As the year closes, so does another project. For the past two-and-a-half years, I’ve been working on implementing a new SAP-based warehousing system at my long-standing client. This has been my seventh SAP project, but probably the one I have enjoyed the most. This has been largely due to the fact that I have been required to actually teach (normally I manage to delegate that to my underlings), and the fact that most of the users have been ‘real people, with real jobs’. Mainly forklift operators, who go to work in company-provided work clothes with their names stitched onto their shirts.
It’s entirely refreshing, after 15 years of developing training and documentation for office-based college graduates, to go to doing the same for our blue-collar brethren who often don’t even have their high school diploma (or if they have, it was obtained in prison as part of their bid for parole – no joke, we had this) and have never used a computer before. It’s surprising how much, in this day and age, we take for granted. I had trainees who needed to be told to hold down the shift key in order to type the characters above the numbers, or had to be shown how to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete (as they tried to work out how they could jab all three keys at exactly the same time, when they could apparently only use their two index fingers for typing.
But after all is said and done, we managed. Furthermore, we managed to get them trained on how to use a vehicle-mounted, wireless PC with a touchscreen and attached keyboard and barcode scan-gun. And most of them managed. Even the ones we thought couldn’t read (although that turned out to be just a badly-disguised bad attitude). And we managed to create effective simulations – using OnDemand – that worked seamlessly with the touchscreen and scan-guns (a first, as far as I can work out, for this software). To be fair, several of the sites already had vehicle-mounted units, but these were 1970s industrial units with an integrated ABC keyboard, and an 8×40 LED display. To go from that to a touch-screen, QWERTY keyboard (playing ‘hunt the letter’ took up a lot of time in training) and an SAP interface that varied from ‘unintuitive’ to ‘downright confusing’ and still manage to run the business is quite an achievement.
Highlights include:
Forklift driver #1, during a discussion on the things you’d put up with during sex before you decided it was all getting too weird (we were on a break!), said he’d slept with a girl who wanted him to punch her. “And did you?” we all wanted to know. “Well, not in the face, no…”. Like anything else is fair game, just not the face…
Forklift driver #2 who made himself dinner of saltine crackers with ranch dressing on top when he discovered that that was all that was left from lunch. (He was fired a few weeks later for breaking into the sandwich machine.)
Forklift driver #3 who had fingers tattooed onto his fingers, for some never-explained reason. Actually, tattoos – and gold teeth – featured prominently across a broad number of the trainees. And a lot of them looked like prison ones. The tattoos that is, not the gold teeth. I get the impression that prison is where you get gold teeth removed, not installed…
That said, although the users were great, the project team was the most dysfunctional I’ve ever worked on. We had the development team hiding key functionality deficiencies so that we looked like chumps when we tried to demo it, or neglecting to tell the training team (me) about key changes, so they could sweep in like the cavalry at go-live, saying “Man, I can’t believe Training never told you about this!”. We had management who would believe the users when they said “We were never taught that!” rather than asking us if we’d covered it and whether the user was actually present (and awake) in training. And we had a support team who consequently saw everything as a training issue. Example: there’s a button on almost every screen called “Details”. Normally you click it and it displays some innocuous information. But on one screen, you click it and it logs you off. System issue? No, it’s Training’s fault for not telling the users to not click that button on that screen. Of course! Silly me…
All that said, I must be a glutton for punishment, because I’m rolling straight on to another SAP project at the same client, with barely a weekend inbetween the two projects. In fact, as is normally the case, there has been a bit of an overlap on this side of the move, and I have a nasty feeling that there will be on the other side, too. Still, I’ll be glad to be finally done with having to wear steel-toed boots (which wore my big toenails don to numbs and put holes in all my socks) and a hard-hat, which seems to have worn my hairline even further back on my head…
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