What To Do When There's No Time To Do the Job Right

The first time I met Ruth Clark, she was giving tips on what to do about turkeys to a standing-room-only crowd in San Antonio.

Ruth’s topic was, “What to do when the turkeys are in cfiharge,” and the event was a cracker-barrel session at an NSPI (now ISPI) conference. She was addressing the problems facefid by instructional designers and training managers when there isn’t enough time or money to completely do every step in the systematic design process. For every problem, Ruth had a solution that would save the day, not to mention saving the designer’s bacon.

We all have projects where the turkeys come to roost. A product has been developed and will be launched next week, and we are asked to come up with online training for the sales team by Monday. There’s a really big change to the benefits plan rolling out at the end of the month and management wants to use e-Learning to prepare all the supervisors to explain it to the employees. The CFO wants to teach middle managers how to use the new budgeting process, but the budget cycle begins in two months and she hasn’t got enough time to go around and teach all the managers herself — but she’s sure you can “put it on the intranet.”

Ruth’s talk was done in the days when e-Learning wasn’t even a distant dream for 99% of people in the training business. But, as the saying goes, even though it’s a different day it’s the same turkeys in charge. I kept Ruth’s handout from that talk for many years, and I’d like to update some of her points as they apply to e-Learning.

To prepare this article, I called on three consultants with plenty of practice in delivering big projects for clients, as well as pulling together ideas based on my own experience as a corporate training manager. Joseph Ganci is the President of Dazzle Technologies and well known for his experience with authoring systems, especially with Authorware. Karen Hyder delivers synchronous e-Learning to her Kaleidoscope Training and Consulting clients around the world. And Chopeta Lyons is an independent designer and developer of courseware who has been called on many times for high-visibility e-Learning projects.

Turkey call

“Hi, I heard you guys do e-Learning. Is that right?” “Yes, that’s correct. We create custom e-Learning for organizations.” “Great! We have a course that we need designed and developed. It’s a really big course and I’m afraid the budget isn’t real high, but on the upside the whole thing has to be done in a month.” “Uhhhh ...”

As an external e-Learning developer, Joe Ganci says he has often received phone calls like this. He can always say, “No, I’m sorry, we can’t accommodate your needs at this time” — at the risk of possibly never being offered work from the caller again — but he doesn’t like turning away work. An internal e-Learning developer may have fewer options. So it helps to have a number of strategies you can fall back on, no matter what your situation, for dealing with these requests.

If you look at the development process, you can see that the biggest opportunities for saving time and money fall into four categories: project management, the instructional design process, coding, and graphics and multimedia production. In each of these areas, there are things you can do to either shoo the turkeys away, or at least manage the mess they make.

Managing the project and the process

This is the area that presents the greatest number of opportunities. The instructional system design (ISD) process, with its multiple steps and iterative structure, is designed to produce the optimum educational result. (See Figure 1) But sometimes, “good enough” would be sufficient, especially when time is short. Many of the steps can be done in less time, and many of them can be combined or done simultaneously, rather than sequentially. (See Figure 2) Chopeta Lyons refers to this as “staging and phasing” the development. For example, if a glossary is required, the necessary terms and definitions or examples can be developed concurrently with content development.

Figure 1 This is the classic ISD model, which relies on structure and iteration.

Figure 2 This is one way to expedite ISD by taking tasks in several parallel tracks.

All of the experts to whom I spoke agreed that the most essential key to speeding the process is communication: as early and as often as possible. Interviews by telephone and in person are popular ways to go about this, and so are meetings. Personally, I have found that a focus group made up of subject matter experts (SMEs), master performers, supervisors, and experienced developers and instructors can generate the level and quality of communication needed much more quickly than traditional means such as interviews and questionnaires.

Communicate with the client

Joe Ganci says that when the work is clearly too much for the amount of time given, set up a quick meeting with the client to discuss the deadline.

“The first question that must be asked is, ‘How hard and fast is the deadline, really?’ Surprisingly, it is often the case that the deadline is set arbitrarily by someone who has no idea how long it takes to create good custom e-Learning and who has no real need to have the e-Learning done by then. That deadline gets passed down to our client contact person who sees it as hard and fast. Going back and asking questions sometimes results in an extended deadline. Then again, sometimes it doesn’t!”

Communicate with the target audience

Karen Hyder seconds Joe’s idea, and adds that when the project calls for synchronous delivery, it is essential to communicate with the participants as well. One way to do this is to conduct a quick needs analysis survey with them. Relying on “softer” needs data than you would ordinarily want to have may not be all that risky, especially if you will have the opportunity to deliver the content several times and to make corrections while doing so. Karen also finds that when the instructor who will lead the synchronous session performs this needs survey, it contributes to solving another common problem: establishing a relationship with the learners.

In fact, because Karen’s lead time for a synchronous course may be as little as one week, she begins building the relationship with the learners right away. She will send three to four e-mails to each participant before class, asking about their particular personal learning objectives, finding out what they may already know about the course topic, and so on. In both cases, communicating with the client and communicating with the target audience, Chopeta Lyons suggests that you keep meetings small, have them frequently, and record them. She has found digital recorders, such as those made by Olympus, to be ideal but notes that even simple, cheap tape recorders can contribute greatly to the accuracy and usefulness of the information you collect during interviews and meetings.

Saving time in design

Before starting the design, but after the initial meetings, Joe Ganci says, “We meet with the client and the subject matter experts to determine if any part of the course is less than crucial to meet the required objectives. Often these sections can be discarded or moved into a separate follow-on course.” Once this is done, you should be able to proceed to the design phase with a shorter list of content to develop.

Incorporate job aids if you have them

In my experience, the next thing to do is to find out whether there are any job aids, checklists, or other guides available that people could use on the job. Any skill or task that people at work can use a job aid for is a skill or task that may not need to be taught. Depending on whether your final product will be blended, synchronous, or asynchronous, you may be able to include the job aid directly in the activities or you may be able to represent it on the screen. If the aid is a form that you can “scan in,” you may save yourself days of work by doing so.

Write the tests first

Once you know which skills and tasks will have to be performed by learners without any assistance, write any and all of the tests that learners will be required to complete. The effect of this practice is to help you concentrate on just the content that is required. Any “enrichment” or “nice-to-know” items can either be eliminated completely, or put in a self study guide for later use or reference by the learner. Writing the test also helps you decide on the level of fidelity required in approximating or simulating the job task and environment. Finally, it ensures that the tests actually get writ-ten; much of the time, test development is left to the end, the project runs out of time, and so the e-Learning application is crippled and the learner is denied the opportunity to practice and be validated in what was learned.

Storyboards and outlines

Having pared down the content by eliminating anything that can be guided through job aids, or that is not required to pass the test, you are ready to create your storyboard or outline. This is an extremely important step that can lead to substantial time savings over the life of the project, but one that is often not done or not done well.

The first task for the storyboard is to establish the sequence of your course and to capture the overall strategy.

Remember that you have some choices here.

• You can sequence tasks in the order that they are done on the job, if there is a fixed or “normal” order.
• You can make assumptions about the skills that most learners will have when they walk in the door, and later on develop another module to teach these skills only to learners who don’t have them.
• You can sequence the most frequently done tasks first, or the most important, complex, or difficult. This is useful for tasks (like manager or supervisor tasks) which don’t always fall into a fixed sequence.
• You can teach the basic things first, and the administrative tasks that accompany them second. In other words, teach prospecting skills first, teach how to enter the new prospects into the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software second.
• If you are familiar with the concept of backward chaining, you can teach many procedural tasks in reverse order.
• Knowledge objectives (e.g., product knowledge training for the sales force) may take a special approach. In the case of product knowledge for new or improved products, for example, you can often use the same sequence that appears in the advertising brochures or on the associated Web site. If you use online versions of the brochures or use the Web site itself, you are also maximizing the sales person’s use of these tools.  

I confess to a weakness for using outlining software to quickly put together the sequence and to make notes on overall strategy for e-Learning modules of all kinds. The great advantage of an outliner is the ease with which you can change the order of items and generate new sequences. Outlining software exists for PCs, Macs, palmtop computers, and even for PDAs, so you should be able to find one that will work for you by searching on the Web. Prices and features vary widely, and it pays to shop around a bit.

Other developers are very attached to the use of PowerPoint for their storyboards. Clip art is extremely useful for building these storyboards, but you can also simply use PowerPoint as an outliner The advantage is that practically everyone you have on your team will also have access to PowerPoint and know how to use it. This means you can split up the sequencing and strategizing between team members.

Karen Hyder points out that if you have simply outlined your teaching points with PowerPoint (the infamous old “bullet chart” technique), you can use some or all of these slides to guide discussion in your synchronous course and to give learners your idea of the “right” answer. Here’s how it works:

Suppose you want to have your learners in a synchronous course discuss the advantages and pitfalls in using your company’s new performance appraisal procedure. When you were putting together the storyboard, you developed a pair of “bullet point” slides, one showing your idea of the advantages, and one showing your idea of the pitfalls. At the top of these slides, you probably had a title along the lines of, “Advantages and Pitfalls of Performance Appraisal.” When you are ready for final production, all you need to do is copy those slides into a new PowerPoint file and precede them with a slide that contains only the question, “What are the advantages of the new performance appraisal procedure? What are some of the pitfalls you can think of?” You now have all the media you need to deliver that particular teaching point in your synchronous class. (For more information on this technique, see Karen’s article, “Teach In Your Pajamas: Becoming A Synchronous e-Trainer” in the November 25, 2002 issue of Learning Solutions Magazine.)

KISS

When it comes to deciding the teaching strategy for each of your objectives — Keep It Simple. Remember that most, if not all, of the most important learning objectives (test items) can be taught using one of three strategies: casework, hands-on, and role play. In asynchronous e-Learning, the form of role play known as the “critical incident” may be more practical.

For purely knowledge objectives, you can minimize the load on the learner’s working memory and maximize long-term recall by using examples and non-examples, by using tables and lists, and by appropriate use of graphics. Wherever possible, show, don’t tell.

Finally, in blended and synchronous learning, you can often get better results by “teaching” less and making the learners work more. Cooperative, collaborative, and constructivist exercises get learners working together. In the resources listed in the sidebar on are three online sources, each containing a wealth of information, examples, and actual materials that you can use to implement these more active forms of learning.

Use the Internet and online resources, and repurpose where you can

Speaking of online resources, there are now a number of places on the Web where you can download ideas, examples, and resources that support online and blended learning. I recommend the three listed in the sidebar as real potential time savers. The Maricopa Learning Exchange (MLX) contains a growing number of these resources (see Figure 3). Each one is presented as a “package” and all are free to download and use. (See Figure 4). Joe Ganci suggests asking, “Can the course be based on an existing template or engine that we have already created?” Joe’s team has developed a wide variety of these types of files and they come in very handy. The variety allows Joe to present the client with a number of choices (and of course, he only shows materials that he has the right to re-use).

Figure 3 The Maricopa Learning Exchange is a storehouse for educational packages.

Figure 4 This is a typical learning package used in management training, and one that could be easily converted for use in synchronous or asynchronous e-Learning.

Finally, in developing content, Chopeta Lyons says, “Do not develop in sequential order.” That is, do not start developing and writing exercise 1 of module 1 first and then proceed right on down your storyboard to the last exercise of the last module. Instead, start with the “hardest” items first. Developing cases, examples, and exercises are likely to be the most time-consuming development tasks.

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