Debbie Farley

Since my last post we have scheduled monthly training sessions.  We do them via a Sametime session which allows anyone in the company to have access to training with incurring any costs for travel.

Our sessions have been small but lively.  We've had a few folks that happened to be from the corporate office that joined us in the conference room during the session.  I actually like that because it does give me some immediate feed back.  We've had lots of questions but there have been a few times when I wondered if everyone had fallen asleep it was so quiet.  

We currently have Basics and Intermediate classes.  I am working on an Advanced session and look forward to continuing to promote IT and Notes within our company.

I have expressed my frustration with end user complaints and the fact that many of these complaints are because the end users just don't know how to use the tool they have been given, namely Lotus Notes. 

I took the advise about having Lunch & Learn sessions and last week was the first one.  Being the week of the fourth I didn't expect too many to attend so be booked a small conference room and sent out invitations.

We had a full house and just as I expected they did not know the basics on how to make Lotus Notes work for them. 

• Stationery,
• F2 to increase font size on the fly
• Permanent Pen
• Highlighting Text
• Meeting invitations
• Go to View and moving multiple messages to folders

All such simple things but you'd thought they'd been given the holy grail.  We are plaining future sessions and many out of this first group have inquired about attending the next one.

Some days life is just good....

My company has been in an "evaluation" period of Exchange vs Lotus Notes / Domino.  It has been hard to get across the fact that it is NOT  "just email."   I have discovered that the biggest complainers are the ones that have never been trained.  I do not understand why companies will purchase Notes or any big software roll-out, only to ignore training.  There is the usual push to train as the application is rolled out, But after that the new users are left to flounder and figure out what to do by themselves without so much as a "cheat sheet" on how to use the product.  I have never understood the mentality of not wanting to spend money on training employees on the tools they are to use as part of their job function.  It never fails the first thing cut during budget time, in my experience, has been training dollars .

I believe 90% of the complaints we hear would be eliminated if the end users knew how to use the product.  I am thankful we are undertaking a monthly "Lunch & Learn"  to hopefully get our end users a little more training and to share the knowledge.

My preference would be a "New Employee Training" program but I'll take what I can get at this point.   Especially since the existing user base is frequently in desperate need of knowing how to do anything more than send an email through Notes.