Way of the Retainer

I will get back to looking at training venues in short order, but I wanted to talk about customer service, based on some experiences on the weekend.

I had what you might call an “interesting” weekend. After flying back from Perth to Melbourne and getting home at ten past midnight, I couldn’t get into my apartment building. The security keypad was completely dead at the front door. After leaving a message with my real estate agent (that wasn’t returned, despite the “urgent” setting on the voice mail) I had no other option but to check into the hotel next door.

I spent most of the next day getting hand-balled between my real estate agent and the body corporate for my building, driven almost to tears with frustration and still unable to get into my own apartment thanks to the absence of a miracle key. Based on the experience, I wouldn’t recommend either my body corporate or real estate agent as great businesses.

Situations like these - adverse circumstances where there are questions around who is responsible for what, are great opportunities to win over customers. Personally, all I’m ever looking for in these situations is the exact same thing I try to provide our customers professionally: an advocate who is apologetic, sympathetic and will help get a solution to the situation. Someone who’s on your side.

Maybe it comes out of working in the integration space, where as the glue between applications you’re most often guilty until proven innocent. But I don’t think that’s quite it. I was talking with my partner while all of this was happening, and while we work in vastly different fields, we have very similar views on commitment to quality service.

We were boggling at the time at the language people were using over the phone - not our responsibility, not part of our service, not going to do that for another hour or so. People spent more time telling me what they weren’t going to do for me, rather than what they could do for me. That, and pointing all care and responsibility at the other party.

The problem was solved eventually, but not before a slew of phone calls ensuring that both parties would actually do something to solve the issue rather than ignore it. And I’m not looking forward to the bugfight ahead to get my hotel bill sorted.

I could go into a myriad of tiny details about the incompetence and indifference I pushed through just to be able to get into my apartment, but that’s not the point. The point is, next time you have a disgruntled customer to deal with, while you may have no control over what’s happened up to that point, you have complete control over what happens next. People remember customer service that goes above and beyond the expected norm, and there is no better opportunity to create an advocate for your company or service.

It’d be nice to think in our Kevin Rudd / Barack Obama world, we can be better than hand-balling problems to avoid culpability.

So take that opportunity to be extraordinary, and sell your company on amazing quality of service.

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This was a bit longer in coming than I’d hoped… it’s taken a few drafts to get this to a point I was happy with, and in the middle of writing this post, I’ve also started relocating to Perth. Exciting times! And again, sorry for the opus length…

So last time we talked about the training material. But while training material forms the foundation of the experience, how you conduct the course is the make or break point. You can compensate for poor material with solid experience and product knowledge, you can make light of a difficult venue, but without quality delivery you’ll either have your students switch off, or even worse, have them go offside.

Herein lie a few prescriptive suggestions about how to coordinate the course. Again, while I’m stating these as rules, this is only my view on how to handle things. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Learn your student’s names, and use them

I used to think this was a good but cheesy rule until attending a training course where the trainer, on the third day, didn’t know a student’s name. Hearing him fumble through that moment instantly dropped my level of engagement with him, and stripped any notion of cheesiness from the rule. It’s a matter of courtesy.

Remembering student’s names lets you be that little bit more personable, but most of all it shows that you’re listening, and that you care. Why should students engage with you if you won’t engage with them? Also, if you need to get someone’s attention, our brains are really well geared to listening for our own names.

Learn something about the students

Find out their technical background, where they’re coming from, and what it is they hope to learn on the course. After all, putting someone on a training course is a significant business decision. Partially because of the cost involved, but more so because of the significant opportunity cost of taking someone out of their job for five days.

So, find out what their goal is.

Also, a good icebreaker can be finding out something personal about the students - personally, I ask them for something they do with their spare time. If nothing else, it gives you a window into their world. Maybe the recent parent of twins is bleary-eyed and disconnected on day two because of feeding routines, not because of any issue with your delivery.

Asking some simple questions about hobbies lets you switch roles and learn from them, straight off the bat, too. Asking questions shows that you’re interested and listening. And knowing about people’s hobbies or interests allows can allow you to draw analogies when explaining things.

This can be a bit of a double-edged sword though, particularly if you overuse it. Basing analogies on layperson’s knowledge of something that is significant to a student can quite easily come off as condescending. So tread lightly.

The other big advantage to asking people questions about their life outside of work and the training course is that people can be downright fascinating. I found out towards the end of a recent project that a colleague made his own photo books, in a conversation sparked by a play script I’d left on my desk. If you don’t ask, you never find out.

Organise this information as a mud map

If you organise all of this information on a mud-map with a rough grid of where the students are sitting, it gives you a cheat sheet to use while you’re still learning names. Also, it keeps any specific student goals right in your face.

What you do with that information will likely depend on the pace of the course, but at least it’s available as a springboard for you.

Facilitate and guide ‘The Experience’

Calling training ‘The Experience’ does make it sound like a dodgy book/DVD package, but training isn’t just the material, or the labs, or the delivery. It’s the conversations over lunch. It’s the tangents that conversations go down. It’s the sum of the experience of everyone in the room.

But you can’t get the most out of this without a guiding hand. Think of it like an electoral debate. Everyone’s got something interesting to say, but you need someone controlling personalities and keeping things on course.

Which leads into the next point…

Constantly evaluate what’s going on

While you’re presenting or helping out with lab exercises or having a coffee break with students or whatever else is going on, make sure that you’re constantly evaluating what’s going on with the students. Whether it’s asking them outright how the course is going, or reading body language.

Once you’ve delivered training for a while, there’s a fighting chance an amazing thing will happen - you’ll be able to do this while actively presenting material. You get the knack of stepping outside of the moment while it’s happening, and focusing for a moment on the meta cognition part of presenting. I’ve talked to friends who are professional actors, and they’ve told me it happens with acting as well. It’s not magic, but it is tremendously handy. I don’t quite know how to drive getting there, apart from Musashi’s advice on pretty much everything: this is a matter of practice.

Keeping an eye on personalities lets you deal with problems with the training course proactively. Do you have a disgruntled alpha who’s going to try to assert technical dominance and railroad the training course? Try to defuse the situation by surrendering status, and rendering any conflict pointless. Or, if that doesn’t work, pick a strategic point to fight on, and pull them in line.

Is the person in the corner quiet because they’re not being challenged, and they’ve completely disengaged, or is it because things are going a little too fast, and they’re overwhelmed? If they’re bored, maybe draw them out by touching on their areas of expertise and getting their input and the benefit of their experience in the course? If they’re overwhelmed, in a quiet moment offer to take them through concepts outside of class time to help them catch up.

If you look around the room and see a lot of long, tired faces, then pull the ripcord and call a coffee break, then and there. If people are falling asleep, then there’s not going to be much retention of information happening anyway.

Be an expert, not an authority

A good ground rule to establish is that you won’t know the answer to every question off the top of your head, but that you will follow up questions you can’t answer straight away. Realistically, no expert knows the answer to everything in a domain without research. Or, maybe you do. In which case, you rock. (and drop me a line, we’re hiring!)

Setting this expectation up front avoids you feeling like you have to be infallible, and the single source of truth. Which is important to making the experience collaborative. Students will sometimes know the answers to curve-ball or tangent questions that you may not. When this happens, it’s something to be grateful for. Partly because it’s helping you grow and learn, which is a great side benefit of training.

But most importantly for the students, because having everyone involved and contributing gives the most enjoyable and highest quality outcome. The sum of everyone’s experience is greater than just yours, and students will be more attentive in an active environment than a passive one.

So be as prepared and professional as you can be, but be thankful to students for good questions, for correcting you, or for answering a curve-ball question. Getting flustered or petulant as a trainer when you’re caught out not knowing something is an immediate reflection of a lack of self-confidence and assurance. And hell, if you’re thanking students, why not make a point of thanking them by name?

Accept input and feedback

Hopefully, if students are kept awake and entertained, they’ll offer input. It might be questions. It might be comments. It might be feedback.

Accept it.

Especially if we’re talking about questions. A question might be outside the core curriculum of the course, but if it’s related in some way, accepting the question and researching the answer is a great way to learn, and round out your knowledge. So, be grateful for questions. If it’s a comment, respond and acknowledge it in some way.

Treat it as an opener to conversation, and if you need to, a segue into somewhere you’re planning to go. If you keep an active ear on what you’re saying, you’ll find that near most any topic can be used as a segue back to somewhere in the course structure.

But the goal here, or one of the key goals, is to engage students and get them involved. So make sure you reward students for being active. If the response to a comment is a technical smackdown, students will be rightfully hesitant to be involved.

Ask questions

This is an area I’m trying to improve on myself… asking questions is a great way to keep students awake and involved, and snap them out of the half-trance it’s easy to slip into when you’re listening to someone deliver material.

Ask questions about putting the current material into the context of what they’re doing in their work environment… how would you do X or Y? Ask simple questions about yesterday’s material to help retention.

A great time to ask questions is just after lunch, too. Training courses often mean lunch vouchers, which often mean heavier lunches for students than they might normally be accustomed to. Combine the siesta effect of lunch with the fatigue that sets in during a training course naturally, and you’ve got a stupor-riffic cocktail.

A round of questions, with sugary treats for reward will help pep students back up. Hell, you could even run your own little game show…

In closing…

So that’s my current thoughts on the actual act of training delivery. Thanks for reading this far.

Next up, and the last of the three part series, is a few thoughts on what makes a good training venue. In the meantime, let me know what you think in the comments… got any golden rules for training delivery yourself? Violently disagree with something I’ve said here?

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For the first time in a long time, I attended a training course in April as a student,. I’m hoping to attend more training courses soonish, particularly some of Sun’s Java internals courses. I’ve just finished delivering a block of training in Sydney, so now seems like a good time to talk about something that’s been ticking over in my head since that course - golden rules of good training delivery.

Watching a course unfold as a student is a great learning exercise. Not just in terms of learning the course material, but also watching how trainers present the course, and help the class learn. Watching the course in April reinforced for me some things I believe about training - a number of them by negative example.

So, here’s my current viewpoint on what makes good training, and it’s exactly that - just my viewpoint. I’m starting with a few thoughts about training material, because training starts with the material you’re delivering. I’ve got a couple more posts planned here: one about delivery (and managing the experience) and the other on what makes a good training venue.

Please let me know what you think in the comments. Part of the benefit of putting this down down in pixels is challenging what’s inside my head, and improving and evolving it. So feedback is, as always, more than appreciated.

(also, I apologise for the length of the post - believe it or not, this is an abridged version… I need to get these puppies shorter)

Know your material’s theory

No matter how familiar you are with a particular product or technology or skill there is still a gulf between knowing it, and being able to explain it coherently. I remember hitting that brick wall when I started delivering Tuxedo training back in 2001. It’s like the difference between knowing a word well enough to use it, and being able to give a concise definition of that word’s meaning.

Going through dry runs of the material you’re presenting is critical, particularly for new material. Even though you’re not likely to go into every detail when presenting, make sure that you can coherently and concisely explain the points of theory on each slide you’re presenting. Even the obvious ones. Because it’s much easier to find a way to explain something when it’s you in front of a mirror than when it’s you in front of ten eager students.

And sometimes, the things you gloss over initially as obvious are the ones that catch you up. You might find some surprising gotchas in trying to clearly explain concepts that you’ve worked with for years. But that’s a great learning step. It’s being able to clearly explain this to other people that helps you crystallize key concepts in your own head as well. It forces you to eliminate any fuzziness from your thinking. You build a rock-solid foundation of concepts that you build the rest of your theory on.

Know your material’s flow

No matter how well you know the theory, know the order that your material presents information in. If you’re unfamiliar with the flow of the material, no matter how well you know the subject, it’s easy to come off as unprofessional.

It’s paramount to a smooth, consistent experience for students to be able to talk through the concepts you’re conveying using the structure that presentation slides use. If you establish the context of what you’re talking about from the information on the slides and the physical material the students are reading, that ensures that one medium reinforces the other.

The flow of the course provides a logical spine you can use to hang your own asides off. If you’re unfamiliar with the flow of the material, you’ll be presenting in spite of the material - ducking in and out of the logical spine the course provides.

Even with courses I’ve presented before, in fact especially with courses I’ve presented before, I find it’s really important to flick through the slides as a refresher before presenting. To jog your own memory about what you’re talking about and how - to set it all in context.

Speaking of context, that brings me to the next point.

Establish the material’s context

It’s a golden rule I picked up from Kathy Sierra’s awesome blog (sadly now long defunct) As much as possible, direct the experience to be about the students.

Part of that is, when talking in terms of a new piece of functionality, establish why it’s relevant or significant to the students. How will it make development easier, or their application more robust? How will it save them time as an administrator? By constantly bringing the material back to why it’s useful for the students, you’re also reminding yourself of why you’re there - not to show the students how much you know, but to tell them the relevant parts of the knowledge that will help them.

Find the awesome in the material

I maintain that the hardest part of training is keeping people awake in a room for five days.

Sitting in a room and listening to someone drone on can become a real challenge. You find yourself holding out for the next practical exercise just to stay awake. So, as a trainer, it’s important to remember where the awesome is in your material.

Web service security standards might not be the subject of Jerry Bruckheimer’s next film, but to me the fact that public/private key encryption can be used for identity assertion AND ensuring message integrity in one step is pretty damned keen. So convey that to the students! Don’t be afraid to get enthused - to show your nerd love for the topic at hand. Being enthused yourself will help keep the general energy level up. It’s infectious.

There is however, a fine line to walk here. If everything becomes the AWESOME way to do the AWESOME thing, you’ll come across as plastic, and wear people out quickly. You need to be engaging, but authentic at the same time.

So work yourself around to being enthused about key points in the material you’re presenting. Look for the fun nerd stuff you might have missed in the race to be across the content of the course you’re presenting.

Next up: The Delivery.

In the meantime, let me know what you think. Good/bad experiences that have stemmed from course training material? Horror stories of The Course Manual That Came From Snoozeville?

…I wanna hear them all.

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As Banjo Paterson would put it, there is movement at the browser station. Unless you’ve fallen off the internet in the last couple of weeks, you’ve no doubt heard that Google has released their own browser - Google Chrome. It’s based on the same original codebase as Firefox 3 and Flock (which we’ll get back to) which puts it in interesting company.

I’ve only tinkered with Chrome a little bit, but it’s targeted at being as non-intrusive and lightweight as possible. The idea is that it gets the hell out of your way, which is an admirable goal. There’s only two menus in the browser. Two. It seems to have some great support for debugging web development, as well. I’m looking forward to giving it a decent trial by fire when I start doing some fairly heavy-weight web development using the Zend framework - lots of Javascript doing sexy stuff like this, which will really put it through its paces.

I’ve only just upgraded to Firefox 3, personally. I held off for a while due to potential issues with the Delicious plugin I use. Not having Delicious was a deal-breaker, as that’s where I keep most, if not all of my bookmarks now when I can manage it. Turns out that Firefox 3’s Delicious support is fantastic! But, Flock is more what I wanted to talk about, after having tinkered with it a bit.

Since my migration south, I’ve been more and more reliant on using the web to keep in touch with friends. I’ve plugged in to Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, 43 Things, LinkedIn, Delicious, Plaxo Pulse, and Bebo. (the last two of which I’m still not really using to their full effect) All of these are great ways to keep up with friends and know what’s happening in their world (and let them know what’s happening in yours)

BUT. (like Sir Mixalot, I like big buts)

All of this can also create a lot of work to keep up with. It’s sort of the reverse of the Inbox Zero / RSS problem. Not so much having to work through a queue put in front of you, but having to find where the new information is. And for my money, Flock is fantastic at neatly summarising and pointing you at updated information. Distilling your social network updates into some simple visual cues.

It integrates with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and adds two new concepts - the People Sidebar - a vertical pane to the left of the browser, and the the media bar - a strip at the top of the browser.

Contacts are sorted in order of last update by default, and a summary is shown based on the site. For Facebook, this means their current status, and whether they’ve made profile changes recently. For Twitter, this means their last Tweet. For Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, a media icon is also highlighted () if they’ve uploaded media (photos or video) recently.

This is where the media bar comes in. Its purpose is to show thumbnails of new media - images or videos that have been uploaded. So if a friend uploads new photos to Facebook, I’ll see the media icon highlight for that friend. Clicking their media icon shows me a strip of thumbnails of their new photos in the media bar.

Simple, huh?

The media bar can also be customised to save favourite media streams you can look at - essentially, smart, repeatable searches based on the functionality of different sites: what’s popular on YouTube / Flickr, photos of you on Facebook, or certain tag searches on Flickr. Powerful, easy, repeatable. There’s still a lot of Flock’s functionality I haven’t tinkered with yet. The ability to blog starting with a photo/video looks neat, but it’s not how I do the majority of my posting.

So, there are some interesting choices out there when it comes to browsers at the moment.

Want a lean, stripped-back browser, with good developer support and very economic memory usage? Go with Google Chrome.

Want a flexible, pluggable browser with great developer support via plugins like Firebug? Go with Firefox 3.

Want to make social networking a lot easier? Go with Flock.

That’s my view on the whole browser thing right now. What browser do you recommend, and what’s the killer must-have feature that means you wouldn’t shift from it?

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One of the pieces of feedback I’ve consistently received in the nicest possible terms, is that what I write here is often inaccessible. (Jules Winnfield would not approve of anything less than clear communication) Now, admittedly some of the topics I talk about are so dense with technical context we could happily orbit a spoonful of their weighty matter.

With other areas however, I’m trying to reach a point where what I’m saying is easily accessible - conveyed not only clearly, but enriched through the transmission. Because I believe there are a  lot of interesting things to say about technology. A lot of them more questions than answers.

So there are two very distinct schools of thought here, that are wont to complete viciously at yearly sports carnivals, and possibly for the affection of that girl.. In order to keep them separate, I’m going to enrich my tagging scheme a little. I’m incorporating the following tags going forward, for each post to classify a target audience:

Gobbledygook - these posts are likely inaccessible due to an alphabet soup of acryonyms and required domain knowledge. But we will TRY to break through the arcane nature of the subject. We will try!

Plain English - these posts are, as much as possible, clear and plain English talking about something straightforward and accessible in the realm of technology. It may still sound like Klingon, but the intent is clarity.

Meta - it’s blogging, about a blog. These posts are where I entertain the delusion of an audience, and stand before them, tweaking knobs and dials.

Here’s to clarity, moving forward!

(also, thank you to those of you who have provided feedback along these lines - really! Otherwise I wouldn’t know that the problem exists…)

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