Here’s one I STRONGLY agree with! A little training, say more than three hours, would be quite useful in this case. A lot of the things you seem to be struggling with can easily be overcome by experience. Spend some time with someone who knows how to get the most out of Business Objects and you’d be amazed at how much you can accomplish with the minimal effort. I see more and more instances where installations start off without experienced guidance and the deployments struggle.
If you create your own variable (via Grouping), you can rename variable titles… thereby changing the legend text. With the automatic group creation, I’ve sometimes used this as an alternative to an if/then/else method of renaming a column value.
Unfortunately, Business Objects isn’t the kind of product that can be mastered by playing around with it. I strongly recommend taking the reporter classes. They give a very strong foundation.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that is always true. I’ve never had a class Not to say that I’m a ‘master’ by any stroke of the imagination! I do think that classes are beneficial and much more valuable if given with the user’s specific data.
I have never taken a BO class, but I have taught a few.
This is a difficult situation. I do think that training is valuable, but for someone who knows other tools, standard training can be very frustrating. However, there isn’t always any option when you have to learn a new tool.
As I said in a previous post, each tool has it’s own method of accomplishing tasks. The one you are most used to is the one that is “best”. So when it comes to working with another tool, it becomes easy to find fault.
I forgot the name of the company,but there is one we used for our client training,this company make a study about our universe,the data and provide client training in business objects using client specific data and universe.
The client was lot more happy then the standard BO training.
Most all of the bigger partners (including us) do this sort of activity. As Michael mentioned, it’s a pretty expensive proposition. However, it can be quite effective for training lots of users.
Using user specific training is very valuable and well worth the time spent to develop the material. It really jump starts the end user. They are more likely to go back to their desk and pick up with some of the reports they developed in the classroom. Having work-specific exercises at the end of the training will simulate the “real-world” scenarios that end users will find back at their desk.
When we developed the end user training based on their universe it was so well received! I don’t know how many times we heard how much better it was than being trained on “Bahamas Beach”…
One of the things we did was ask in advance for standard business questions they needed to answer. We developed those basic queries and worked with them during the class so that they could see how they could customize a general query to specifically what they wanted.
Another thing we found helpful was grouping the training by function. The accounts payable people were together, the finance group was together, etc. Then the queries and the questions made sense to everybody in the room!
From the user perspective, for that class, having training based on their data is great. From a training material development perspective, it can become a nightmare. Most of our clients that have asked us to develop custom material eventually went back to eFashion / Island Resorts for a variety of reasons.
It costs money to develop material. It therefore costs money to update that material everytime your user data model changes. When was the last time eFashion changed?
If you want your training material to “match” what you see on the screen, you have to have a snapshot of representative data to build the training material around. It takes time to generate that data, to build an appropriate subset of “real” data, and then to maintain that over time.
Finally, depending on the user, it can be difficult for the trainer to keep everyone on track. Some users get distracted by seeing “their data” and start going off on tangents to write their own reports. That’s fine in an unstructured environment, and I would be the last to discourage “playing” with the tool to see what it can do, but in a structured classroom environment it can be very distracting.
What we generally suggest to clients that want “custom” material is that we present our current one or two day curriculum (beginning + advanced user training) followed by a 1/2 day session on the user’s own data. By that time they are (hopefully) ready to branch out and apply what they have seen during the prior day(s) training sessions.
But it means that the standard training material that is provided doesn’t have to change every time the customer’s database changes, the data on the screen will always match what’s on the printed page, and nobody gets distracted by eFashion data.
You have to look at response times too. In your classroom things need to happen ASAP, otherwise people will work on other things because they can’t sit and wait. I’ve hosted classes using an ORACLE version of the Beach Universe… with 20 people hitting it at once, it was laggy even as small as it is.
What a better thing to do would be to figure out what types of reports the end users plan on generating. Then you can spend the first half of the last day going over “report” specific questions. Then they get real-life examples with mocked data and snappy report times.
Lastly… When they leave the class and go back to their desk… they “ALWAYS” have the Beach universe to play with (on standard installs). The only change I really do is recreate the universe in Oracle, so we can use Oracle specific functions and not worry about the ODBC version of the functions.
That’s an interesting approach. I like it. Although I can see it getting very expensive,as well, since you would have to purchase an Oracle license for the server on which you host the new database. Of course, if you can put in on an existing Oracle server, that would work just fine, but, in my experience, DBA’s don’t like putting training or test databases on production servers, even if they’re small.
I could not agree more!
It is the first thing I say even before going into financial/time considerations.
The training almost invariably turns into chaos as students start talking “shop” about the data and totally disrupt the class.
Hmm I see both points…we provided generalized and application specific end user training.
The users really had a hard time relating to the data from efashion etc. and received the appplication specific training very well.
Regarding turning the training into a “shop” - I believe this is a matter of keeping the training focused and not to be side-tracked, which requires a good trainer and co-operating users as well.
So as Dave already said: I think a generalized training followed by application specific training would be the best approach.
I’ve heard of user’s who wanted their money back, after having taken the e-fashion training. They just didn’t get it at all. They could not relate.
I heard they really liked the application specific training they received later on.
If you develop your course work so it is very specific and covers a lot of functionality, you keep them so busy that they don’t have time to talk shop.
Another good idea, is to state up-front, that all questions will be addressed at the end of the class, so please jot them down.
You can use the personal trainer to give them generalized training and then follow up with your own customized training.
While we were doing the customized training, we had one or two other trainers wandering around. We kept smacking them on the knuckles if they got side tracked!
(BOB member since 2002-06-08)
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
(BOB member since 2002-08-08)
Not to say that I’m a ‘master’ by any stroke of the imagination! I do think that classes are beneficial and much more valuable if given with the user’s specific data.
Most of our clients that have asked us to develop custom material eventually went back to eFashion / Island Resorts for a variety of reasons.
And you gave candy bars to all the goodie users?