ellissj3 wrote:I have recently been asked to put together some training materials for a company's TM1 user community. This would be catered to beginners and intermediate individuals. Rather than just go through the TM1 User Guide and start documenting many of these processes. Can you assist me with identifying some consistent training issues you face regularly. For example, often I have seen training issues for users remembering how to filter using the wildcard. Any insights you can point out would be most helpful. I am usually stuck in development, so this is a new experience for me.
1/ If possible, spend a bit of time with existing users to see what they're doing with the product. Aim your training materials at the tasks that they actually do (or
need to do, even if they aren't aware of it yet) rather than trying to turn them into TM1 gurus.
2/ Don't bother being too comprehensive. I've learnt this one the hard way. Even if you index and provide a table of contents and keep the length down to (say) 20 to 40 pages, they're likely to say "Gee thanks, this is really good!", throw it in their drawer, never look at it again and call you for help when they can't remember how to select an element. You're far better off doing several smaller documents (say, one on PNL reporting, one on data entry, one on HR reporting etc) of only maybe less than 6 pages double sided and just give each user the ones that they need based on what they do.
3/ Screenshots are helpful, but don't go overboard; remember the overriding principle that the longer a document is, the less likely they are to read it or keep it around. Much as I love Photoshop CS5 for photography, it's both overkill and not particularly easy to work with for this kind of thing. Nor is PS Elements, come to that. I used to use Paint Shop Pro which was excellent for screenshotting back when it was produced by Jasc, but Corel have now morphed it into a Photoshop wannabe. I still use PSP5 at work (ancient, but does the job) but for training materials that I'm creating on my own machines I have
TechSmith's Snagit, which it would be worth seeing whether your bosses will spring for. At a push you can get away with PrintScreen and MS Paint, but that doesn't allow you to capture the cursor as well (which can be useful), and it's nowhere near as good at overlaying captions and compositing multiple screenshots together. (Remembering the principle of more pages = fewer readers, if you combine shots of multiple related dialogs together you save space.) I've also found that it degrades the images when you need to resize them far more than "real" image editors like Snagit do.
4/ If possible do some one page "crib sheets" which cover the key points, focusing on what they need to do. A 20 page document may be thrown in the drawer. A one pager may find a place on their partition wall if it's relevant enough to their work.
5/ You also have the option of doing multimedia training materials, but be sure that you'd get a decent return on investment first. The three (main) options there are:
(a) PowerPoint. Yes, most people hate PowerPoint but mainly because it's used as a crutch by really boring speakers who just read bullet points on garish backgrounds, and the product has suffered by association. It can actually be useful for explaining concepts like data flows between systems graphically, and I have indeed used it for this when I'm presenting training courses (allowing me to pick and choose when transitions come up) rather than distributing it as a stand-alone for users to view themselves. As a stand-alone it's the most limited of the three tools that I use.
(b) Adobe's Captivate. I don't use this one so much at the moment but Captivate is very useful for doing interactive training tools where you can get users to "simulate" doing things then giving them "yes, that's right" or "No, that's wrong, you do it like this" feedback. However this is a pretty substantial undertaking and probably not worth it unless you have a large number of users and a steady churn of workforce. Also I find Captivate's interface a little clunky, but that's a personal view.
(c) Techsmith's Camtasia, which is something of a combination of a screen motion capture tool and a lightweight video editing tool. It's the best of the three for creating "movies", while Captivate (which also motion captures your screen) is better for creating interactive training.
All of the above, even PowerPoint, require quite a bit of an investment in time to learn the tool as well as to produce the presentations and again, it's a question of whether it's worth it. (For instance if the users don't have sound on their PCs, what's the point?) If the environment that you're working in changes rapidly (with regular upgrades of TM1 version) but your workforce doesn't, multimedia is probably a waste of time and you'd be better off sticking to written materials since they'll be easier to update.
6/ Finally, you can have all the training materials in the world but they really aren't substitutes for having someone standing in front of a training group (ideally in a training room where each person has their own machine) presenting to them and being able to answer their questions and explain things in greater depth as needed. Although one problem there is that a lot of people find public speaking to be an experience slightly less desirable than death. I quite enjoy it (a hyperinflated ego helps
) but many people don't, and a training course where the presenter really doesn't want to be there (or worse, where they do want to be there but don't really know their subject) can be more off-putting to users than no face to face training at all. So the last thing that you need to factor in is whether you have the resources / trainers for face to face training, and consequently whether there will be a need for training materials to support that.