In any field, whether it's sports, business, or personal development, taking the time to train before starting an important high-stakes endeavor can make all the difference. Building a system with RTI Connext is no different. While jumping right in may seem tempting, investing time in preparation offers significant benefits that lead to minimized risk, accelerated time to market and an overall better experience for everyone involved in the project. 

It’s part of our “Field-Fast” philosophy, which affirms the importance of setting up systems for optimal performance from the very beginning, which can avoid rework and incompatibility that could easily undermine vital project milestones down the road. And the best preparation for new customers who want to start building their systems the right way is RTI’s free Onboarding. Let me explain the advantages:

1. Minimizing Risk

Facing an unfamiliar challenge can be overwhelming. Training provides a structured way to acclimate to the task, making it more manageable. Often, training can also help teams anticipate and avoid future problems before they even materialize. This proactive approach helps reduce stress and prevents last-minute changes that sometimes are not even applicable.

I still remember one of my first customers as a Services Engineer. They had designed their legacy system independently, without any formal training, and had not accounted for the challenges related to building a huge distributed system with thousands of applications. At that time, RTI Academy didn’t exist, so they had no structured learning resources available. Plus, an aggressive project deadline prevented them from engaging with us for live training.

As a result, during integration they encountered scalability issues that could not be resolved with a simple adjustment—their system required a complete architectural redesign. When I explained this, they were understandably surprised. The necessary rework ultimately slowed down their project by several months—time that could have been saved with just a few hours of training at the outset of the project.

This experience highlights the value of early education in system design. A small investment in training can prevent costly redesign work and delays down the road! This is why our no-cost onboarding focuses on the foundational topics, such as Discovery and Reliability, to minimize project risk for new Connext Projects.

2. Accelerated Time To Market

Preparation reduces trial and error, saving time and resources. By understanding the steps involved in advance, you can streamline your approach and complete tasks more effectively. When building a system with Connext, this translates to improved initial design of the data model, system architecture and QoS parameters, as well as better performance for the final system.

Also, through training, engineers learn by encountering potential obstacles in a controlled environment, allowing them to develop problem-solving strategies before real-world problems occur. This foresight equips them to handle challenges faster, saving time during development, testing and integration.

Want a real-world example? One of our customers submitted a support case regarding prolonged discovery times—up to 30 seconds—between two applications running on different hosts. Frustrated by the delay, they spent several days troubleshooting the issue without success.

Upon investigating with them, we suspected that the problem might be related to the discovery configuration, specifically the participant_announcement_period and initial_peers settings. Could it be that discovery was not properly configured, or was there an issue with loading the QoS settings?

To test this hypothesis, we adjusted the participant_announcement_period from the default 30 seconds to 1 second. As a result, the discovery process completed in just 1 second instead of 30—a significant improvement. However, further analysis revealed that the root cause was an improperly configured initial_peers setting.

This customer’s experience is not uncommon. Many engineers, while knowledgeable enough to make progress, often lack formal initial training due to time constraints within their teams. A case of: Training? Who has the time? Unfortunately, this mindset often results in unnecessary troubleshooting efforts for several issues that are actually covered on the first day of Connext training. The reality is that today, engineers don’t have the time to not do training. 

RTI’s free Onboarding helps with this challenge, providing exactly the right amount of initial guidance you would need to get started at an accelerated pace when building your next-generation system.

3. Reduced Stress and Anxiety

How many times have you found a problem you don’t even know how to start debugging? Facing an unfamiliar challenge can be quite overwhelming. And can lead to unnecessary stress: A twilight realm in which system specs and lines of code keep you awake at night, distract you from focusing on other priorities, and intrude on what’s supposed to be down time.

Training provides a structured way to handle challenges, making them feel more manageable with tasks documented and partitioned into sensible swim lanes. This proactive approach establishes a predictable routine that helps reduce stress and prevents last-minute panic.

One of the valuable aspects of our free Onboarding is that it is delivered by RTI Services, the same team of seasoned experts within RTI that helps long-term customers solve any kind of challenge.

Final Thoughts

From the perspective of RTI Services, taking the time to train before tackling a task is an investment in success. While it may require initial effort, the long-term benefits far outweigh the costs. Preparation fosters competence, confidence, and efficiency—the key ingredients for achieving excellence. 

RTI Services is committed to helping you get there. Most comforting of all is knowing that our world-class engineering experts are on call and working tirelessly to solve both your current system challenges, as well as the ones you haven’t thought of yet. Visit us here to find out about free project Onboarding and Success Plans we offer, so you can get back to focusing on innovation.

About the author:

Juanjo Martin is Senior Director of Professional Services at RTI. He joined the Engineering Department of RTI in 2012, where he started working in the support team and developed some features and improvements in several products. Later, he joined the Professional Services team to help RTI customers optimize their systems. After traveling to help customers around the world for a few years, he now manages the EMEA and APAC Professional Services teams.