EIDT 6501 Training and Development: Planning For a Needs Assessment (Week 2)

Greetings Classmates!

This week our assignment is to assume that you have been asked to perform a needs assessment for one of the following companies: Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines, Cisco Systems, Men’s Wearhouse, Intel, Steelcase, Nokia and spend some time exploring it online. Try to get a sense of the organization’s products and/or services, consumers, management philosophy, and strategic objectives. 

Based on this, how might you approach the needs assessment? Specifically:

•                What stakeholders would you want to make sure to get buy-in from?

•                What questions would you ask (and to whom would you address them) during the organizational, person, and task analysis phases?

•                What documents or records might you ask to see?

•                What techniques would you employ (see Table 3.2 on page 108 of the Noe text), and why?

I selected Southwest Airlines for this assignment, an airline that I love to fly! The mission of Southwest is “dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit” (Southwest.com).

Another interesting fact, that says a lot about the organization is its mission and view of its employees. CEO Gary Kelly states, “our people are our single greatest strength and most enduring longterm competitive advantage” (Southwest.com). For this reason, the Chairman of the Board, President & Chief Executive Officer, Gary Kelly and the Southwest employees are major stakeholders in a needs assessment. Other stakeholders would depend on the hypothesized problem that needs to be solved and those directly involved.  Additional stakeholders may include other Southwest officers as outlined in the Southwest Organization Chart

An organizational analysis “involves identifying whether training supports the company’s strategic direction; whether managers, peers, and employees support training activity; and what training resources are available” (Noe, 2010, p. 110). Based on Southwest’s mission to its customers and employees, important questions to ask during an organizational analysis are “how might the training content affect our employees’ relationship with our customers” as well as, “will employees perceive that training program as an opportunity? Reward? Punishment? Waste of time?” (Noe, 2010, p. 111)

“Task analysis results in a description of work activities, including tasks performed by the employee and the knowledge, skills, and abilities required to complete the tasks” (Noe, 2010, p. 123).  A task analysis has 4 steps:

1. Select the job(s) to be analyzed
2. Develop a preliminary list of tasks performed
3. Validate/Confirm the preliminary list of tasks
4. Identify the knowledge, skills, or abilities necessary to successfully perform each task (Noe, 2010, p. 124-125). 

The person analysis “helps to identify employees who need training, that is, whether employees’ current performance or expected performance indicates a need for training” (Noe, 2010, p. 113).  The person analysis can also assist in gauging the targets readiness for training, which can be beneficial when designing the instruction and is a natural transition after the task analysis has been completed.

The techniques that I would employ rely heavily on the task and person analysis. Documentation is an excellent place to begin, as it’s a great source of information, its low cost, and does not use a lot of resources.  Observation can be a great way to gather information on day-to-day activities and procedures while not interrupting or disturbing the work of others. Questionnaires are effective in collecting anonymous information from a large number of people, which can easily and quickly be analyzed. Finally, I would use interviews and focus groups as a needs assessment technique. Both  allow free dialogue which can assist in delving further into problems, issues, and other employee concerns.

References

Noe, R. A. (2010). Employee training and development (5th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

www.Southwest.com

EIDT 6501 Training and Development: The Truth About Training (Week 1)

Good Evening Everyone,


This week our topic was to:
Imagine you have just 2 minutes or so to give someone an "elevator speech" regarding the "truth" about training. This person does not believe that training is important, complicated, or even necessary. What might you say to this individual to convince him or her otherwise? What key insights could you impart that this person likely would not have known and would find surprising and/or interesting?

 Utilizing the insights you gained this week, draft a hypothetical "elevator speech" that, when spoken, lasts for approximately 90 seconds. 


Some would say training is a necessary evil, while others I'm sure would drop the term "necessary" altogether. Hopefully my brief argument is enough to make someone at least pause and think of the complexity of designing training and some of its benefits.


Below is a copy of the transcript (give or take a few lines) and you can listen to the audio clip via SoundCloud by clicking the link below

Elevator Speech

The role of training in companies has really changed over recent years. Traditionally

most people think of training as a boring and grueling event they are required to attend in order to learn things they don’t even need, in order to do their job.  You know exactly what I’m talking about- when training is over and you think to yourself “what a waste of time” and you think of all the things you could have gotten accomplished in that time if you were at your desk. 

What many people don’t realize is just how complicated it is to create training, specifically learner-centered and performance based training.  People don’t know that effective training can assist businesses in meeting specific needs and challenges, and good training can even improve employee performance, confidence, and commitment to ones job and company.

Did you know there’s a difference between training, instructing, and educating? A trainer has to consider the information that is to be conveyed, the best way to convey it, create a platform in which everyone will learn, understand, and gain knowledge- all while taking our learning styles and other factors into consideration?  Talk about stressful and complicated and unappreciated!

Training is an important part of business acumen as the survival of a business is dependent on the quality of employee talent. Businesses have to educate their personnel to ensure business goals are met and they experience continued growth and success.

Though most people dislike training, employees want to actually do their job to the best of their abilities. In fact 33% stated they would like proper training for new duties and responsibilities and 45% of employees stated they wanted the opportunity to learn and develop their skills.

Training benefits everyone when it’s done correctly. It’s a complex process and a lot more goes into it then people may think 

References

Bradley, A. (2010). Shifting away from an employer’s market. Training and Development, 64(7), 16–17

Noe, R. A. (2010). Employee training and development (5th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Stolovitch, H. “The Truth About Training”. [Video]. Walden University

EIDT 6501 Training and Development (Week 1)

Greetings to my Walden 6501 Classmates

First, thank you for subscribing to my blog, I'm looking forward to much dialogue with each of you!


What a journey! We have finally reached the last and final class of our Instructional Design Masters' program. It's a bittersweet ending as I am elated to be finished with homework, but saddened my scholastic relationship with you all is ending. Luckily for us we will always be connected via the World Wide Web


Okay, it's time for me to take care of a couple things here in the office, we have a post due in a couple days on The Truth About Training so stay tuned

Project Management 6145 Week 6-Analyzing Scope Creep

This week our blog topic is the ever-scary topic of scope creep, here’s our blog assignment:

Describe a project, either personal or professional, that experienced issues related to scope creep. What specific scope creep issues occurred? How did you or other stakeholders deal with those issues at the time? Looking back on the experience now, had you been in the position of managing the project, what could you have done to better manage these issues and control the scope of the project?

So let’s first start with the question, “what IS scope creep?”

According to our required text, scope creep is “the natural tendency of the client, as well as project team members, to try to improve the project’s output as the project progresses” (Portny, et al., 2008, p. 350). Another definition that truly hits the nail on the head so to speak is, “the tendency of a project to include more tasks or to implement more systems than originally specified, which often leads to higher than planned project costs and an extension of the initial implementation date” (What is scope creep, 2007).

In my previous position we took part in a deployment of a case management system that was implemented enterprise-wide. This deployment was a high-profile effort and everyone on my team was expected to travel to support the deployment effort. In the end our team was responsible for training the application, supporting that application (providing field support, as well as support via phone/email), providing support documentation, designing/developing/implementing another training module to later replace the in-person training.  What is interesting is our contract did not originally include all of these provisions esp. with a staff of only 8 people (most of which were on the road).

These issues, and the many that arose as a result, were almost always dealt with in a defensive and reactive (vs. proactive) manner. It seemed we were always reacting to a new development, and/or a new client request that simply came out of nowhere.

In the government contacting realm this is always precarious territory as a contractor never wants to tell the client “no”.  This could possibly result in the client seeking a contract with another organization, and no company wants to lose business (i.e. revenue).

Looking back, I feel a lack of documentation was one important area that could have been done better.  Meaning, many of our processes were undocumented including change requests.  Without documentation it is difficult to see what is in existence, what is being requested, what has been changed, and the results of the requested change. From a project management stand point our organization left themselves very open for later problems to arise.

In an article entitled, “10 Ways to Tackle The Scope Creep”, Miles Burke provides important ways to avoid scope creep:

References

Burke, M. (2010, November 26). 10 Ways to Tackle the Scope Creep » SitePoint. SitePoint » Web Design, Web Development, Freelancing, Tech News and more. Retrieved October 13, 2011, from http://www.sitepoint.com/10-ways-tackle-the-scope-creep/

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

What is Scope Creep?. (2007, October 10). FollowSteph.com . Retrieved October 13, 2011, from http://www.followsteph.com/2007/10/10/what-is-scope-creep/

Project Management 6145 Week 5-Estimating Costs and Allocating Resources

Hello Everyone!

We have made it to week 5 already of our project management course!  I can’t believe we’ve already made it this far and are almost finished.  It has definitely been interesting and I have gained a lot of great information.

This week we have freebie assignment:

To prepare for this assignment, conduct a web search (listservs, message boards, blogs) and locate at least two resources that would be useful in estimating the costs, effort, and/or activity durations associated with ID projects. Explore the sites and consider how you might use them to help plan a project’s schedule, budget, or break down a project’s tasks.

Here are the websites I found that hopefully will be of some assistance:

 

1. Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design

 The title pretty much says it all!  This website has a plethora of information ranging from training cost guidelines, to estimating development hours, and development time for e-learning modules.  This is a great place to look in determining how many hours it may actually take to develop the specified item.

It also provides great low-cost resources designers can utilize to help keep costs down. 

2. Development Time, Costs and Instructional Design of a Web Course

 Similar to the above resource, it provides cost breakdown for faculty developming distance learning (web courses)

 3. How to Make Accurate Time Estimates

 What I like most about this article is its honest perspective in determining how much time a given activity takes, using something called the “fudge ratio”.  Of course this seems completely inapplicable but it can be applied in an instructional design team.

It would require the project manager to be proactive and track how long basic processes of the ADDIE model actually take to be completed within the team and then use this as the basis for future estimates. By no means is this a fool-proof method, but it is a place to at least start…

Project Management 6145 Week 3-Communicating Effectively

Okay so I actually have it together this week and have my blog completed on time!  Kudos to me for getting it together J

So this week we have an interesting assignment regarding “how you communicate with different stakeholders is of equal importance to what you communicate and can influence how your message is interpreted”.

As you know I like to outline the assignment for you so you know what I’m talking about, here it is:

To prepare for this assignment, view the multimedia program "The Art of Effective Communication." In this program, you will observe a piece of communication in three different modalities: as written text, as audio, and as video. Pause after receiving the communication in each modality, and reflect upon what you interpret the message to mean. Think about the content and tone of the message. Record your interpretation of the message after receiving it in each modality. Then reflect upon the experience by considering the following:

• How did your interpretation of the message change from one modality to the next?
• What factors influenced how you perceived the message?
• Which form of communication best conveyed the true meaning and intent of the message?
• What are the implications of what you learned from this exercise for communicating effectively with members of a project team?

 Post your interpretation of the message as it was delivered in each of the different modalities, pointing out what, if anything, changed about your interpretation from one modality to the next. What did you learn that will help you communicate more effectively with others in the future?

“Communication is not just words” (Stolovitch, n.d.), this is a very important anecdote to remember when communicating with others. Effective communication is influenced by:

All of these items can directly influence how your message is transmitted and ultimately received by your listeners.  How often have we heard “that’s what I said, but that’s not what I meant?”

Overall I did not feel the message was misconstrued among the different modalities as the words, tones, and body language all synced up for the most part. However I definitely understand how in a different context this could be very, very different. The use of the capitalized acronym “ETA” in the email could be considered yelling, the tone in the voicemail could convey anger, annoyance, and frustration, or the crossed-arm body language of the face-to-face discussion should lead to a heated argument. 

References:

Stolovitch, H (n.d.). Communicating with Stakeholders.  [Video] Available: Laureate Education, Inc.