After two years as a product manager at NueMD—where I applied my instructional communication pedigree to writing product specifications and building intuitive features—an opportunity opened up for me as manager of my original department.
Problem
Background
Client training often took a month
A newly-enrolled client would schedule one-on-one phone calls with our in-house trainers for five training sessions. They would carve time out of their work day and follow a "show-and-tell"-style training over their shared screen, but they had no takeaways to study on their own.
I was proud of helping write our first training manual...
In my first two years as a technical writer for NueMD, I mainly created user guides for product modules and assisted our instructional designer with Nuebie Notes, the first training manual for our product.
...but did we create more problems than we solved?
While clients now had a handy printed manual at their fingertips that we hoped would shrink support calls, its publication, revision, and inventory tracking presented new headaches.
Departments again found themselves weighed down by manual chores. We had even duplicated processes, instructions, forms, and manuals for client segments with slightly different requirements, rather than granularize and share those resources across audiences. Our short-sightedness doubled the pain of maintaining the material.
Realizations
We should have moved on from print sooner
We were a software-as-a-service technology company built on cloud computing, yet our department just unleashed a physical, static, paper-based training program that burdened clients and coworkers with new friction. It took time to recognize the need to evolve because we were still basking in our achievement.
We focused on what we created, not what we needed
Though we loudly extolled the virtues of pithiness and conversational writing advocated by Strunk & White's Elements of Style↗, we often failed to observe brevity in our processes and volumes of material.
Today, I see a similar disconnect in the design community, where some use design to celebrate their personal art more than to solve others' problems.
We should have made the product more intuitive
Our documentation department was in demand because we never addressed root issues in the product that required so much training in the first place. User experience was in its infancy, and we often put the needs of our department or career ahead of the user.
Solution
It was time to go digital
We needed to automate the routines we accidentally inflicted on the company. We could break our training monolith down into manageable, scalable, granular videos that could be quickly updated over the course of product releases.
We vetted vendors and chose Saba
I decided to move our training videos, survey questions, cross-department triggers, and emails into a learning management system (LMS). Our team looked at a few options and selected Saba (now Cornerstone↗). With this system, we could:
- let the user login and complete at a time convenient for them
- configure courses differently to suit the needs of different audiences
- present and grade quizzes immediately, rather than have a human deliver manually
- integrate a sandbox environment of our application for "point-and-click" interaction
- schedule one-on-one calls as needed
- eliminate paper forms and faxes completely
- extend to internal staff training
Process
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Evangelize
To justify cost, we cut other teams in...
At first, we were concerned we might not get the budget approved. I decided to listen to other departments, understand their pains, and consider how we might expand the scope of Saba to work for them as well.
Now that we had early buy-in, this was no longer just another pet project for our department, but a company initiative. I didn't want to inflict more unwanted change to someone else's job. This effort would include and involve stakeholders across the organization.
Convert
I categorized assets by needed action
First, I inventory of all documents we produce and grouped them according to how they will fit in the new system:
- Update: These items are working well and should be adapted to the new environment.
- Consolidate: These should be combined with or covered by another existing document.
- Standardize: There are separate versions of these documents with onlyminor differences. We can use inclusive language or conditional logic in Saba to combine this and be easier to maintain.
- Sunset: We no longer need these. They might be replaced with video tutorials, messages embedded in the Saba course, or covered elsewhere.
This made it easier to assign members of my team. For example, junior members could handle the straight conversions while senior writers would tackle the more strategic consolidations and standardizations.
Plan
I set deadlines to push updates within each release cycle
Workflow
Pitch
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Scripts
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Standards
We documented our guidelines for style, tone, and format
We used readability metrics to quantify our improvements
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Action
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Video
Results
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Evolution
With LMS curricula now built out for both client onboarding and training, we began to develop internal materials for our own staff. Most of our talent were not domain experts in medical billing. We started producing just-in-time education materials for all staff to bring them up to speed.
Staff tutorial describing a medical patient's "user journey." Toward the end of the video, you can notice the narration becoming unpolished. We had not yet edited this draft's script for brevity or screen time.
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