One of the most common, pervasive challenges to effective BPM I have seen and continue to see is a lack of basic training in the basic tools workers need to do their jobs. I have lost track of the number of users I have met who use software for document creation and editing, presentations, spreadsheets, and Web browsing, and who have received absolutely no training at all in any of these. Many of these people don't even know how to access, interpret, or use any of the help information included in these programs.
Why?
"There isn't time or budget for training – these people have work to do!" (And how much better and faster would their work be if they weren't spending more time than anyone seems to know figuring out how to do stuff they should already know how to do or figure out?)
"It's not my/our job to train people, and we don't have resources/skills for that." (That may be, but it still needs doing, on at least a basic level. And if you didn't insist on such skills when you hired these people, you owe it to them and to the company to help them learn at least enough to help themselves.)
"Everyone already knows how to use these programs!" (It takes about 20 to 30 minutes to teach someone how to get a sound recognizable as music out of a guitar. It can take a lifetime to get good at playing it. And the guitar is, in most cases with which I'm familiar, neither as complex nor as business-critical as most word-processing software. If you work with someone who says or acts as if they actually believe this one, you might want to consider changing jobs.)
What to Do
1. Pick a particular department, team, or task. Work with an initial set of those primarily involved to determine the most critical specific tasks they perform regularly. Criticality can be determined by effects on costs or revenues, or whatever other metrics make the most sense.
2. Choose one that relies upon one or more specific programs. For a sales team, maybe it's drafting trip reports, filing expenses, or organizing and following up with new contacts. For new service or support representatives, maybe it's completing incident reports, or escalating problems. Whatever. Doesn't matter. Pick one, and identify the program or programs users require to complete it correctly and effectively.
3. Work with users to identify and capture the specific steps needed to complete each task – including, where appropriate, how to turn on the computer and/or load the printer. Leave nothing out. Assume nothing. Focus only on commands and features directly related to the specific people, resources, and task at hand. And keep each task-specific set of instructions to fewer than five steps, or the equivalent of a single, single-spaced standard page of text. (Tasks that seem to require longer documentation may instead need to be broken into smaller tasks.)
4. Test and refine each document, again with at least some of the users directly involved in the tasks at hand. Edit and refine as needed. Then, make sure everyone who should get one gets one, and that it gets updated at least annually and after every significant change to the supporting IT resources. (Updates might go out with the employee manual or handbook your organization distributes to all new employees – right?)
5. Document the specific steps and results of your organization's specific take on the above recommended processes, and use these to replicate and scale this exercise across other business-critical tasks and the IT resources that support them.
Extra Credit: Put up a wiki or some other shared collaboration space, where users can support themselves by posting comments on the official instructions or newly discovered tips and tricks.
More soon. Comments welcome.
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
