Terri Roehrig This article was co-authored by Terri Roehrig and Noah Kreischer.
Today’s learning and performance (L&P) functions are tasked with maintaining an ever-growing library of learning modules, content, and experiences to equip their workforce—AND they’re challenged with making learning more engaging and more digestible for users to minimize work pressure and stress.
That responsibility is made harder by constant change, ranging from quarterly updates in response to external regulations, requests for new deliverables from other business functions, and significant changes to the business (with subsequent pivots within the organization). To continually meet evolving requirements, many teams need to release new or refreshed content every quarter, if not more frequently.
How do you achieve it all, deliver a great learning experience, and still be strategic in aligning investments (both time and money) with the organization’s overall strategies?
Every team has different needs—whether you’re trying to quickly develop high-quality eLearning or deeply impact culture through learning experiences, effectively supporting your organization requires a unique assembly of practices, standards, tools, and processes that enable your team to get things done and do them well. The key is intentionally designing and defining the processes, tools, and models that drive efficiency and consistency for your team while delivering great curriculum design.
After years of helping high-performing teams to define and streamline processes and ways of working, we’ve identified six areas that are essential for any agile L&P function. We’ve seen average development cycle times cut in half , even for global, high-volume teams, by building practices in these six areas.
When managers need to meet with associates to assign specific tasks, it creates downtime, more meetings for visibility, and other productivity drainers. Imagine instead if teams could see the work available, the actions required, and simply pick up a task or action item and see it through. Everyone has visibility into what work needs to happen and when, and the team can stay aligned as they leverage the right skills when needed.
This is possible using a team collaboration site with documented workflows, because it empowers everyone—instructional designers, UI/UX designers, subject-matter experts, course owners, business owners, etc.—to manage individual deliverables. There’s no idle time spent waiting for someone to assign work. Associates can pull work forward, allowing things to be addressed quicker than traditional waterfall-style approaches.
In partnership with your team collaboration site is workflow management. We’re big fans of JIRA and Kanban boards, although other tools work too. A good workflow accounts for all the steps and stakeholders; is customized to the work; and provides pathways to cycle content through the team whenever issues are found.
Start with a process map that details all the steps (such as role, timing, and other dependencies) as well as necessary stakeholders. Then, build out that process in your team collaboration site to ensure all team members have visibility into the steps it takes to develop and iterate on an individual deliverable. To add clarity to tasks and ensure no step in the process gets overlooked, assign a specific number of days to each step in the process.
To ensure your training deliverables meet quality assurance standards, integrate your quality control process into your workflow. This includes:
The corrective action log will help your team manage for a quality product that meets the standards when it comes out of production. Managing quality through a corrective action log will help your team catch potential risks and failure points before they happen. The work becomes “mistake proof.”
Your corrective action log should:
Before any development work begins, document standards for all team members. Consider:
These standards should be continuously updated as the design and content for digital learning assets is iterated over time. By making regular updates, your team will develop an efficient rhythm for reviewing standards. To drive quality management and ensure consistency across deliverables, update standards regularly as a result of flagged items in the corrective action log.
Staying engaged with the team helps keep things moving. Asynchronous communication tools are great for keeping the right people connected with each other at times that are most convenient to them. It allows for quicker and more direct solutions to problems that may otherwise see a lot of churn through email.
However, sometimes the fastest way to solve an issue is through a live (synchronous) conversation. We recommend regular check-ins with the team as well as ongoing communication to ensure nothing gets left on the shelf and everything keeps moving.
Key team communication tactics to consider:
Also, communicate with your business functions to plan for upcoming learning and performance needs. Set up a cadence to plan for upcoming needs: create a yearly plan and refine quarterly or choose a cadence that works for your team and the business.
Make this non-negotiable: every project has a clear project plan with baseline delivery dates to be shared and communicated with stakeholders.
This allows your team to flag potential issues before it’s too late. When deliverables are falling behind, a clear project plan guides the entire team in holding the right conversations at the right time to ensure a successful outcome. Armed with baseline delivery dates, your team will be able to decide whether changes to the plan need to be made—and when.
Here are some examples of this in action:
Juggling great curriculum design with the inundation of requests across the business is an astronomical task. Support your team with a process or template document for incoming requests to help your team gather requirements.
Your team can populate the information when meeting with your business functions; for long-term or strategic efforts, have stakeholders draft it to the best of their ability and set up time to review together and discuss to dig deeper. This allows for an open conversation about the learning need and whether learning will solve the problem! Leveraging tools such as a Degree of Difficulty, Criticality, and Frequency matrix can also inform the conversation.
Some topics to consider:
Equipped with the right set of agile practices , L&P teams can stay aligned on who’s doing what and when, quickly pivot to incoming work or urgent requests, and consistently develop winning experiences that drive results. By focusing on these six areas, your team will be empowered to execute work faster and more consistently—allowing you to keep pace with the organization’s learning and performance needs.
For more insights on operationalizing or optimizing your learning and performance function, we’re always happy to chat. You can connect with us by filling out the form at the bottom of the page.