3 tips for getting better content from your SMEs (subject-matter experts)

One of the constant challenges instructional designers face in building quality training programs is getting the right information out of their subject matter experts (SMEs). Interviewing SMEs is a skill best honed over time, for nothing can prepare you for the roadblocks you'll face when gathering the content you need to begin pulling your course together. These three tips should help you cut to the chase, and simplify your content gathering efforts.

First, prepare intensely for SME interviews. What would you do if you were job consisted of interviewing Hollywood's biggest A-list actors, and you were only going to get them seated with you for a few hours during which time your conversation would be videotaped? This is the challenge James Lipton from the show "Inside the Actor's Studio" faces on a regular basis during production of the series. Being a fan of the show I can tell you that his line of questioning is always direct, relevant to the actor's career, and even able to catch some of his biggest guests by surprise at their level of detail. Think of your SME interviews in the same light. Mr. Lipton was himself asked at one point how he prepares for these high-stakes interviews, and his answer was very telling:

“Nothing is handed to me. I get raw material from my researcher… and then I watch all the movies, read everything that the person has written about himself or herself, and I go through all the articles that have been written about them, and from that I distill the blue index cards, which are approximately 300-500 [cards] for each person”. 

Prior to you scheduling SME interviews, you two should gather as much information about desired performance, target audience, experience and background of the SME, etc. never walk into or treat a SME interview casually or show up unprepared. 

Secondly, and along the lines of our first step is to talk to the target audience for your training. In many instructional design projects, the SME will serve as an intermediary between yourself and the target audience. Your client will in many cases assume that the SME can provide you with all of the content you will need. As a check and balance to the content your SME provides you, we collaborate Gleaned invaluable insights from members of the target audience for the courses we are developing. Typically, target audience members are closer to the front lines of the desired performance than the SME and can provide invaluable feedback to your training design efforts.

Lastly we've got a tip for you that at first might appear controversial or make your SME cringe. Don't accept content from SMEs in PowerPoint format. PowerPoint's linear workflow was originally designed for speakers to outline their talks, but in doing so has a tendency to degrade content in favor of formatting. There is nothing worse for you as an instructional designer than to sit there staring at a PowerPoint deck loaded with bulleted lists. PowerPoint and other "slideware" is used by SMEs to condense content that you need to build a good training course into the lowest common denominator that can fit in a bulleted list. Our challenge to you, should you choose to accept it- don't settle for slideware when you know the bulk of the content you need is in the SMEs had or in other document forms. 

The minute we request content from a SME and are emailed a PowerPoint deck we quickly and without opening the slideware request additional content in either .pdf or Microsoft Word format. 

These three strategies are just ones that we use and have found useful when gathering content from SMEs. I'm sure there are more tips and tricks out there, and would love to hear about techniques you use to pry the necessary content from your SMEs. What are some of your favorite techniques for getting at the content you need?

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

Are your learners front and center in everything you design?

This is the question you should be asking yourself as an instructional designer. A very similar question is being asked by Alicia Boler-Davis, Chief Of Global Quality and Customer Experience and her team over at GE and is one of the keys to the automaker's astounding turnaround. Why is this question so powerful you may be asking yourself. Let me explain.

Putting the learner front and center, you have the opportunity to not only train them but to build advocates for your learning and development programs. You can only do this though if you learners are walking out of your classroom (or leaving the bright glare of their laptop monitors) able to perform in new ways they will brag to their colleagues about. 

Many organizations limit the evaluation of the training programs to smiley sheets and surveys that are beyond stale, not to mention many learning and development departments are so strapped for time these smiley sheets sit gathering dust inside of a dark desk drawer. When was the last time you modified the instructional strategy in one of your courses as a result of employee feedback or comments left on one of these level I evaluations? 

Worse yet, if you're not using the feedback that you are getting from your training courses to improve them not only have your courses grown stale, but your lack of listening to what your end client has been telling you has probably negatively impacted the desire of your students to leave you candid feedback in the future. 

If "culture eats strategy for breakfast" as Mr. Drucker pointed out, I encourage you to rethink how you are designing your training courses and look not just at your business goals but at your learners' goals. Millennials who are increasingly comprising the bulk of today's workforce want to see you not just caring about the business, but want to feel you authentically caring about their needs and aspirations as well. 

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

How closely should your e-learning simulate the performance of a skill?

Our advice to clients— within your budgetary and other constraints your e-learning should allow for skill performance and practice that very closely resembles the real-world environment.  No picture that I’ve come across recently exemplifies this principle more than that of Patrick below, the virtual patient used to train medical students entering the field of proctology. You can track Patrick’s very existence to this line in the article—

“Currently, students receive minimal practice and interaction in intimate exams due to the high cost for training and high anxiety nature of the exams.”

Feel free to read more about Patrick and the team that developed him by clicking here. When selecting a delivery medium for instruction, never forget e-learning is most effective when:

1.        Practicing the skills to be taught is too dangerous, risky or costly to allow for practice in the real world (think of the military’s use of flight simulators, or Patrick in the article above),

2.       Your learners are very geographically dispersed, or

3.       The skills you need to teach lend themselves to online delivery (i.e. software training).

Unfortunately, decisions are sometimes made at the beginning of the instructional design process with thinking that goes something like this, “because we have all these PowerPoint’s already built and e-learning development software is so inexpensive,” or “it has been decided this will be an e-learning project.” In many of these situations where the medium does not fit the learning situation, the results are often very unfortunate but irreversible after construction of the learning materials has begun.

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

5 Cost drivers of E-learning projects

One of the questions we hear almost daily from customers is―How much should I budget for the development of my custom e-learning project?  Our answer remains the same every time.  We're not trying to be elusive with how we price our services mind you, but honestly it simply depends.  Anyone who tells you otherwise, I’d sprint away in the direction!  So, it depends on what you may be asking yourself?  And hence, we decided to write this post.

There are five key cost drivers the building custom e-learning and they are:

1. Project Management

Building e-learning generally involves some moving parts, and at any given time you want to know how far along in your course development you are.  When working on a course or building out a large curriculum, you’ll also be involving a variety of players such as graphic designers, animators, writers, subject matter experts, voice over talent, video editors,  or other specialists.  In order for your project to stay on time and on budget, you’ll want to budget time for the development of a project plan as well as weekly update calls or meetings.  In our experience we have found these activities to consume roughly 5 to 10% of your budget. As the old adage goes fail to plan and you’re planning to fail.

2. Instructional Design

Many clients who approach us at some point during our conversation will say something to the effect of “we already have the content; we just need someone to put it online for us”.  Experience has taught us to reviewing the content before providing a quote. Often what is referred to as content is often a PowerPoint deck or Microsoft Word Outline of the bullet points used by a previous instructor-led initiative. This “content” was designed to jog a facilitator’s memory that was going to stand in front of a classroom and dive deeper into these points. Without the luxury of the content inside of the instructor’s brain, the bullet points are can rarely be repurposed. More than likely the content must be rewritten from the ground up (beginning with a quick needs analysis) to meet the needs of an audience that will be experiencing this training online, without the aid of a facilitator or instructor, and at their own pace. 

This is where an instructional designer adds value to your project. While e-learning authoring tools are indeed simple to use, designing and building an engaging and immersive experience for your learners requires a degree of creativity, writing ability, and most importantly knowledge of instructional strategies that many subject-matter experts lack.  In our experience, you’ll want to budget roughly 25% of your e-learning project budget on quality instructional design.

3. Multimedia Design and Development

After the instructional design is complete and appropriate instructional strategies selected for all of the objectives that you’re teaching, it’s time to develop any multimedia assets you may need. This includes any navigational elements, custom graphic design, and video or audio that needs to be recorded and edited for use in the course.  If you’ve got a limited budget for the development of multimedia assets you want to let your instructional designer know so that they can leverage the use of lower-cost methods such as stock photography and or even assets currently existing in the public domain in your course.  A general principle is the more customized you need your course to be, the more you will need to spend to build these assets from scratch.  Again, generally speaking we have found it safe to budget roughly 25% of your budget to the design and development of multimedia assets.  This varies greatly of course; it is much more inexpensive to record software demonstrations on your PC then it is to hire acting talent and a camera crew in order to stage live role-plays and scenarios in a studio.

4. Interactivity

Training involves practice.  The effectiveness of your e-learning course depends on how well you allow the learner to engage with your content and practice new skills and behaviors (as opposed to having someone sit there reading or listening to a narrated PowerPoint show).  This secret sauce is truly what sets e-learning a part from what we call e-listening― a lecture delivered by a PC as opposed to a talking head in front of a classroom.  Luckily, a quality instructional designer can bake interactivity right into a course with the right multimedia assets, so there is no additional human resource to throw in.  The expense comes in the authoring of the activities, and in their testing in whichever software platform you are using to build the e-learning.  While anyone can insert static images onto slides, it takes a little more time, knowledge of your tools’ capabilities, and creativity to engage your learners in an online environment.  We’ve found throughout our years of building e-learning programs that you can reasonably expect designing interactivity into a course to consume about 25% of your projected budget.

5. Subject-matter expert (SME) availability

Last but not least, it is important to remember that no e-learning is designed in a vacuum.  One often overlooked expense is the time it takes for your designer or developer to acquire the content from subject-matter experts in order to build e-learning.  Even in smaller projects where a subject-matter expert is leveraging an authoring tool to build a course without the benefit of a designer, you must budget for the time it takes to gather all of the content, even when it’s just screen recordings or screen captures; it will take time.  Once your e-learning course is in its 1st draft or in a very rough state, you’ll want to budget in time for a SME who is also a member of your target audience to go through it and provide you with feedback on how you can improve the training experience.  A very general assumption is to budget for 10 – 20% of your costs to SME time. 

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Though every project is different and we're not very big fans of generalizations, these cost estimates are born out of our experiences and yours may be different. 

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Quality of e-learning development is a subjective thing, and budgetary and other resource constraints may limit the instructional strategies you can employ.  Coupled with the fact that- as this image points out “there is always someone who will do it cheaper”.   If we left out a cost driver, or you’d like to share with us how your projects for different please do so in the comments section below. We'd love to hear from you!

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

HR strategies for cultivating a customer service culture

Your customer service training course will fail unless you take a systems view and develop a culture of service.  Customers are not serviced in a vacuum, and unless EVERYONE is involved in delivering a positive customer experience, your investment in customer service training is headed down the drain. 

If you earnestly want to improve the customer service experience for your customers, begin at the top by analyzing your mission, vision, and values.  If all of these aren’t aligned and focused on your customer’s experience and how improve their condition―it’s time for a refresh.  You must involve your Human Resources (HR) team to help you answer the questions as to how you get there.  Human Resources, instructional design and organizational development practitioners can help you analyze your culture from the people you bring into the organization, to how you can develop a more customer-centric and service-based culture with the people you already have. 

Click on the diagram for more.

At every step of your HR workflow, there are strategies and tactics that you can employ to ensure your success.  A culture of customer service involves a system of inputs and outputs, all working towards building a team recruited and completely focused on ensuring the satisfaction and loyalty of your customer base.  As this diagram above illustrates, to build a culture committed to service you begin with your people.  The ones you have not yet hired, the ones you are in the process of hiring, and the ones you've hired in the past.  Click on the image above to learn more about the questions you should be asking at every stage of recruiting, hiring and managing to achieve a culture of service.

Finding a contract HR professional, instructional design or organizational development consultant with the appropriate skill-set needed to properly help you achieve results from your customer service initiatives can be an overwhelming challenge for any organization.  If this is the case for your company, consider seeking guidance from a firm like Collabor8 Learning.  Collabor8 Learning is experienced at strategizing, designing and delivering custom customer service strategies and solutions that exceed your expectations, regardless of your organization’s size.  

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.