Bentley Systems, Inc.
Civil Software Training Development, Training and Consulting
San Diego, CA (home office)
May 2008 - November 2021
In 2008, I reunited with my Huntsville Intergraph Infrastructure colleagues after a 15-year "separation" (except the were now Bentley and I worked from a home office in San Diego). My role was to write InRoads training full time: a dream job!
Event highlights included:
- authoring the first ever "Advanced InRoads" Course
- authoring the GEOPAK port of "Site Modeler"
- developing the initial OpenRoads Technology courses (and many subsequent)
- training OpenRoads on site (in Vancouver) a weeks after we introduced the training at the 2013 Bentley Conference
- On Day 1 of Day 5, the client said "if what you're planning to teach is on the Learn Server, we've already worked through all of that". That was all of our training! Fortunately, they were Land Desktop experts, so we had plenty of engineering specifics to work through with OpenRoads. Bentley Consultant motto: "Be prepared. Prepared to Dance!"
- Working with Product Manager Jonathan Smith in England, developing Bentley's Training framework and courseware for OpenRoads Drainage and Utilities.
- Teaching at the Bentley Nordic Civil User Conference in November 2015 was a career highlight. A wonderful venue, wonderful people, and perhaps my funnest class ever. You can build a really good comedy bit about Engineers and Relationships: OpenRoads is how Engineers understand and honor Relationships. Tack on a couple days in Stockholm as a dessert. Perfect!
- I worked with hydraulic teams on-site at VDOT, ALDOT, TxDOT, OrDOT, and WashDOT, as well as private companies to help plan their OpenRoads Drainage software implementations and work on their hydraulic questions and workflows.
- Working with the City of San Diego to move them to OpenRoads. The migration contract is now signed and the project is ongoing.
The most transformative value I got from my time at Bentley was learning how to train properly. Bentley is chock-full of amazing and brilliant people, but Peter Huftalen - now happily retired - had the biggest impact on me. He taught the full-time training developer's - all top-tier subject matter experts - how to develop training. We thought we knew, but we didn't. Peter was kind enough to patiently teach me on many of his commutes home while I argued that we engineers were somehow different than other learners. We're not. And our training wasn't very good. It wasn't good at all. It "worked" for one audience in one scenario: designers already familiar with the full engineering workflows taught with an instructor standing in front of them.
Peter introduced us to concepts familiar with those who study learning and training design. Books like "Teling Ain't Training" and "The One World Schoolhouse". Concepts like:
- "Just In Case" Training - the current default, but around infrequent training events. "Just in Case this is the last training you get for a couple of years, let's throw every everythign we can think of in this training."
- "Just Enough" Training - getting only what you need. Keep it direct, keep it lean. The key here is designing to produce an explicitly-stated outcome. Anything not directly supporting that outcome gets thrown out.
- "Just In Time" Training - get what you need when you need it. Not three months earlier, not four weeks later. Now.
I led the Civil portion of Bentley's training transformation from "Just in Case" Training to "Just Enough - Just In Time" Training. The most obvious manefestation is the transformation from training courses that were multi-day instructor-led engagements to training that was both that AND web-delivered OnDemand Training (Learn.Bentley.com)
Much more work needs to be done at Bentley concerning their training design. The primary gap is helping users Get Unstuck quickly. This is essentially a fuller implementation of the "Just In Time Just Enough" paradigm. An amazing amout of valuable content is useless because it simply can't be found. There is still a mindset that the minimum training unit is 105-minutes (because that is the default workshop time slot at those annual conferences). There is still a very strong tendency to write complex integrated large block training that requires a life instructor to explain and troubleshoot. There is strong tendency to design the training for one audience: the guru (instead of nascent eventual-gurus). Beginners and self-study learners need a lot of nurturing and safeguards. Design for the self-study and then instructor-led will be fine (the reverse in NOT true).
My last responsibility at Bentley was for an ambitious but critically important Overall Goal: Transform how we deliver our training and Consulting (Blueprints!). My last title at Bentley was Blueprints Portfolio Manager for Design Integration Products (OpenRoads, OpenPlant, OpenBuildings, STAAD/RAM suites and the MicroStation Platform).
The goal of the Blueprints program is to take the ease of consuming training to the next level AND to transform how we deliver consulting services. Between Foundational Training (our Onboarding Wiki links to it - this was one of my last deliverables) and Enterprise-level training (paid engagements) is the huge landscape of "adoption" training - new skills and techniques for users not new to the software.
Getting users unstuck should be a primary and concerted effort by Bentley to increase user satisfaction and increase their use footprint. It's a huge opportunity, but cannot be met without committing sufficient resources. "Doing more with less" doesn't.
My final transformation of Bentley Learn is lowering the requirements of learning OpenRoads.
For years (decades!), the default training for new Bentley Civil learners was:
- A week of foundational CAD Training.
- A week of InRoads/OpenRoads Training.
After the OpenRoads modular/OnDemand material was released, the initial initial course was "QuickStart for OpenRoads Designer". This course tried to take users through a full corridor building workflow (complete with placing an intersection Civil Cell and its cleanup) in a four-hour exercise. There was only one audience demographic that this was potentially-suitable for and then only with an instructor leading: the very experienced InRoads or GEOPAK user who had already done the equivalent in one of those legacy products. For everyone else, it was an Exercise in Pain. Definitely NOT a confidence-inspiring hand-on. I eventually simplified this down to a two-hour "EasyStart for OpenRoads" for when I taught on-site. It better suited the legacy gurus, but it was still inappropriate for all other audiences.
At the time this initial OpenRoads training was prerequisited with "Users are expected to have a minimum competence in CAD skills before beginning this training." That was it. No further guidance was provided. I asked colleagues:
"Um, if I'm a new user wanting to learn OpenRoads, what do I do?"
"Go take some MicroStation courses."
"Which ones?"
"There are some learning paths for MicroStation. They should take one of them."
"Um, there are a bunch. Which one?"
"How about Microstation for Civil Users?"
"I agree. If a learner were to stumble upon the MicroStation learning paths, that one is the least inappropriate for them."
"Yes."
"Are you aware that they should NOT take six of the 10 courses listed?"
"What?"
"OpenRoads tools and techniques supercede MicroStation tools and techniques. In fact there are couple of training classes for MicroStation that are beyond not being applicable for OpenRoads users, but downright antagonistic to OpenRoads techniques. I have a better idea.
Rather than say
'don't start this until you've figured out and taken the appropriate MicroStation courses,
why don't we say
'Start Here' and give them what they need."
The transformation was from a low-probability-of-success 10+ hour painful process to a much better designed pre-requisite-fulfulling 60 minute process. The result is the currently-titled "Navigating the Interface" which quickly provides all audience groups the skills they need for any topical beginner OpenRoads Training courses. Regardless of your end goal you are ready to begin the appropriate OpenRoads training courses:
- from simply reviewing an OpenRoads file,
- to migrating from another civil design product,
- to learning from scratch,
- from learning about roads
- to learning about drainage.