A short tryst with e-learning (Jan-Sep 2008)

The highest Adobe: Going green at the workplace
Everybody is going green at the workplace, some of them with envy. The others have Captivates. The green icon Adobe product has captured popular imagination and content alike here.
For those working on this project, the closest we can get to the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) is through this software, which allows us to hear the experts speak and move mice (mouse for clarity) to enter data into different systems in different regions of the US of A. These are systems on which Americans order new products, or want their existing service moved to a new address.
But what we see are simulations. Real live customer data, if any, is not for our eyes and needs to be masked. It’s another matter that sometimes this instruction is given after the SME has already explained how and where salespersons take down data from Mr !!!!!! !!!!!!! (existing or would-be customers, masked here to avoid litigation) to serve him better.
So there’s a separate team in place to identify which captivates need to be masked before writers can work on them. One live data in the storyboard that is delivered and we are all dead!
While going through captivates, hunting for live data, the team also makes sure the SME did not say something and entered something else. There’s also the issue of resolution, deviations from the standard having the potential to forever hold back storyboards inching closer to delivery dates. Minor errors are, however, left in a note for the writer to take up with the SME. Captivates going back to the SME for rework, too, carry a note. On occasions, we have been told to be polite to the SME.
After all the SMEs do provide some light moments. Like, when one of them said at the end of a long session, “O, my boyfriend’s here”. There was another who kept making blunders and later added, “I’m drunk”. No wonder, everyone seems to be high on this project.
Once the green captivates get the green light, they are published. They evolve from captivate to .html or flash files that are made available to the writers, who have access to a server, which is at the heart of this project (Every time the server goes down, there are sighs and gasps of evidence).
To keep this heart pumping, the captivate team, spread across Mumbai and Kolkata offices, ensures a steady supply of freshly QA’d stuff. And QA’ing is fun. The teams make use of headphones all day. There is no saying, however, if they are all listening to captivates. Once when a member of the team was approached for something, he first took off his headphones and then his earphones, plugged to his cellphone, tuned to some FM channel.
It’s not surprising then that captivates that had been made production-ready had to be sent for SME or graphic rework at a later stage. There were false alarms too.
Like when a writer got back saying there was live data in a QA’d captivate. The one who had QA’d it was suddenly the accused, all guns pointing at him for an explanation. He went through the captivate once again, looking for the four-letter ‘live’ word in what seemed to be familiar territory. As the timeline of the published file inched closer to the end, his anxiety levels began shooting up. And, there it was, the SME did say it was ‘live’. But, wait a minute. Did she say live data? No, it was only the system that was live. And not the data, phew!
We could have gone on and on and on, but there are targets to be met. The captivate team gets to QA around 500 slides every day. There are times when the team sits idle, waiting for the captivates to be downloaded from SharePoint. Once one has got the 500 slides to QA, time is on a roll. On other days, people go home without meeting targets. They return the day after with a silent prayer on their lips, “Give us this day our daily CPs…”