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Hi,

I hate to be so philosophical surrounding notifications, but I am doing my best to help out an organization that is newer in the learning game, and I want to be sure that I am not imprinting my own practices based on prior experience. So my hope is by tossing this out to folks? I will get back a note or two that I will need to work through.

Some givens:

  • The notification app “is what it is”.
  • Learning Plans are being used to deploy sequenced and packaged learning (two or more courses).
  • Courses are being deployed in certain circumstances to large audiences

These two deployments are what I consider to be classic pushes - we identify a person (people, grouping) and deploy a notification to them with their learning. And the notification app successfully works with scoping those two things together….(select the what and who and then due by when).

So far - I have been pretty successful with avoiding their overlap and where their was overlap? An order of operations made the system make sense..

What I am trying to work through is something that is surfacing as a requirements. They would like for PUs the ability to deploy in smaller pushes compared to a centralized group. The challenge is that they do not have the same “send email” tool that a manager does.
The problem that I having….if I want to generalize the approach and begin to configure courses that would support that PU to have enrollment messages? I will run into the “gotcha” of needing to enable/disable when we want to push to an overlap in audience (different levels of “push”). Because eventually we will lose track of things.

And? If the course is in a learning plan? We will land up notifying at the course level when the LP is mapped to a learner.

My gut tells me to sell the organization on less function and fewer notifications to start….tell my PUs unless they can successfully target an audience, we will not be turning on enrollment notifications for the course...and call it a day...but for an organization that is newer at this game? Telling your SMEs (and PUs) that they need to have a group identified for their pushes to work seems like a dissatisfier…

So...I ask you kind folks - HOW DO YOU handle this one?

Is it something that you gradually get your clientele and constituents to work through and they communicate on their end? Or do you throw all the caution to the wind and allow the system to send multiple notifications at times?

(Is it PUs or PUers????)

First, the important question, it is def PUs (Its an abbreviation so the other way would end up being Power Usersers)

I think you are in sound logic.

The two things that came to mind were:

  1. When are the learning plan enrollments happening? i.e. all the time or in defined scheduled batches? I know some groups that only do those types of enrollments once a month so they turn the notifications off, enroll, and turn them back on, so they are set up to be triggered based on events and the PUs can trigger them.
  2. While I get the push back against centralizing, how I usually position this is better for the users. If it is decentralized and people are pushing whenever they want without knowing who else and what else is, you get users who potentially get multiple notices same day/time and get annoyed. By centralizing, those in charge would know that and could schedule manage it better.

Product idea might be to add the notification flag to the learning plan api (last time I checked was not there) that is there for course enrollments. This way you could do enrollments that way and not trigger the notifications. I do this for certain course enrollments now and then we send our own notifications for those courses.

@Bfarkas - thank you for the chat here - and I can stand behind the process of keeping the system sounding sane and taking on a special order of operations in certain cases that I cannot avoid. I like the idea of explaining with a simple reasoning - “if you cant target them via an algorithm that I can put into a group or if you cant feed me (or the system) a csv file - then how are you going to keep it your business straight in the long run”?

The organization had one system where it overall was way too  chatty - notification popups were all over the place and it felt schitzo as an admin that completed any learning - enough that I can promise that people just stopped listening.That is overall a bad tone - especially for a newer deployment of Docebo all together and one that I am going to do my best to avoid.

With notifications I know there is some investment being done with overhauling the app overall. And I dont think this can be improved - it is more of a configuration and a better practice’s approach.

@dklinger as usual I think your thinking is along a solidly logical line. 

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