Motivating end users to read the manual

[Garnier Garnier]

Hello to all who responded to my query,

Thanks for the responses. It is sincerely appreciated. I will sincerely explore the suggestions.

Our documentation (User and Reference Manuals) are made available as part of the installation in html (Webworks help) and pdf format. No print format. The User/Reference Manuals include “What’s New in the Release” section with the relevant hyper links to User/Reference Manuals for details. The “Requirements” are part of the Installation Guide which is made available as an external file as well as part of the installation. The readme.txt that accompanies the installer lists all the book names and its contents in brief. 

The training materials are made available to the customers at a cost (who buy the tool). This includes the labs with screen shots (step wise instructions) plus presentations plus videos. The changes made in the training material is provided as “Readme, I’m new.txt”. I also send mails to the field engineers about the changes and asking them to exercise the new features. But unfortunately they never respond. For all the major changes the engineers are given training through Webinars, which again most of the time is poorly attended.  As mentioned earlier, they are familiar with the tool so ignore the trainings and the documentation. But there are certain details that they need to know before going to the client site for training. At that time their only focus is to train and ensure that everything is running fine. When they are stuck with the new/modified features they aim the barbsJ. It is probably the lack of time and the confidence that “they
 know everything so do not need to read” is causing this issue. Not sure. 

As already mentioned the new comers are anyway made to go through the training to get hands on experience of the product before they actually get down to coding.


As someone suggested “how about bribing and violence”. Fortunately or unfortunately its not my cup of tea. I was hired to work so let me continue to do so. 

We are a very small company so almost everybody is busy with their respective projects. It is not always possible to have training sessions. Never thought about inserting offers. 



B/R, 
Garnier
  



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