The Customer is King
Only by improving customer service can e-learning content providers meet changing demand.
When an e-learning project fails, it is often for all too obvious reasons. The client was inexperienced and did not define the requirement correctly; the supplier lacked the necessary skills or oversold its production capacity. Frequently, however, we come across examples where the client knows what it is doing, the tender is well written, the supplier company has excellent production and project management processes – yet the project still fails to deliver for its stakeholders.
What is going wrong? In our work and in our conversations with clients – and in working to re-engineer our own development processes internally for continuous improvement – we believe we have pinpointed a systemic problem with the standard e-learning production process that needs to be addressed industry-wide. The process is broken.
E-learning content developers are, by and large, still locked into an off-the-shelf software production model, which was never designed with learning in mind and in which inflexibility and unwieldiness are the source of much client dissatisfaction. Two particular bugbears come up time and time again.
First is ‘black box’ syndrome, the tendency for the client not to get to see anything substantial to comment on in a content development project until it is almost too late to make change. This is particularly difficult where the relationship between client and supplier is a new one, as no bedrock of trust exists to set expectations. Black box working puts too much pressure on the initial briefing or requirements capture having been done accurately and effectively, which, as we know, is not always the case.
Second, the inherent inflexibility of the standard process tends to stifle creativity and limits the ability of clients to influence work in progress.
Death by process
Even if a project has been effectively specified and requirements capture has been done well, new opportunities and insights may come up in the design process that the client does not get to see and help to maximise until it is too late. Alternatively, shortcomings in the original brief may be revealed in the process of actually authoring the course and they may not be corrected. The client feels excluded from the process and any attempt to intervene can cause confrontation with over-ardent project managers wielding change control notices like traffic wardens with parking tickets.
How have we got to this state of affairs, where too many projects turn into confrontations between client and supplier? Perhaps it has something to do with the level of risk involved in creating high-end e-learning. A lot is at stake for both parties: the client is making a substantial investment of training budget; the supplier is trying, desperately in some cases, to control the margin in a business where it can get out of hand all too easily.
Part of the reason for the inflexible mindset of some suppliers is historic. Many will have experienced the boom and bust years of e-learning, in which very few e-learning companies managed to operate profitability and failure to control operating margins, particularly on big projects, caused some spectacular examples of crash and burn.
The survivors from that era were those that managed to lock down their processes. For a while, the obsession with process became almost a crusade, with critical path diagrams and ISO logos filling the pages of supplier web sites, along with tracts on the virtues of Six Sigma.
In all of this could be seen the insecurity of small companies dealing with large companies and attempting to provide reassurance, given the risks inherent in such an asymmetrical relationship. After all, the typical e-learning company employs about 25 people, while the typical client for its services has a headcount of 5,000 or more.
The losers in this situation, paradoxically, were often the big companies. What they lost was the flexibility and innovation that ought to be on offer from interfacing with a small, boutique operation. However, this was not a situation that was going to be allowed to persist for too long in the emergent, fiercely competitive UK e-learning market, where evolution is fast paced.
The rapid revolution
The landscape of e-learning content production was changing. Three factors in particular were driving this change. First, authoring tools, which had not previously been particularly user friendly, had developed to the point where non-technical people could use them. Less programmer resource was necessary, one of the big factors that the standard production process existed to control.
Programmers could focus on creating the bespoke elements of an e-learning solution while designers, subject matter experts or even the client’s own learning team could put together basic, template-based e-learning pages. Where the requirement was fairly straightforward and a cookie-cutter approach could be taken to production, a course could be completely authored by non-technical people using off-the-shelf tools. The rapid e-learning revolution was born.
At the same time, e-learning courses were tending to get shorter. The second factor driving change prescribed ‘little and often’.
Third, clients were becoming more experienced and more educated about what to expect from e-learning as a delivery mechanism. No longer so dependent on their suppliers for knowledge about the process, they were more likely to question its rigidity.
Despite all this change, the standard process largely stayed in place. Rapid tools and development methodologies were addressing some of the problems clients had with document heavy, paint by numbers production processes, but everybody knew the rapid template-driven approach was not suitable for all situations. It did not provide the whole answer. If you wanted high-end e-learning, it was assumed you still had to have high-end prices and extended production timescales.
A variety of new approaches are beginning to be seen that promise significant change to the way e-learning is designed and produced. While the rapid debate has centred mostly on tools, production and multi-skilled teams, attention is turning to the design activity at the front end of the process.
Prototyping using development tools has long been seen as a way of controlling risk on a project and avoiding the black box problem, but it can create as many problems as it solves. If there is no clear framework and outcome for the learning course, a prototyping approach may divert attention away from the message and refocus on the delivery, sometimes to the detriment of the outcome.
The iterative nature of rapid prototyping can also set an expectation that the unique threads that bind a learning programme together can be snipped and retied with little consequence – something that would make most good learning designers shudder. And because the design prototype review cycle is repeated until all are satisfied, it can add to, rather than reduce, the overall project cost and timescale.
Client expectations
At Edvantage UK, formerly Futuremedia Learning, we have been trialling a new form of wireframe prototyping invented by learning consultant Patrick Dunn. It allows the design of programmes to be developed collaboratively and iteratively before a penny is spent on production and it throws the emphasis on learning design back where it belongs.
This process has seen great success in practice. Not only can it radically shorten design time and save costs, but it also helps in setting and controlling client expectations as a result of the shared experience in coming up with the solution in a collaborative way. It is also helpful as a scoping tool and allows more accurate costing of the subsequent production phase. Recently, an expected 12 weeks for a high-end, scenario-driven piece of e-learning was cut to eight using this process, with no sacrifice in quality.
Key to this improvement in efficiency is effective collaboration between client and supplier in the design. We believe design should be a collaborative process, not a war of nerves in which each side tries to second guess the other. At Edvantage UK, this focus on process extends beyond production and design to all our operating procedures, a re-engineering of our processes around customer service that we call Touch. Only by becoming more focused on customer service, we believe, can e-learning content production companies keep pace with the changing face of content.
Carole Bower is senior vice president of learning at Edvantage UK
John Helmer is an independent consultant