Ready, Set. Learn!

Perhaps the most painful thing you can ask anyone to do is to document - a program, a process, training materials.

And we'll find any excuse NOT to do it.

Well, we're piloting a program at work these days which seems to be working pretty well. We've stopped writing training documentation in many cases.

And we've started creating instructional videos.

With a free downloaded program called Jing, creating short instructional videos is quick, easy and fun. Jing captures video from any portion of your computer screen, and along with audio narration, you create flash videos in real time. Once completed, the videos can be stored on your PC or server or (for free) at Jing's site.

We accumulate, meta tag and store all our training videos on our SharePoint intranet.

We're building up quite a library. And avoiding that painful exercise of creating volumes of documentation that no one ever reads.

The second thing we're doing is certifying our users on computer functions, before granting permanent rights. Recently we put some staff through certification on the customer and contact merge function on Goldmine CRM software. Only after each of our users had successfully performed data cleanup (on some of their own accounts), were additional rights granted.

And of course, we documented the process with Jing.