Training is important

Hi,

I one of my e-zine, there was a link to this article Employers aren't training staff to use new tech tools. Employees are paying the price - TechRepublic

Ouch :worried:.

The following is a true story. At this time I was with a company that was an AutoCAD dealer. We were told by a draughtsman (working for one of our customers) that he went back from the weekend on Monday, to find out that his drafting table was replaced by a computer with a copy of AutoCAD. This poor man didn't know anything about AutoCAD. He was speechless. That was a long time ago, seems times never change.

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Our experience in the UK is that employees are pretty much sat down in front of their computer and asked to ‘get on with it’. Virtually no handover and an awful lot of knowledge lost when someone leaves.

There is a gradual reduction of awareness of the database’s abilities with each handover and, as a warning to fellow developers, it can eventually end up with the system being replaced as the perception becomes that it doesn’t do what they need. It does of course, but nobody ever asks, they just assume that what they know are the limits of what is available. For anyone with an SBA solution, it is important to keep in regular contact with all clients.

This lack of training approach also emphasises the importance of the UI. If it isn’t intuitive, then again the system’s long-term life is limited.

It seems a long way from the days of receiving a new Mac with a floppy disk that showed what a mouse was, how to use it and how to use a filing system.

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Absolutely. Bringing forward the need for training (and documentation) is important. Many have in mind their own experience with ubiquitous software like MS Office, which everyone knows and masters to some extend.
Enterprise software supports enterprise processes. All starts with a duly documented process, giving a set of crucial contextual information to people involved:

  • what we do
  • why we do it
  • how we do it

I am in the process of revamping a CRM module for a customer. This morning I did some statistics about the use of this modules’ specific fields. Less than 1 % of concerned records hat entries in these fields. Looking for the cause of this low level of data availability, I found the process description. It is a 2-sentence stub that formally excludes halve of the eligible records (customer category) from receiving these data. This limitation is erroneous and there is no what and why explained. Proper process documentation is the starting point for effective training.