Waterschap Rijn en IJssel, with 550 employees, ensures safe and clean water in East Gelderland, the southern part of Overijssel, and the southeastern Veluwe. With SelfGuide, the organization provides user-friendly support for the digital workplace to its employees, while administrators simultaneously save a lot of time in creating and maintaining this support.
Waterschap Rijn en IJssel employs 550 staff members to ensure safe and clean water in East Gelderland, the southern part of Overijssel, and the southeastern Veluwe. The organization provides user-friendly support for the digital workplace to its employees with SelfGuide, allowing administrators to save a significant amount of time in creating and maintaining this support.
Waterschap Rijn en IJssel has been collaborating with IT training provider ExplainiT for several years. As a SelfGuide partner, ExplainiT offered Waterschap Rijn en IJssel the opportunity to support employees on the workplace through SelfGuide, in addition to traditional classroom training. Nick Verwaaij, Trainer and Educator for the Digital Workplace at Waterschap Rijn en IJssel, explains how SelfGuide met their needs alongside training:
“We want to optimally 'take along' and guide colleagues through changes. We were looking for a solution for user support in the workplace that would actually be used. The solution needed to be accessible and centrally available.”
A significant need within the organization was for short and user-friendly instructions to quickly assist employees in their work. In the view of Waterschap Rijn en IJssel, this was the main advantage over a complete e-learning solution, which would require too much time to implement.
In a short period, SelfGuide was fully set up with the various organization-wide instructions for the employees of Waterschap Rijn en IJssel. Nick Verwaaij shares how the organization experienced the added value immediately:
“We gained immediate time savings in creating, editing, and keeping instructions up to date. I only hear positive feedback about that. Additionally, it was convenient for employees that instructions are stored centrally in one location instead of being scattered across SharePoint, our intranet, network drives, and other environments.”
A crucial element for Waterschap Rijn en IJssel was the uniform format in which instructions are created in SelfGuide. This format prevented employees from adding unnecessary images and lengthy texts, as was often the case with Word/PDF documents. As a result, instructions are completed faster, of higher quality, and more user-friendly.
As part of the training program at ExplainiT, some employees of Waterschap Rijn en IJssel were introduced to SelfGuide, ensuring that basic knowledge was already in place. Nevertheless, the regular implementation process for an organization-wide rollout was followed. Nick Verwaaij explains why this was important:
“We were supported by a dedicated contact person during the implementation. Following the established 'ground rules' for a successful implementation, we worked together with a group of key users from our organization and our contact person from SelfGuide. We encountered no complexities during the implementation”
There was great enthusiasm for SelfGuide within the organization. However, this also led to immediate requests for improvements. User feedback is crucial for the development roadmap of SelfGuide, ensuring that the product continues to meet evolving needs.
Currently, the service desk is the department that makes the most use of SelfGuide within Waterschap Rijn en IJssel. Use cases for the service desk include users with (repetitive) questions, projects related to (new) software applications, and installations of new devices. Nick Verwaaij recently experienced this himself:
“After receiving my new laptop, I received an email with all the necessary information about the installation, among other things. The email included links to the various relevant instructions in SelfGuide. I found that experience pleasant and clear.”
To ensure the quality of instructions, a colleague is responsible for reviewing them. Before an instruction is made permanently available to all employees, a check is conducted to assess whether the instructions align with the policy on language usage, among other factors.
Waterschap Rijn en IJssel is an organization that is actively developing. Examples include transitions to new systems for HRM and Finance. SelfGuide is expected to play an important role in the implementation of these systems. Nick Verwaaij is currently working on establishing a new academy:
“I am personally involved in the WRIJ Academy (a type of Learning Management System - LMS). Given the integration possibilities, I expect SelfGuide to play a significant role in this. We are very satisfied with SelfGuide; it does exactly what we want it to do in an accessible and fast manner.”
Within Waterschap Rijn en IJssel, the ‘Adoption Bureau’ is responsible for guiding employees through 'the new way of working.' All organization-wide projects are discussed here, where the applicability of SelfGuide is always assessed in collaboration with other stakeholders.
