A Conversation with Kari Richards about Rafte Application Consulting Services

Dan Keeney — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:00:00 GMT

Kari Richards is a member of Rafte & Company’s Application Consulting Service initiative. Kari has a master certification for Microsoft Office, and works in collaboration with the other Rafte team members to provide a ready-to-implement training solution. Rafte’s Application Consulting Service assesses client needs, develops a training plan and implements a customized training curriculum to maximize the effectiveness of the client’s technology and application tools. We sat down with her for a brief conversation about computer application training.

Give us the basics about Application Consulting Service. What is it?

Rafte & Company’s certified trainers are focused on helping organizations get the greatest return on their technology investment by building the skills and capabilities of their employees. Application Consulting Service accomplishes this through a variety of training formats, including custom and standardized classes, workshops, and one-on-one training.

Are there specific applications you focus on?

Application Consulting Service courses include, but are not limited to, all versions of Microsoft Office, Interwoven’s document management system, Adobe products, Workshare Professional (Deltaview), and graphic applications. The bottom line is that with Application Consulting Service, we help clients focus on improving the knowledge and capability of the end user.

Many organizations offer their own training. Why do they turn to Rafte’s Application Consulting Service?

Often it’s the case that Rafte & Company’s trainers have knowledge and expertise with certain applications that their internal trainers may not.

What makes Rafte’s Application Consulting Service stand out from other training programs?

We do everything for our clients. We find our clients often want to implement a training program, but they get overwhelmed by the burden of organizing everything – having to select the course curriculum, sending the information for people to sign up and tracking who has signed up for which course. It can be a real burden and, as a result, it gets shuffled aside year after year. Rafte & Company can take over that entire responsibility and let our clients focus on what they do best.

So you handle course registration?

Yes, we handle course registration and course promotion inside the organization. We do it all online using our Web-based events registration tool. We set up a description of the course, send the staff an e-mail describing the class, its prerequisites and a link to register. Our online registration system is easy to use and tracks who has registered, how many have registered and makes it easy to generate a roster. We handle it all and the client can get on with their job.

How did you become a trainer?

Like most people, I learned some of my computer skills on the job. From there I took it a step further, received training myself and became certified. I’ve always enjoyed helping and teaching others. I finally found the perfect venue in software training.

From my work experience, I saw a lot of different aspects of how people actually use the software. So when I am teaching, I emphasize real world scenarios that you won’t find in any textbook. I give class participants typical examples of errors and issues they’ll come across most often and then show them how to fix or avoid the issues. I like to teach shortcuts because sometimes you can fix a problem in 10 minutes that could have cost hours of unproductive time.

Are your courses relatively elementary, or do you get into some sophisticated subject matter as well?

We do both. We have off-the-shelf classes already designed for each of the Microsoft Office applications – with three levels for each – and we continue to design additional modules to address specific needs our various clients have. For example, we designed one course to drill down into Excel formulas. For those who don’t really use Excel much, we designed Excel basics. We’ve also developed “Tips and Tricks” classes for Word, Excel and PowerPoint along with advanced “Tips and Tricks.” For those who haven’t mastered charts and graphs to graphically depict data, we developed a module that delves into how to create and manipulate charts.

So from our experience working with students, we developed these customized courses to augment the standard course offerings.

Do people tend to just scratch the surface of what office productivity applications can do?

Most people only know what they have to in order to get the job done every day. They may have taken a class in the past, but if they only use certain features for their job, they tend to quickly forget all the other capabilities that are available. As a result, when they take on new responsibilities that stretches their skills with an application, they end up coming up with their own solution that is typically “the long way” either because they don’t know or can’t remember how to do it more efficiently. The funny thing is that many computer users don’t even know the fastest, most efficient way to get their core tasks done.

Is that the case across the board, or do people in some office environments tend to have deeper knowledge?

In the legal industry and the engineering field, workers tend to delve deeper into the software’s capabilities. In the legal field, they generally know Word much more in-depth than the average office worker. For them, the primary advantage of the training is learning the new features and new methods of performing the same tasks. They may not have kept up with how the software has continued to evolve, because each new version generally makes it faster and more efficient to use if you know how. A person can use the same method of getting a task done in Word 2003 that they used 10 years ago in Word 3.0, but they could get the same thing done in just a couple clicks of the mouse.

How do you audit a client’s needs to determine what course content is most appropriate and necessary?

It depends on the client. Sometimes we go into the office environment and observe how the employees are using the applications. This gives us a great deal of insight, but an audit can also be fairly straightforward. We ask what they want to learn! I’m working now with a client who wants training for her staff in Outlook. She has about 20 people, but she’s not sure which parts of Outlook they need or want to learn. In these cases, we send course outlines to the client or their users and ask them to respond with the features they are most interested in.

Office 2007 is coming, with Forrester Research estimating that most businesses will migrate to it over the next three to five years. By all accounts it has been radically redesigned, so do you anticipate growing demand for Application Consulting Service as a result of Office 2007’s launch?

There will be a lot of businesses trying to figure out how to use Office 2007 because this is a huge evolution. It has a completely revamped user interface, so it won’t be like the gradual changes we’ve seen with previous Office releases. Training will be imperative for virtually everyone. That same Forrester survey found that on average most expect to give employees between two to three hours of formal training in Office 2007, followed by a two to four week period of decreased productivity while the users acclimate to the product. It’s going to be a very big deal.

But I thought it’s supposed to be easier to use!

Once the person is trained, it will be easier. Microsoft says the changes will reduce by half the number of mouse clicks needed. It currently takes more than a dozen mouse clicks to change the margin of a document in Word. In Office 2007, it will take three clicks. The challenge is that while most upgrades you can still find your way around and it doesn’t look a lot different. This one will look entirely different. No more pull down menus like “File” and “Edit,” for instance. The new interface is designed to make the layout of control for logical and to bring forward helpful features that are hidden in current and previous versions.

What should a company interested in Application Consulting Service do to find out more?

Give us a call at 800-396-9390or send an e-mail to info@rafte.com. We will be happy to learn more about their training needs and offer guidance regarding what type of training will provide the greatest impact on improving the knowledge and capabilities of their employees.

15-Jun-07 10:00 AM

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A Conversation with Kari Richards about Rafte Application Consulting Services