Journals by RSS
Journals by EmailI’ve been a feedreader and blog hermit lately because I’ve been working on a couple of projects in my spare time. I’ve still shown my face (did I just hear a shriek…?) in the RoboHelp forums, mostly because it’s not a big time commitment. Get an email, go to the forum, give a reply, get on with life.
After a recent round of WebEx training on a Web application, one of our stakeholders proposed a different scheme for training. This application is going to go out to far-flung offices, and we see the potential for spending a lot of time training the staff. In addition, we tend to discuss peripheral issues and edge cases more than we should, lengthening our sessions.
The new scheme is to provide some quick-start material directed to the office staff roles. Then we’ll provide a menu of demonstrations done in Captivate. The demos will cover the “happy path,” as one of the managers calls it, rather than wandering off the main road into the dark woods and fields of tangentia (I think I just made that word up). Support for edge cases can come from the managing offices.
Next, we hold question-and-answer sessions by WebEx.
Finally, the stakeholder department will provide coaching and support.
I think this is a good approach for this particular situation. Quick-start guides or quick-reference cards may become a standard part of our deliverables. I and the designer on this project are going to propose a training page that is reachable from the landing page. The Captivate demos would open in modal windows. We have to pass it off through the project management, but I think with this new emphasis on training, this page will be added in.
To me, that’s one benefit of Agile development. If needs come up during a project, as long as there’s room in the budget, you meet those needs. We’ve seen a training need appear, and so we take care of it rather than ignoring it because it wasn’t in the original specifications or plan.
