Can I have a few target learners to evaluate the instructional design? No.

Was this e-learning effective?

Many of my instructional design colleagues throughout the years have expressed frustration at the seemingly little to no time to conduct the scantest of needs analysis, yet there is another omission to the traditional ADDIE model many seem to overlook.  I’m talking about a formative evaluation of your materials by a small subset of your target performers.  Here at Collabor8, we push our clients to allow for a very iterative process very similar to Michael Allen’s SAM- but there is a limit to what a client will allow.  It seems to me the minute the finish line for a project is in sight, any formative assessment and tweaking to the instructional strategy that might involve additional time and/ or money are usually rejected off hand.  Have you had similar experiences in some of your projects?    Please comment.