Transcending Constraints

In my last post I referred to “transcending constraints” as a critical component of the learning professionals’ job. What I mean by that is that we need to strike the right balance between designing a blue sky solution (where we have all the time and money in the world to create a learning work of art) and the reality we are working within in terms of schedule, budget, and resources. Clients (internal and external) will always want the Cadillac solution for the Yugo budget, and they should. Most training (unless it’s a customer-facing profit center) is an organizational cost, and a discretionary one, at that. Under any circumstances the client should be looking to derive the greatest value for their dollar, and under the current economy, even more so. As training professionals, we have to push ourselves beyond the typical Instructional Systems Design box to find creative solutions that deliver that value without devaluing our own efforts. In simplest terms, this is done in three steps:

1. Clearly define the goals for the intervention
2. Clearly define the constraints for the project
3. Present options and make choices (this is where the transcendence comes in)

1. Clearly define the goals for the intervention

I know this is stating the obvious, but it’s amazing how often we skip this step. We hear, “need sales training” and bang, we’re off and running. Sales training. Check. Know what that looks like. Know what that’s supposed to do. Improve sales. Got it. We’re already on to the constraints part, because we know that there is going to be a looming deadline, and we don’t have a second to lose. But not so fast. The first thing we should ask is why? Is the sales team as a whole not hitting their quotas? Are new hires struggling to be productive? Is there a new product about to be launched? Is there a corporate shift from a product sell to a solution sell? Are upsell opportunities being left on the table? Get granular, and map it back to corporate goals. Is this training supposed to improve overall revenues? A specific sub-set of revenues? Win rates? Conversion rates? For whom? Who’s being measured on these indicators, and what are their specific targets? Identifying all of this will drastically reduce the scope of content that will need to be addressed. This is critical, because we know we can’t do it all, and we can do even less, once we move on to number 2: the constraints.

2. Cleary define the constraints for the project

We tend to be a little better at this. We have all the traditional constraints that any other project operates under in terms of what’s the deadline, what’s the budget, what resources are available to support this (both training folks and sales experts), what work conflicts do those resources have, what blackout dates (holidays, vacations, sales travel, etc.) will impact our productivity, and so on. In addition, we need to know how distributed the audience is, how they will access the training, what they already know, what’s their preferred learning style, and what will their attitudes likely be towards this training. If building online training, we’ll also need to know accessibility and bandwidth constraints, compliance requirement (SCORM, AICC, etc.), technologies we can or must use, and what we need to integrate with. Finally, we’ll need to determine what’s required in terms of assessment and tracking. We should also find out how long this training is expected to be relevant.

Let’s say we’re dealing with a technology firm that is struggling with low attach rates in terms of upselling the professional version of the product suite. , which includes two extra applications from the standard edition. The two additional applications differentiate against the competition, but tend to be so complex that most sales people don’t know where to start in terms of positioning and selling them. The next release will focus on reducing some of the complexity, but isn’t due for another six months. Meanwhile, the organization believes attach rates are critical to organic growth and have added a specific target to the sales people’s goals starting in the next quarter. They need to be trained by the current quarter’s end, a month and a half from now. As a team, they are highly distributed, have aggressive quotas, and have little to no time to come out of the field for training. Also, they think most of the sales training courses they’ve attended so far have been pretty disconnected from the reality of their day-to-day work.

3. Present options and make choices

Ok, so now we know enough to start thinking through some options. The nature of the sales people’s roles and locations rules out face-to-face classes as a viable option, so realistically that leaves online options. Though at first blush, six weeks to produce and deliver eLearning is enough to make anyone want to run away screaming, there are actually a number of levers to pull to make this happen. These include:

• Options for end product:
  • Traditional eLearning: (Presumably) high quality, interactive, and self-paced, but often quite costly.
  • Webinars: Fast and cheap to produce, can be very interactive, but participants tend to multi-task if they’re not engaged, and not an easily searchable reference downstream.
  • Rapid eLearning: Relatively fast and cheap to produce, can be accessed on-demand, but limited options for content flow and interactivity.
  • Social Learning: Highly relevant and topical, but requires existing infrastructure and active participation to be of value.
• Options for the process:
  • Provide traditional analysis, design, and development support.
  • Provide analysis and design, but let the experts develop the content.
  • Provide some guidelines and templates and let the experts develop the content.
  • Provide content seeding and /or community management services for a social learning community.
• Options for quality gates:
  • Specify the number of review cycles
  • Specify the types of reviews
  • Specify the number (and authority) of the reviewers
  • Prohibit upstream changes after each gate has been closed (unless other tradeoffs are made to compensate for the rework)
• Options for the content:
  • Number of topics
  • Level of depth
  • Focus

Play with all these levers and all you can come up with any number of specific options such as:

• Create a “traditional” online training course, but make it brief and easily navigable (easy to find and jump from topic to topic rather than a linear progression), and focus only on a few key features that tend to close deals with customers. (Limit QA to only support a specific browser and operating system.)
• Create a series of webinars exploring both wins and losses, deriving lessons learned, and discussing how to apply them to current sales engagements. (Work with the sales lead of each to focus their review on the most pertinent information.)
• Build a series of 5-minute rapid eLearning modules and add them to a searchable sales portal seeded with other content and marketing collateral. Enable ratings and comments so sales people can provide feedback on the utility and efficacy of the materials. (Regularly ping the sales team via their blackberries calling out new and interesting content, and/or soliciting participation.)

Ultimately, there is always a way to meet the needs under almost any constraints, and without compromising quality. It’s all a matter of identifying priorities, exercising your creativity, and making informed tradeoffs.

~ posted by Beth Chmielowski on 4 May 09
   tagged as: constraints, design

 

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