First off, San Diego is a beautiful city and if you are going there for vacation, it's probably worthwhile. Seems like it would be a fun place to hang out and enjoy life a little bit...
Second, the training itself takes place in an old building located about 45 seconds from the beach, nice enough that you can see the beach from the building.
From there, we can discuss the actual class itself...
For starters, the training was held in a large open room, with about a dozen rented tables and roughly 30 plastic chairs. The $15 variety you buy from Wal-Mart. Each table had a LAN cord run to it, but none of them were plugged into anything and there were no computers (as other such training classes I have been to have had at least a cheap computer for everyone to work from).
Upon setting up my laptop, I noticed that they had a wireless connection available, and after about 30 minutes, they finally told us the password to connect ... From there, we were able to crash the airport wireless that they had. Even after setting up the second wireless AP, we were able to crash it as well.
We then, were divided into 3 training regions on the Service-Now training servers (very slow). The wireless network kept dropping our connections.
The training materials didn't exist. The instructor, while nice enough, spent both days kind of rambling through a lot of the same material that the proof of concept demo had gone through. Alot of what was covered, I actually knew going in after playing with the tool for a very limited amount of time.
The workflow portion of the training, which is where I thought I might get the most benefit, was about an hour and a half long and mainly consisted of making some very minor modifications to an existing workflow and creating a very, very light workflow.
As not to sound completely negative about the experience, with a little forethought and some proper materials, I think the training could have been very effective.
The most informative part of the class was having their lead support person in class as he was prompting the instructor for real world examples of some of the things that she was pushing so quickly to get through.
- A handout ... A reference book or even a reference web page of some sort to follow along step by step with what the instructor was going through.
- Narratives about how this situation applies in the real world. What times have you seen this go well? When have you seen it go bad?
- Here are watchouts and places to be careful, places we have seen other customers get themselves into trouble from time to time.
- You get the idea.
We appreciate the open and honest feedback. We listen to our customers and will always do our best to provide a swift response.
ReplyDeleteWhen we built Service-now.com our goal was to change the way IT management software was delivered, used and supported. We wanted our applications to be so simple that they would not require training, similar to the user experience of Google or Amazon.com. But as our application functionality expanded Service-now.com was introduced to new users and new ways of solving IT problems.
In short, Service-now.com has expanded far beyond incident and problem management to become an IT service management platform. We recognize that the application now requires administrator training. Like any rapidly growing company, we recognize we will have growing pains and are doing our best to respond appropriately. We will continue to strengthen our educational programs.
We are in the process of redefining our Administrator’s Training Guide by leveraging our Wiki-based documentation. This will ensure our training programs are always fresh and continue to keep up with the product’s release cycles and our customer’s needs. In other words, old-school training guides simply will not scale and will become irrelevant the day you leave the training course. Our customers deserve a fresh approach.
As for the training facilities, the uncomfortable chairs are by design to keep everybody awake. However, we completely agree that the networking issues during this specific training course were not excusable. We apologize for the inconvenience and will address the issue going forward.
Best regards,
Matt Holetz
Service-now.com director of services
Matt
ReplyDeleteFirst, let me thank you for reading my post and not being defensive about the class. It was definitely not intended as a slam, simply a place for me to write some quick thoughts (as this blog is a place for me to practice some technical writing and occasionally some rambling thoughts).
Secondly, I went back and re-read the post. There were a couple of points I may have been a little negative (may have been influenced by our SAN being down).
I agree the tool is very easy to use and learn the basics. It took me the demo / proof of concept and a couple of hours of playing with Service-Now in our demo environment. I walked into the class with a high understanding of how things worked when it came to modifying basic forms.
The class room itself was less than ideal for how I learn. My ADD kicks in hardcore when I am uncomfortable and by the middle of the first day, I was in pain from the chair I was sitting in. The tables were simply not large enough to have a laptop and a notebook for taking notes (not the largest issue in the world, just an annoyance).
The documentation on the Wiki (which is how I learned many things before walking into the class) is wonderful and the community pages are great (especially the forum) seem to have some other great information.
I am truly looking forward to engineering Service-Now to work with our environment as desired. As Rick and I discussed, this training might be right (minus the physical environment) for administrators who missed out on the demo phase and who's management has not allowed them into their dev environments prior to the training (thankfully, I was involved in our purchase from the start).
For the way that I learn, I know an Outline of "This is what we will try to cover by lunch, by end of day, by lunch day 2 and by end of day 2" would have beneficial. While I understand the idea behind completely free flowing training is awesome, it is tough to achieve a result without knowing where the target is. Some ability to have some "Right Click Here" documentation would also be helpful as some of us learn more effectively through visual vs aural communication (as I have some issues with hearing).
Thank You for your time,
Mike Cusick
nice information thanks for given such valuable information .KSB Training Institute provide service now training with real time expert globally such as India, USA, UK, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia
ReplyDeleteThanks for writing such a good article, I stumbled onto your blog and read a few post. I like your style of writing… servicenow online training india
ReplyDeleteservice Now Training in Hyderabad
service Now Course Content
service Now Interview Questions
service Now Training in ameerpet
service Now Online Training in Hyderabad