Preface

Developing, implementing, and managing performance-changing projects requires sophisticated project management skills to ensure completion on time and within budget. Yet, many learning developers either do not have those skills or apply their own project approach inconsistently.

This book describes a project management approach and development process that I created in 2000 to provide a flexible structure to manage projects in my company. This approach was born out of necessity and, in truth, developed in the school of hard knocks as I built a successful consulting business in which a repeatable approach to developing valuable programs was essential to success.

The need for a solid project management approach to training development became evident as the projects of our growing company got larger and more complex. Often we were serving multiple clients with conflicting needs, changing business requirements, and a host of other uncertainties. These more complex projects required multiple developers to work together in a team.

Now, in 2015, multitasking is the norm, and dedicated project teams have disappeared. Instead of focusing on one project at a time with a full-time team, people are juggling multiple projects that require help from many others. This can cause problems as personalities clash and more and more hours are required for rework driven by communication difficulties. As a result, work is not always delivered consistently, and clients begin to notice these struggles. It is time for some structure—not so much structure that flexibility is lost, but enough structure to improve the effectiveness of your business.

You may very well have your own structure, and it doesn’t really matter whose you use, as long as it works. The approach in this book is consistent with the Project Management Institute, which builds and maintains best practices of project management. What matters is that the project is planned, organized, and managed in a way that allows the needs of the customers to be met, regardless of how often they change their mind or how many people are involved. Realistic project management forces us to squarely keep our eyes on the customer’s performance need rather than our snazzy methodology and delivery method—online, live, or both.

When creating courses, you may very well be able to “wing it,” especially if you know the material well, are going to teach it yourself, and the customer base is well defined. Unfortunately, this is not the way the business world is right now. Often, trainers are being asked to write courses that will be taught by others or taught completely through technology. We are being asked to develop course materials about things we know almost nothing about—and deliver them in a week. We have to negotiate the requirement differences between squabbling functional silos within the companies we are serving, while negotiating the natural conflict and competition of our own development teams. These are all project management problems.

Tighten your project management process before it is too late. Change the way you think about course development projects. Fight the urge to skip ahead to a solution or visualize the exercises and content while your customers are describing their needs. Forget about the slides you already have. The steps in this book will help you completely define a development project before you start planning the details.

Expect each project to progress completely differently from your plan, and then forgive yourself when it does. A project done correctly is a project whose plan has adapted to the changing needs of the customer. If nothing surprises you, you probably did not add much value for the customer.

Much has happened since the first edition of Project Management for Trainers. My business partner Vija Dixon, who was instrumental in the original book, passed away more than five years ago. A devastating recession forced me to completely reboot the business from the ground up, with the ground being just me. Today, many of the facilitators who used to teach for us are back, and new friends and partners have inspired improvements to my project management process. The Association for Talent Development has become a significant business partner, and we are thankful to ATD for allowing us to teach project management and related topics live and online to its members. Special thanks to Senior Director of Education Courtney Kriebs, a close friend and trusted adviser in her role as an ATD leader.

Brittney Helt, my first hire after the recession started to abate, continues to be the most important person in my company. She keeps me focused on work that adds the most value and on finishing projects like this book. Betsy Ballentine joined us to run the operations side a little more than a year ago and will be leaving soon to begin pursuing a career in nursing. She will be sadly missed, but Brittney and I are proud that she is chasing her dream. Nadine Martin, one of our facilitators who teaches this material, has her fingerprints all over the changes in this edition, as well as the material that stayed the same.

Richard Sites of Allen Interactions and Angel Green of Coca-Cola Beverages Florida provoke me with their interactive approach to development and their unceasing focus on performance change. You’ll find pieces by them in chapter 3. Thanks also to my new friend, Megan Torrance, who is the first and maybe only person I’ve met who is successfully applying an Agile methodology to learning development. She also contributes her approach in chapter 3.

I am a member of a peer-to-peer business group that we call Rogue 9025, which is led by Mike Donahue, a gifted coach and facilitator. He and the other members have built my business with me. Their frank and encouraging feedback is invaluable.

Finally, thanks to my three not-so-little-anymore project managers—my daughters, Kelly, Kristin, and Katherine. Kelly is working for a national company that uses games to teach product knowledge, and while she doesn’t think she’s in my field, it’s fun to share ideas. Kristin and Katherine, both in their second year at DePauw University, juggle academics, athletics, sorority life, and philanthropy projects with amazing ease. I am proud to be their mom.

And to my husband, Doug, I owe the greatest thanks, of course. As a team, we have created a flexible structure to manage the complex balance of our lives. His devotion as both a husband and a father is most important to me and gives me the confidence to create.

The heavy lifting on this rewrite was done by ATD editors Jack Harlow and Melissa Jones, as well as Ellie Sheffield, our amazing 2015 intern from DePauw University. Thanks of course to Mark Morrow, retired editor at ATD, who initially talked me into doing this book.

In 2000 when I wrote the first edition, we built “training programs” and we were “trainers.” Even then, I chafed at the bossy sound of the term trainer, preferring instead learning facilitator. We created and then taught courses. We learned how to create learning objectives.

Fifteen years later, many forces, including technology, have made the options at our disposal much more complex. Our role demands us to form partnerships with our learners, not just tell them what to do. Most of us have refocused, favoring to talk with our customers about performance-changing experiences rather than training programs. Our industry still lacks a standard language for all the different roles and deliverables, but in this book, I use the terms set out in the following table.

It’s time to begin your project! If you have any questions, feel free to email me at [email protected]. Seriously—we love this stuff. Remember, bad news early is good news!