Jim Eidelman's Learning Curve Tips

One way to represent the "learning curve" is like this. How to minimize the "valley of despair" is discussed below.

The goal is to make the "valley of despair" as SHALLOW and as NARROW as possible.

To make it narrow, you must give plenty of training, and follow it up with continuing floor support, help desk support, and other forms of "just-in-time" support so that people can quickly get back to the point of competence. If they stay in the "valley of despair" for too long, they will lose hope and hate the new software and the people who made them switch.

To make it as shallow as possible, minimize the number of things you try to teach people at once. Build gradually, and only add more to learn once people have developed a level of competence with the basic things.

Some wisdom on the value of training from J. Harris Morgan:

Harris Morgan is a lawyer from Greenville, Texas who is well-known to lawyers across the nation. Not only is he an outstanding lawyer, but he was also one of the founders of the ABA Law Practice Management Section, a past Chair of the Section, a motivational speaker, and recipient of the ABA's Harrison Tweed Award for outstanding contribution to the legal profession in legal education.

Shortly after Bell Telephone was split up, Harris was invited to be a motivational speaker in Vail, Colorado, at a retreat the Baby Bell companies were having.

During the course of the meetings, while sitting at the dinner table and at the cocktail party, he learned that a computer system had been installed to automate the office work of several subsidiaries in the Pacific Northwest, and he was particularly interested in the legal system to automatically track easements and handle some of the in-house legal work related to easements.

Harris learned that there was a division of opinion, and some of the people thought it was a curse, the worst piece of junk they had ever seen. The other camp thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Harris was interested in how there could be such a divergence of opinion about the same equipment and software, but because people weren't grouped together, it took a while before he got to the bottom of it by asking lots of questions. It turned out:

• The "disaster" camp and the "we love it" camp were from different subsidiaries in different states.
• The "disaster" camp's subsidiary had spent no additional funds for training beyond what the vendor provided with the purchase of the system.
• The "we love it" camp's subsidiary had budgeted an additional amount equal to at least 20% of the cost of the system (he can't remember -- it might have been much more) for continuing training and support.

The training made all the difference!

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