Taming the Productivity Dragon!

Productivity is a word that has become a part of our daily vocabulary. Project managers spend almost half their time trying to tame this fire-spitting dragon, unfortunately with the meagre ammunition and weak weapons of data that is generally cooked up to cover for the lack of time. Phew! The dragon of productivity influences every one alike…it devours our time, energy, and even integrity at times, and continues to breath fire on our necks!

The question is…who can tame it?
In my opinion, despite all hullabaloo about productivity being a project target, and being controlled through asking the team to meet delivery targets, and following them up…substantial increase in a project’s productivity can be managed only by those who design the courses – namely the Instructional Designers.

This may sound strange but if you give a serious, analytical look to your past projects you will know that the above contention is correct. There are courses that were developed in half the average time, and the client loved them…there are also courses that took more than double the average time and were rejected. In between, you will find courses that took average time and received average response.

In my experience, courses that are developed faster in the beginning of the DLC, slow down in the middle, and are hastily sewn together in the end; end up with complaints. Such courses are characterized by many review cycles, a lot of rework, and extremely low productivity. On the other hand, there are courses that begin slow (ease-in,) gain speed in the middle, and slow down again towards the end to reach a clean finish (ease-out,) do extremely well. These courses can be identified by less review and rework effort, and they typically have higher than average productivity.

Why does this happen? If you make a calculated guess, you will say that it is because the Instructional Designer takes time to adjust to the new subject matter, analyses the content, and then moves forward. This helps her avoid errors and develop faster. You got it right. It is extremely important for the ID to become comfortable to the subject matter at hand, if she wants to do justice to the course.

But then, “course development productivity” has more to it than just the quality of Instruction Design and the ID productivity. There are other teams that work towards the delivery of content – primarily the Media, Programming, and the QA teams. The question is – can Instructional Design help in improving the overall productivity of the course. The answer is – it can. Let’s see how an Instructional Designer can truly impact the course productivity and hence the project productivity. (The Project Managers have a strong ally in the Instructional Designer.)

Hail the Dragon-tamer!

First and foremost, the Instructional Designer needs to realize that she should become comfortable with the subject terminology and the course objectives as soon as possible. A quick tip here is that for almost all subjects under the sun, there exists a free newsletter. Subscribe to it and read it. Check out a few books on the subject; see how it is treated.

The next thing to do is chalk out a plan for your time. Unfortunately, on projects we don’t have the luxury of deciding the delivery deadline, but then we do have the freedom to decide what we want to do with the time we are given. Note this carefully – allocate at least 20% of the time to “ease-in,” and another 10% to “ease-out.” You should spend no more than 70% of the time writing.

Is your reaction– “It’s easy to say – we actually need double the time to write…and she’s suggesting that we cut it down by 30%”? If it is, calm down…and read on.

During the “ease-in”, be easy on yourself. Take a break, sip some coffee, and doodle a little; but all this while, carry with you the content outline and your research notes. Try to imagine your audience, think of what would appeal to them. Chalk out an approach. I have found that creating the flow of the course by putting points in small boxes connected by little arrows works best for me, but I’ve also known some wonderful IDs who prefer to write it all down. Please do what suits you best.

Once you have your approach ready, you need to test it. This is the hard part, but this part will determine whether your course will be a huge, roaring success or….

So pick up the microscope and find out (The figures as well as the checklist items are indicative. They vary depending upon the nature of the project, quality of the raw content received from the SME, and so on..)

For Development Effort:

• Will you have to re-write content from the SME to the extent of >25%?
• Will you have explain changes to the SME and extract new content >25%?
• Will your approach support standardization within the course?
• Can your approach (or some of its components) be adapted to other courses?

For Media Effort:

• Have you proposed a style of media that will deluge the media team with new software trainings and practice, before they can even begin on your course?
• Are you planning on using a lot of video, characters, and character animations?
• Is your approach mapped to the strengths of your media team?

For Programming Effort:

• Are you planning to use interactions that are interesting but will need the programming team to develop new algorithms from scratch?
• Will your planned interactions make a fair use of the templates that already exist?

All this of course, needs to be viewed from the perspective of the end user, but then you must take care the audience map while creating your approach.

If your approach is filtered out in the above check, rethink. If you don’t then the course productivity as well as quality will go down as the rework and complaints will climb up. If we are naïve enough to believe that it’s only the development checklist that impacts us, we will pay the price. If you don’t agree, reflect on how much time you spend in discussions with the media and programming teams over issues that cropped up in a course that you developed aeons ago. Moving onto a new course or project is not always a rebirth! Issues in the previous courses continue to plague you and your productivity in the new course. Don’t let that happen!

When you have an approach that looks good from all angles, divide your work evenly over the next 70% of the time. Remember to leave 10% of the development time for a final check. You can also use this time to figure out whether the doubtful media pieces and interactions will actually impact the media and programming teams.

It’s a good idea to track how well your effort saving measures worked for the course. The project managers consolidate the course productivity data from all teams, so you can find out how your measures helped. Figure out a way to share these practices with others in the team and your ideas will find lives of their own.

Taming the productivity dragon is not all that difficult when you get used to it.

Author: Shafali R. Anand