New manager on the block

Subject: New manager on the block
From: Bill Lawrence <lawrence -at- mayaviz -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 13:02:27 -0500


Since we're telling war stories...

I had just started as the doc manager (at a previous job) for a company that had been selling enterprise-wide software to the broadcasting industry for seven years. The company had about a dozen customers, all really big contracts, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to actually canvass the entire user base. Since we were part of tech support, I asked my boss (the tech support manager) to set up focus panels at the various customer sites so that we could talk to them about our documentation. We got buy-in from about half of the customers, so we set up conference calls with a half-dozen focus groups. What we found out left me stunned.

None of the customers sites we surveyed used any of our user documentation. In fact, they never took the manuals out of the boxes. The online help system wasn't used either. Each customer site established their own help desk as the first line of support, and so the users would simply call the help desk with questions. The help desk built a knowledge base based on the questions and referenced that, not our help system. If the first line help desk couldn't answer a question, they called us.
So how did customers learn how to use the product? Our tech support group ran "train-the-trainer" courses at each site. These were ad-hoc classes with no formal training materials.
Scary huh? Especially given that some sites had as many as 400 users.
We did discover that system administrators, DBAs, and the more technical folks did indeed use our installation and administration manuals.
So when somebody tells you that nobody reads the manuals, they may be right.

Bill

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