A Geek Tragedy in Three Acts (continued)

Act III: User Training Has Gone by the Wayside
As the systems slowly become “maintenance only” projects, the training for new users is often subpar. New users are given a username, a password and a standard set of menu options for the department they’ll be working in, and then they’re dismissed by the Synergy/DE development team.

The hope — nay, the assumption — is that departmental personnel will train new hires in the use of the system. Unfortunately, the people doing the training were themselves trained by other people years earlier, and it’s amazing how much systems know-how can get lost between “employee generations.”

I was once working with a Synergy/DE systems user in a shipping department, and was astounded by how many programs were in her menu. When I questioned her, she said she only used a few of them, and didn’t know what the rest were for.

“Why are they in your menu?” I asked.

She said she didn’t know, but she thought they were there for the employee she had replaced. Someone had simply copied his menu to her account and assumed that she’d be trained. Digging around, I found that no one — not even the department manager — knew what some of the programs were for.

It’s a shame, but it happens a lot. New users, most of whom have never seen nor used a Character User Interface, are simply sat down in front of a terminal window and largely left to their own devices. Whole portions of a system’s functionality can be lost in this manner, simply because the users are already in unfamiliar territory and lack the skills to even begin asking the right questions.

The problem is that applications developed to run on terminals are no longer intuitive to the vast majority of users. By employing xfServerPlus to give your application a GUI, suddenly everything will just “make sense” to old and new users alike. And if a user can’t find something he needs, or wants an additional feature, there won’t be any hesitation (or fear) in asking that it be provided.

In the end, insistence that a character-based UI is ample is simply not good enough for most users. Providing intuitive interfaces through an xfServerPlus-enabled GUI can go a long way toward deflecting costly, time-consuming investigations into alternative software solutions.

The Climax: Turnover at the Top
The climax to this well-known play comes when there is turnover at the top: a new CEO, a new VP, a new comptroller, even a new manager. Any or all of them can start the ball rolling down a migration path, and those of you who’ve tried it before know it’s not an inexpensive prospect.

When a new “management type” arrives, the first thing he’s going to need is information. It doesn’t matter if someone else runs the report or collates the data, or if he does it himself. Either way, his introduction to your company’s software is likely to be through the reports he receives. If he has trouble making heads or tails of it (or worse, the information he’s requesting just isn’t there), it doesn’t bode well for the future of your application. Everyone knows that first impressions are all-important, and your software just blew it. Right from the start, the new guy is thinking about how the systems looked at his old company, and the reports they used to have… and he’ll remember them with fondness and forget (or not know of) the travails involved in setting up the old software.

It doesn’t take long for the new manager to start getting feedback on what the users think of the current system. He’ll start by asking pertinent questions, like “How do you know when x happens in your department?” or “What sort of metrics are you keeping on y?” No matter what happens at that point — though it’s preferable that the employees have had the training that enables them to get at the requested information — the new manager will finish off with one final question: “Would it be helpful to you if we had software that did z?”

continue >