If you’re planning on using HP Service Manager within your business, you’ll need to consider how to get your staff trained to use it effectively.
Hewlett-Packard training
As you might expect, HP provide a comprehensive training. They offer a 5-day on-site training course that includes both lectures and practical, hands-on training and covers a basic overview of the software, installation, customization and operation.
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Customized training
The standard training courses are comprehensive and provide a good grounding in Service Manager and other HP software. However, the risk is that the course will cover a lot of ground that’s not relevant to you or your staff, and you’re spending time and money on unnecessary training. If your staff are already familiar with some elements of this or similar software, they may be spending time retreading familiar ground and not actually learning anything new. This leads to bored students, and they won’t pick up as much benefit as they could from the course.
In a group situation where representatives of many companies are present, and the tutor is working towards a specified curriculum and qualification, they don’t have the flexibility to adapt to the needs of individual businesses or follow up on queries that may be relevant only to your specific situation. In these cases, it may be quicker and more cost-effective to arrange for training that covers the things your team needs to know, builds on their existing skills and knowledge, and allows time to explore in detail questions that would normally fall outside the course remit.
If you feel that your needs would be better served by a customized training course, our consultants can work with you to devise a training plan that is tuned to the needs of your business and the skills of your staff.
Self-training
As you would, expect, there are many useful online resources available to your staff, including YouTube videos, forums, and more.
- HP’s Processes and Best Practices Guide is a great place to start. This doesn’t just cover the basics, but goes into detail on the pros and cons of different ways to configure and use Service Manager to create highly functional workflows.
258 page PDF
- IFOST (the Institute for Open Systems Technologies) in Australia provides some customizable training courses under Creative Commons. These include PowerPoint and video components Web site & video.
- New Day Press has two books by Mike Sanders covering different aspects of Service Manager. Tailoring Techniques covers useful tips and tricks for optimizing and troubleshooting SM, while JavaScript Techniques shows you how to include SM functions and variables within your JavaScript code.
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