HIGH QUALITY/LOW COST

Challenge: Review

The review process was cumbersome for two reasons. The first is that stakeholders were being asked to approve something in the abstract. They were presented concepts and asked to imagine how they might be executed. Far too often, they would approve something, only to recant later when they realized the finished product wasn’t what they expected. The second reason was geography. Team members worked in different locations and time zones and were asked to provide feedback asynchronously. As documents were shuffled around, comments kept getting added one upon another. It was very difficult to maintain the thread of feedback and even more difficult to mediate between conflicting input.

EB’s Solution: EB recognized that frequent review by a variety of personnel – line managers, subject matter experts, trainers, users, design experts, I/T staff, etc. – was an integral part of development. So, EB did two things. First, it made its tool web-based, to support concurrent (or asynchronous) participation by people across the globe. Second, it devised a means by which many different parties can be involved in the development process. And each can be involved at whatever level makes best use of their time, from annotating comments about particular aspects of the system to making structural changes in the learning model or situation content. This allows everyone to do what they do best. Authors can write the content for subject matter experts who then review and refine. Stakeholders can log in to review the learning model and look over the situations being simulated. Users can work through the system and record their impressions of particular actions and coaching. The net result is both better feedback, and less cost in securing it.