I was once on a tour of a plant where conveyor belts were being manufactured. I noticed that one of the machines had several people standing around it, and the machine did not seem to be working well (if at all). I asked the tour guide what was going on, and she replied “Oh, we always have problems with this machine. It never works right.”
So being a nosy type, I said “It looks like the people running the machine don’t really know what they’re doing.” And she replied, “Oh, that’s because they’ve never really been trained. When we hired them, we just put them on the machine, showed them how to turn it on and off, and had them get started.”
“Well what about documentation? Surely there’s a user’s manual for the machine…”
“No,” she replied. “The one they gave us didn’t make sense to us. So we’ve just been trying to figure it out as we go.”
This story is a complete fabrication, of course.
But if you substitute the word “machine” in this story with “AMS” or “database,” this is a story I hear repeated again and again in association after association. Associations invest thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into their data management systems, only to short-change the staff by not providing the kind of documentation and training that would allow staff to be really successful with the database.
If you ran a manufacturing plant, would you run the machines without proper training and documentation? Then why are you running your association that way?
Very true. We once did a two day workshop with a client to help them develop a manual that combined their internal procedures with the workings of their software into an integrated new staff training. When we were done the prevailing view was “well this is all well and good but its not realistic that we will give a new hire more than a 30 minute orientation before we turn them loose on the software.”
Michael, that would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad.
It can be hard to document exactly what you do, when you have no idea of the base level of computer knowledge of the reader. If you make it too detailed, you lose people who “know what they are doing” and start to try to anticipate what the document will say (I plead guilty in this regard) but if it is not detailed enough, “it doesn’t make sense” and people muddle through as you described.
Of course, the classic fix for this in the factory system was the unions. Apprentices Did What They Were Told and did not advance until longer term employees were satisfied with their performance. In the modern economy you a pretty much expected to hit the ground running without any period of apprenticeship to learn your craft.
David, good points. But clearly faulting to the side of “too much information” is better than what I’m seeing, which is little or no information.