After months of persuading, our company’s HR department finally agreed with my ISD department that our annual employee training would be much more effective if delivered as online interactive courseware. Previously, all of our training was sent out via email as a PowerPoint file. Employees were supposed to view the slides, then print and sign the completion certificate at the end of the presentation. As I’m sure you can guess, all the employees learned to just skip to the last slide, print the page and sign the form. There was no instruction, just pointless paperwork.
As the lead instructional designer, I was given the pilot course to build. I was excited and creatively stimulated. The kicker? The training had to be designed, developed, and implemented in a week. Seven days(!!!) to create an interactive course and build an online LMS for all of our future training?
The Downsides
The Upsides
In the end, the training was very well received and much talked about. Our HR department decided to slowly convert all of our training to online courses. While Portny says, “the success of a project depends on how clear and accurate the plan is,” I think we were lucky to have achieved some success despite the extensive confusion and disorganization of the entire project.
Recommended PM Interventions
Having a project manager oversee this project would have avoided a number of the aforementioned downsides. First of all he/she could have argued for a more realistic delivery schedule. Also, the planning phase of the project would have been given more attention. Finally, the PM would have been able to facilitate communication between the instructional designer (myself) and the other stakeholders, rather than leaving me to my own devices.
Resources
Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.Portny, S., Mantel, S., Meredith, J., Shafer, S., Sutton, M., & Kramer, B. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Video Program: "Project Management and Instructional Design"
Hello Lindsay,
ReplyDeleteI cannot believe that at some point in time someone thought the PPT Sign-off was a viable option for HR training. Sometimes it is really frustrating how little people see value in actual training. This devaluation also seems apparent in the limited time they gave you to create the pilot. It really speaks highly of your abilities to take a weaker “define” process and really build a strong program. I would assume you also had to fly through the start and perform functions as well (Portny, et all.) I know you mentioned the program was well received but did you ever complete the close process, is this where you determined where you could have benefited from a PM?
Portny, S., Mantel, S., Meredith, J., Shafer, S., Sutton, M., & Kramer, B. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Adam, I share your disbelief. It's a long, arduous journey getting people to see the value of a systematic approach to employee training. Because this type of training is billed to overhead and is "not profitable" too many people dismiss it.
ReplyDeleteHi Lindsay,
ReplyDeleteI agree with Adam. I cannot believe that someone actually thought sending out a PPT and signing the last slide was an effective training tool. I'm sure it didn't take a genius to figure out to just print out the last slide and sign it.
In addition to the already daunting task of developing the training tool in a week, I anticipate there was backlash from the staff when you created a more in depth training model. While I know it was received well once it was implemented slowly, I still would venture a guess that many people were not happy that they actually had to do something! Did you encounter any of this?
Nicole
According to Murphy (1994) for every hour of classroom presentation time requires between forty to sixty hours of designer work. That would use up your week! For computer-based training the design time increases to approximately 185 hours for each hour of training time (Murphy, 1994). You mentioned that, “having a project manager oversee this project would have avoided a number of the aforementioned downsides.” It does seem that this would have helped. “In many corporations a project management approach is utilized to ensure that development time and available resources are used in an efficient manner” (Murphy, 1994, p.9). While you must have used both time and resources extremely efficiently to have completed the project in one week, I agree that a project manager have effectively argued for a more realistic time frame.
ReplyDeleteReference
Murphy, C. (1994). Utilizing project management techniques in the design of instructional materials. Performance & Instruction, 33(3), 9–11.
Copyright by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.