Many users struggle when they are beginning to use Projectmates because they haven't yet been trained or they do not know what is expected of them. In many cases, Projectmates Administrators end up receiving numerous support calls or users become exceedingly frustrated and do not use the system. Many of these issues can be avoided by creating your own personalized training and help documents that users can access at any time.
For our clients with their own server(Total Control and Installed Solutions), I recommend creating a separate Project entirely dedicated to Projectmates Training and Support. If you are an asp user (i.e. you login to www.projectmates.com) you can simply create a separate tab in an existing project for storing your Projectmates training documents.
Even though Projectmates comes with detailed, user-friendly help guides, every company should create their own brief help documents specific to their processes. Simply download the Projectmates guides and edit them to suite your needs. For example, you may be able to eliminate the section related to Prime Contracts if you are not using that particular module. You could also separate out each module's help information so that you have separate files for RFI help, Schedule help, Change Order help, etc. Also, make sure to add information that is specific to your company. For instance, you may need users to enter a specific number into the RFI Internal Tracking Number field in Projectmates. Be sure to explain these types of procedures in your documentation. Then, upload these documents into your newly created Projectmates Training and Support Project.
Once this is done, users should be able to easily find a Help Guide specific to their needs that outlines what is expected of them. These documents could be written files or recorded video presentations. You could also setup a discussion or RFI/Issue Tracker thread for responding to users questions or posting FAQs. It would also be a good idea to include links on the Project Home Page where users can link to the Projectmates' University page where they can view and download pre-recorded training seminars created by Projectmates' Training and Development Staff.
Keep in mind that as soon as you add a new user to your system, they receive an email from Projectmates welcoming them to the site and giving them a link to login. When adding a new user it would be a good idea to also send out your own email (create a template for this) that lets them know exactly what they are expected to do in Projectmates. Also include information about your new Projectmates Training and Support Project so users know how to get support and training!
We have institutes a train the trainer program to help our in-house folks. On construction projects we require the contractors to pay a fee that includes a lunch with training for their specific project. We also provide them with contacts to ask questions during the project. We created a project specifically to provide information, ask questions and to generally play with the software before going live. The result...RFI response time has decreased and submittal review time has decreased.
Posted by: James Lynch | November 28, 2008 at 05:14 PM