inputs/outputs

Here’s my proposal:

For all production support which involves an interaction between consultant and user, excluding a classroom setting, there should be a 20 minute rule between the question and the answer.  Basically, the user should have:

1. 20 minutes to figure out a solution on their own
2. The ability to close their own ticket
3. Just a tiny bit of patience

For instance, if I get a request for some help on SAP, I’ll wait 20 minutes before calling them back.  I couldn’t confidently give a statistic of how many times the ticket will be closed when I check again after 20 minutes, but I’m guessing it could save some painful phone/email/research time.  Why 20 minutes?  It’s enough time for the user to use a learn-by-doing approach to solve their own problem without perceiving the helpdesk as unresponsive.

Often times, users do a knee-jerkreaction when they encounter an error.  We tell the user what to click without attaching meaning to the clicking.  (Why would we?  That’s what training is for.)  Then, when the error returns, they call us back.  More time, more money.

Question, for another post:  Is classroom training effective?  For who?

I recently bought a Ukulele (which has been a great purchase) and I’ve been watching lessons on how to play it through YouTube (as well as some other books). I thought it was funny in a lot of these videos that the teachers try to cram an entire lesson of musical theory and method into a 10 minute clip.

Then I started thinking: what if there are 7 year old ukalele/guitar/piano players learning technique from these YouTube videos, and what if they become really famous musicians one day? The web is changing the way we learn, and who we learn it from. For instance, anyone who buys a Mac can become an instant teacher of any skill.  Anyone who has a high speed internet connection now has the ability to learn any skill.

This is a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. On one hand, it allows talented people to become teachers, and it also allows the people who don’t know much about a skill to be a fake teacher, and possibly misguide users.

When you allow your users to pick their own roles, you create an interesting, and sometimes slanted, dynamic. There are probably parents who turn their guitar-playing children onto YouTube so they can save money on an actual teacher. It’s not the same, but then again, you get what you pay for. It’s the variance in the quality of these instructional YouTube videos which makes the web experience much different than something like outsourcing your customer service calls.