Book Excerpt #1: Corporate Training Tips & Tricks—Save Your Money & Prove Your Worth
NOTE: The following article is excerpted from Corporate Training Tips & Tricks: Save Your Money & Prove Your Worth by Katrina Baker. It is one of three articles by Microassist Senior Learning Architect Kevin Gumienny. To hear more training tidbits from Kevin and other learning and development professionals, we encourage you to get your copy of the book from Amazon—and to stay tuned to this Learning Dispatch blog for additional excerpts!
Beware Sniper Stakeholders
Those who design courses, like those who design other products, often need to have their projects reviewed. There’s the instructional content, of course—you don’t want to get the subject matter wrong (especially necessary when you’re not the subject matter expert). Other instructional designers can be helpful (who sees everything?). Perhaps your boss needs to review it; or, if the project’s for an external (or internal) client, the project owner may need to give their approval.
These are to be expected; but there’s always the risk of the sniper stakeholder. The person (or department) who, you are informed at the last minute, needs to give it one quick look. Maybe it’s someone from sales, or perhaps marketing. Maybe it’s your project owner’s boss. It could be someone on the board who likes to review everything before it’s put into production.
That one last look, though, might change the font, color scheme, logo, and general layout. It can set you back hours or days of work as you develop alternatives, which are then reviewed and critiqued in turn.
How do you take these sniper stakeholders into account? How do you prepare for their changes?
When you can, get ahead of the problem. Make sure everyone has a say at the right stage of the project:
- Does the marketing team need to have input? Make sure that happens at the visual design stage, not after the course is programmed.
- Does the project owner’s boss need to review? Better it happen at the storyboard stage than when the project is nearing completion.
- Will your project be hosted on learning management systems or website that aren’t under your control? Better you use a test module to judge compatibility than find out when the SCORM package is ready to load.
Perhaps the most important technique is to be aware of the possibilities. Keep track of the approvals needed for other projects—even those that you didn’t work on. Sometimes you can poll your network to see what they’ve encountered. Perhaps you’d like to reach out to the authors of this book.
Get ahead of the problem, and you might save yourself from hard-learned lessons.
Additional Resources
- Mischief Managed: What “Harry Potter” Can Teach You About Managing Elearning Projects
- Book Excerpt #2—Corporate Training Development Tip: Draw on Other Fields—If you’re going to run an affordable, effective training department on little budget, you have to leverage excellence where you can find it.
- Book Excerpt #3—Corporate Training Development Tip: Take Training Yourself—Yes, you can educate yourself in a piecemeal way with help columns, articles, forum discussions, and Google. But will that revolutionize your approach?
- Corporate Training Tips and Tricks contains the collective wisdom of over 200 L&D professionals and industry leaders. For more on the book, Katrina, and her company, ROFL (Resources of Fun Learning), catch Microassist CEO Sanjay Nasta’s interview with her during the January 2017 Elearning Council’s Leaders in Learning podcast.
Microassist excels in bringing strong project management skills to each custom elearning development project. Contact us today to find out how we can help you with your custom training project!
Image credit: WPClipart: Marine Sniper
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