prompts are alive and how many are new, one workflow where the time went down, and one decision or document where the tool played a part.

The comparison is the useful part. When one site is clearly ahead, the difference is almost never the room or the trainer: it is that someone there owns the topic and has time for it.

When one site is behind, look for permission before blaming the training. In most cases nobody told that team explicitly that it was allowed to use the tool on client documents, so they kept doing things the old way to be safe.

Report the numbers with their basis, how many people and how many weeks. A single percentage with no denominator travels badly inside a group, and someone will eventually ask.