Case study

CMS documentation and client training program

10 months | PM & Training Lead | Medium-level complexity

Media & publishing

User research

Training development

CMS optimisation

100+

Clients trained personally

Month initiative

Cross-functional IT partnership

Summary: When clients feel out of their depth, even the best product gets quietly abandoned.

What was happening

The company had invested in a proprietary CMS to power newsletter products for its entire client base. Adoption was low, and the consequences were real. Junior staff, the people responsible for operating the platform day to day, lacked familiarity with HTML and felt out of their depth from the start. When newsletters went underused, decision-makers at client organisations questioned the value of the investment. The product was capable. The documentation was thin, technical, and written as if the reader already knew the system. There was nothing that helped someone build competence from zero, and there was no training process designed to change that.

What I did

I started with a comprehensive audit of the existing process and gathered direct feedback from users to find out exactly where confidence broke down. The pain points were consistent: the interface assumed technical knowledge most users did not have, and the language across every touchpoint reflected that assumption. I built a full user manual from scratch, written specifically for people with minimal technical background, focusing on clarity over comprehensiveness. Then I redesigned the training programme entirely, prioritising confidence-building alongside practical skills. I personally trained all 100+ active clients on the system. In parallel, I collaborated with the IT team to introduce a WYSIWYG toolbar that removed the need for HTML knowledge at the interface level, making the documentation and the product reinforce each other.

What changed

A plain-language user manual and redesigned training programme gave junior staff the confidence to use the CMS fully, turning passive users into capable ones.
Client perception of the CMS shifted from a technical burden to an accessible, practical tool, protecting the newsletter product investment across the entire client base.
Collaboration with IT delivered a WYSIWYG toolbar that removed HTML as a barrier, with the documentation and interface improvements working together as a single, coherent solution.
Decision-makers saw demonstrable value in the newsletter product again, and the combined foundation of training, documentation, and interface improvement set up long-term adoption across the full user base.

Reflective: The manual was a deliverable. The real outcome was people feeling like they could do it themselves.

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