New manager on the block

[Bill Lawrence <lawrence -at- mayaviz -dot- com>]

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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