This Fall, Turn Over A New Leaf With The Successive Approximation

It is time to modify and realign your employee learning and development processes

There's never been a more opportune time for L&D to be successful and, perhaps, never been a greater time that we need L&D on a global scale. With these great needs, there are critical changes to be made, to be made as fast as possible, responsive. 

All In: Why Everyone Needs to Be Vested in a Winning Strategy 

Whether you’re a CLO, CFO, HRO or head of operations or sales, you need to be sure that your investments are having a positive impact on your entire organization. When you're investing your money, when you invest in training, you need to know that an approach is going to be used that is going to give you the impact that you want and that your learners deserve.
 

Wasted time and productivity in your development team just doesn’t take away time from your LXDs and SMEs. The widespread effect of a sub-par development process hurts your investors, your clients, employee morale, and perhaps most importantly, your learners.

Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls

First, we need to look at our processes. We know that traditional waterfall development processes just aren’t producing the agile results that organizations require to stay afloat with the demands of e-learning development in an increasingly virtual world. 

These traditional processes, namely ADDIE, have been churning out some disappointing training over the years. This disappointment is measured by the impact on the training departments, management, learners, and even shareholders.

So, how do you know if your development process isn’t working?
 

• Your training department is spending too much time, money, and energy on training that has little, if any, impact on the performance of the learners. 
• Management is in the constant cycle of allocating ever diminishing budgets which are not adequate to build training that has any return-on-investment.
• Learners are disillusioned and unmotivated by the boring, lifeless click-through training to which they are subjected.
• Shareholders are seeing their organizations miss opportunities to improve performance and efficiency, and therefore hurting the bottom line.

Breaking ADDIE’s Never-Ending Cycle

Let’s start on a high note: ADDIE and other traditional processes do a great job of acknowledging risk and managing its impact, but this risk management does come at a cost. The foundation of any traditional process is an accurate analysis. You can’t move forward until the analysis is complete and flawless – the problem with that is this combination is virtually impossible. So, training departments get stuck in what we refer to as Analysis Paralysis – and the schedule slips and keeps slipping.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Because these processes are linear and require approval to move forward, they lend themselves to a design that is focused on facts and text. Training departments attempt to explain designs with storyboards and content outlines that simply provide the words and facts. Once these are approved, it’s way too risky to redesign to meet learners’ need for performance-focused learning experiences. In the end, it’s the learner who suffers—and ends up with disappointing, page-turner training.

So, to make up for these, and the many other challenges, we modify and realign traditional processes (ADDIE). But that’s not really a solution at all. The limitations of ADDIE are not its five phases, but rather the order of the phases, the lack of practical strategies for incorporating learner input, lack of collaborative design, and limited manageability. We all analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate – there’s no other way to build learning experiences. 

Thankfully, we aren’t limited to traditional processes. It’s time to meet SAM (the Successive Approximation Model).

Get SAVVY, Get Smart, Get SAM.

Before we get too involved in modifying or realigning our old processes, it’s important to consider the ultimate needs of our development cycle. When designing a high-results training program, the criteria below are a good start:
 

1. Processes should be iterative. An iterative process provides opportunities to experiment, test, and revise designs.
2. Processes must support productive collaboration. The inclusion of learners, managers, and stakeholders in the design process ensures a better, performance-driven solution.
3. Processes must be effective and efficient. At the end of the day, we must support the business case for training and the time and budget it takes to create learning experiences. We must ensure we are able to move quickly, purposefully, and adapt to changes with minimal buffers.
4. Finally, our process must be manageable. Some great processes (on paper at least) are not easily managed, which means a lot of energy and time is expended solely to keep things on track. Our process needs to provide strategies to increase its manageability so that our time is valued and we are able to focus on our learner’s results.

Where Do We Go from Here?

This set of criteria is just the start. There’s plenty more to creating and implementing a successful, efficient, and manageable process. If you’re ready to invest in a development process that fosters iterative design and can yield up to 60% saved time during production and double your performance, you owe it to your teams—and learners to adopt a production model that supports your goals.  

Allen Academy provides virtual, instructor-led courses, e-learning, and professional development for learning and development professionals. Visit www.allenacademy.com Visit www.alleninteractions.com