Training

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Parent Category: Leadership
Category: Training

"If you want to go fast, go alone."

"if you want to go far, go together."

"If you want to ORD, get together."

Do NOT go alone.

 

Use the resources you have available, all of them.

(For a video read-through of this page:  The #1 Best Practice for OpenRoads Success )

(As far as I know) If you have a license for any Bentley Civil software package, you have access to Bentley's LEARNserver (Learn.Bentley.com) and to Communities.Bentley.com.  Learn them, use them.

This should be your first goal when learning to use OpenRoads: ensure that your staff can use the immediate permanent resources available to them:

  1. Learn how Learn.Bentley.com works.  Take one or two short OnDemand Bentley LEARN classes; they are all available to you at all times.  They are typically, a PDF, a dataset and videos walking through the course.
  2. Find and poke around the OpenRoads | OpenSite Community.  Wiki is their curated content, Forums is the Question & Answer.  Search for some topics, get a feel for it.
    1. If you already have questions, see if you can find some answers.
      1. If you don't find an answer ask a question there.  Expect a couple days for questions to be answered.
  3. Google a question.  Include OpenRoads in the Search (that helps).  Arguably, Google finds content in the Communities better than the Search in Communities does.
  4. YouTube.  YouTube has a lot of content and its Search rather effective.  Bentley has some content channels there.
  5. Service Tickets.  Service Tickets - if your service agreement includes this - require Bentley to respond.  If you're paying for it, use it.  Connect.Bentley.com
  6. Talk to people who have been there.

Oh, yeah: Help!  I forget that Help is actually helpful nowadays. It used to be rather unreliable as being valuable.  It's better now. Try help.

If you pay someone to train you and they don't ensure that you know how what your available training and support options are, they are not fully looking out for your best interest.  We all want repeat business, but teaching users to help themselves should be Priority #1 for you and your partners and vendors.

 

 

 

 

Details
Parent Category: Leadership
Category: Training

One of the first things I do when I start an on-site class is ask:

"Why Am I Here?"

  • What value do I add by being here?
  • Why did your company pay me money to teach you something that is available for free?
    • Videos of these lectures and exercise are availble online.  In fact, in many of them, I'm the narrator (unlikely now, but common at the time).
  • Why Am I Here?

 

  1. It forces staff to spend the time 24, 32 or 40 hours taking the training.
  2. I can answer "detail" questions and provide context.
  3. I diagnose, triage, and curate.  There is a LOT of content available, some of it is critical to you, much is not.  Some has a negative consequence.  The first hour I spend focused on learning your needs, picking appropriate foundational material to work through for the first day.  Over the course of the day (and the next), I refine my understanding of what you need and then find the best material available.  Generally if there is a day 4, I've got some new custom exercise that fill the biggest gap in the material that fits your needs.
  4. I can translate the generic workflow to how you do things or how you should be doing things for your projects' unique or quirky needs.