Re: system administrators and documentation

[Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>]

Brian,

Here's a similar scenario that may apply. Our product is large and 
feature-laden. We thoroughly document the whole thing, including 
installation, upgrading, administrative functions, ....

Nonetheless, our customers--the people making the spending decisions, 
not the people installing or using the application--have NEVER asked us 
to just ship them the CD and let their guys take care of it from there. 
They've given us grief about plenty of stuff, but they are more than 
delighted to have our implementation people install, configure, train 
their administrators, train their key users, etc. And yes we get paid 
for all those services.

In our customers' calculus, it's more cost-effective to have our 
experienced people holding their hands for the first month or so than to 
pay their own people to flounder and flail.

Once we've trained their key users, administrators, and trainers, they 
become much more self-sufficient. But we still have to walk them through 
software upgrades as often as not.

Yet every bit of what we provide in the form of instruction, guidance, 
system configuration, etc., is thoroughly and clearly documented. We 
have never found a reason to leave something out in order to encourage 
customers to ask for our help. They're happy to ask anyway; it costs 
them less than reading and following instructions.

Dick

Brian Das wrote: