CHAPTER 6

Are You The One?

You may have been asked to create instructional materials or you may expect to do so soon. You may be leading a development effort that someone else (your school, your boss, the manager of another department, or a colleague) has requested. You may be ultimately responsible for communicating the success, struggles, alternatives, and completion of the training solution. If you are, this makes others the “client” and you the project leader.

It's often assumed that the instructional designer will take the initial training goal and just make training happen. Underestimating this complex task can easily lead to unfulfilled expectations, ineffective design, and off-budget and off-schedule projects.

It is essential to the success of your project that you are able to constructively discuss timelines, budget, treatment alternatives, and review and approval obligations with your client (even if they aren't paying you as a consultant). Setting and maintaining clear expectations with the project sponsor (client) throughout the project ensures that there will be few surprises on either side.

Keeping the client informed as to the status of the project is not enough. You could accomplish that as a project manager. You need to be a consultant. The difference between a consultant and a project manager is your skill in identifying and presenting alternatives, setting and maintaining expectations, building and leading the team, and effectively negotiating with everyone involved throughout the whole project. An iterative process is all about alternatives—to the design, media, strategies, timeline, budget, and more.

Successive approximation gives you the means to produce highly effective learning, on budget and on schedule, through collaborative teamwork, small iterative steps, and continuous course correction. It's a very successful process, but it's essential to adhere to the rules of the process. Success therefore lies in the ability of the project leader to manage all of the project flow effectively.

The leader must be a dynamic in-line manager of the process and able to adjust the activities, design, and project variables without losing project momentum. If adjustments cause the project to stall or move backward, the work up to that point, and the faith that the project can be successful, may be at risk. Fortunately, those problems are far more prevalent in traditional ISD than with SAM. Perhaps the most pressing leadership skills are confidence in the process and the ability to win support for it from all participants.

There will be calls for exceptions and violations of the process to resist or at least negotiate. It's very easy to pursue too much perfection too early—to strive for too much before product rollout. So, as a SAM leader, you must prepare to:

• set and maintain expectations
• dynamically adjust design and project variables
• resist superfluous modifications
• combat indecision
• keep the focus on behavior change
• be an advocate for the learner.

SETTING AND MAINTAINING EXPECTATIONS

The fundamental question that all clients have is “When will it be done?” Although you have a clear schedule and the team is fully committed, you should expect that there will be some pressure on the schedule that must be communicated to the client. A content expert may not be available, media may have to be rebuilt, your instructional writer may take vacation at the worst time, or someone could have an unexpected emergency. Conservative planning with built-in contingencies can help manage assaults on the schedule, but it's common that the client both causes delays and becomes upset with you about them.

You should always be considering creative solutions to any problem that may arise in the project. But you will need to be just as creative in your communication of schedule conflicts as of your solutions. The client may have expectations for how things are handled as much as when they are handled. Make sure you are aware of their expectations.

DYNAMICALLY ADJUSTING DESIGN AND PROJECT VARIABLES

As the project leader, you are charged with producing an instructional product that meets the expectations of management, the sponsor, team members, learners and their managers, all while producing desired behavior changes. There's a lot that goes into a successful project, not to mention your ability to juggle them all.

There is no more important skill for an effective SAM leader than the ability to effectively negotiate. This is even more important if the client has not been involved in the early stages of the design process (but hopefully you would not have let that happen).

Instructional negotiation involves identifying opportunities and alternatives to the design that either improve the instructional treatment or address an ineffective treatment, then gaining agreement with the project sponsor, stakeholders, and the team members.

Negotiation requires trade-offs and compromises. Additional development, content, or media are often seen as required improvements even though they necessitate more time and budget than exist in the plan. As the SAM leader, you need to point out that no schedule or budget allows perfection, and it would be better to rollout a product with some resources in reserve should quick fixes be needed, than to delay release and have no means to make corrections later. Actual use of a product should be considered just another cycle of evaluation leading to future design and development. This is far more effective and efficient than trying to guess what the real world response will be. So you should challenge “simple fixes” and remind people of the advantages of the process they agreed to at the beginning.

In many cases, you'll have to do something you didn't anticipate. Your role will be to come up with practical solutions. Maybe providing a link to a policy document or to an existing course can fix the perceived problem. Maybe an activity addresses a topic that is somewhat outside the scope of the project and should be moved to a separate course rather than being enhanced. Maybe a previous design option that was prototyped and discarded should be revisited.

These choices require someone who understands the options and their impact on the project and can communicate them to the project owner. By striving to be an effective consultant and sticking to the SAM process, you can shepherd your project through tough challenges and negotiate with confidence.

KEEPING THE FOCUS ON BEHAVIOR CHANGE

The role of an instructional designer is to focus on instructional events that achieve learning goals and objectives. The role of the project manager is to focus on the budget, team activities, and timelines. The role of the media artist is to design and create visual treatments and objects to support the course content. The role of the developer is to construct components that bring the course design to life.

All of these roles are essential in the development of good instruction, but they only represent the means to constructing it. A project leader needs to ensure that each constructed piece or component works to address the behavior change that was identified in the Savvy Start. The leader's role is to make certain that design, budget, and timeline decisions continue to focus on changing learner performance.

BEING A LEARNER ADVOCATE

It is hard to believe that someone would build a course of instruction with a malicious attitude toward learners. Nonetheless, the realities of the project (finding the budget, staying on schedule, keeping team members on task, and so on) easily shift the focus of the team away from the true needs of the learners. Defocusing project pressures are nearly constant, while learner considerations may have little advocacy.

The SAM leader needs to be the one to take a step back and see the learner standing behind the spreadsheets, plans, drafts, and schedules. A learner-centered approach means challenging the design via learner review and feedback, as well as reiterating the identified learner expectations identified in the Savvy Start. An effective leader should be an unfaltering advocate for learners throughout the project.

ARE YOU A SAM LEADER?

A checklist of skills helpful for SAM leadership appears below. This checklist is divided into four specific areas necessary for anyone who endeavors to lead a successful project: instructional design, project management, consulting, and selling.