[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Costs/Staff training/testing

[Dan Scott]

On Tue, 2010-06-15 at 11:50 -0400, Cynthia Williamson wrote:
> Couldn't agree more re staff testing - our one "do-over" would be
> changes to the way we did staff testing/training.  In a past migration
> project at another library, when our vendor did the training months
> before we went live (we had no choice about timing), I knew staff
> wouldn't retain what they'd learned.  I created exercises for them to
> do on a weekly basis, they had to work together in pairs and they had
> to hand in their "homework".  In going a more casual, open source,
> learn-yourself way, my big under-estimation was staff engagement.
> They just weren't as excited about EG as Robert and I were.  We're
> lucky to be an academic library with a slower summer time so it all
> worked out for us.  And our circ desk is not crazy busy as some public
> libraries circ desks can be so that made the "learn while live"
> situation doable.  It all really means that, in spite of some
> universal truths, you have to make your plan according to your own
> situation. Its not a one size fits all situation, many things can be
> done differently depending on how much time & money you have and
> depending on the skill levels and engagement of your staff.
> Cynthia

To add one more voice to the mix; during the months leading up to our
go-live date, our cataloguers had weekly training / exercise sessions
where each week we went over the previous week's tasks and then
introduced some new tasks with practice exercises. When we went live,
they were in a relatively happy state. Kudos to Ron Slater, who put
together the training schedule, and the cataloguers for tackling it with
good spirits and humour.

In contrast, our circulation desk is very short-staffed, so the staff
had very little time to commit to formal training sessions of this
nature. It was also a little bit harder coming up with good
representative samples of problems they would encounter; setting up the
system with dummy data was a lot of work (this would be a good part of a
test & training package, if someone wants to develop that!). When we
went live, they were very unhappy because they were trying to learn how
to solve problems on the fly - and that is not a fun thing to do in
front of users. I think we would all like a do-over on that one.