So, the day has nearly arrived: Elaine Biech's latest opus, ASTD's Ultimate Train the Trainer, is nearly ready for the printer. It has not been an easy book to work on, for a variety of reasons, but in the end it's a project that I feel proud of and that will ultimately be a real gem for the people who use it. One of the reasons it's been hard to work on is trying to make it as easy and user friendly as possible. Sometimes that requires a lot of work and thought from authors, editors, project managers, and designers (and a lot of disagreement about how best to accomplish that goal). But it's coming together. Those last bits and bobs are being fixed, the finishing touches are being added, and next Friday this book goes to press.

It's been a complicated book to put together, but it's not a complicated book to use, or at least that's the plan. What it does is provide a complete, three-day train-the-trainer workshop in five modules that generally align with the ADDIE model. It gives the trainer who needs to train trainers everything he or she could need: step-by-step instructions for activities, handouts for participants, checklists for getting prepared for the session, evaluation forms, PowerPoint slides, and more. All the stuff that the trainer will need to have on hand in the training room is provided on the CD, so he or she doesn't need to spend hours copying pages out of the book or recreating handouts from scratch.

And of course, it's from Elaine Biech! She's spent a lot of time perfecting the way she delivers training and is more than willing to share what she knows works.