Hi everyone,

I work for a company that produces a wide variety of software, and my job is to write customer-facing training that instructs systems engineers how to implement and use those products. Given the breadth of our proudct portfolio and the number of developers on the team, pretty much for every new project I have to learn a new product. This typically involves a very large ramp-up time and requires significant reliance on subject matter experts to answer questions and vet content.

We're thinking of trying something new on my next project and sending developers out to a customer site to a) see first-hand how the product is implemented/used and b) to interview and work with our Consultant intermediary to help us synthesize what we're observing and clarify any questions we have.

We're hoping that by trying this method we can increase our knowledge through immersion in the customer's world, as well as shorten our overall development time. After a two-three week engagement we're shooting for a rough draft of the final book. Our traditional development time is close to three months.

Has anyone ever tried such a method? If so, was it successful and what did you learn from the experience that you'd do differently in the future?

Thanks!

Thiagi has an article on his site called something like "Rapid Instructional Development" where he discusses a similar approach.

Don't forget to have a real customer work through/with the document or training you create before releasing it to the world...

Thiagi's stuff on his website will be helpful. More relevant material though will be by Allison Rossett (First Things Fast) and George Piskurich (Rapid Instructional Design). Because what you're really talking about here is how to both shorten the ID process and also get a better feel for the client needs/situation.