Preparing for the e-Learning Consultant’s Arrival

It's Monday morning, and you're staring at the stack of candidate resumes you received from Escoe Bliss. You had no doubt they would find you e-learning consultants with the skills needed for your first e-learning project. Before you pick up the resume at the top of the stack, you're wondering: What will the consultant need to get the job done?

Every project is different, and it's important to have coffee, chocolate, and restroom facilities available. And, of course, you'll need to have the tools for developing and delivering the online courses, subjects I'll cover in future blog posts.

However, there are some things I've learned from experience that you can put in place for the consultant before she or he arrives at your site. In this blog post, I'm going to cover these topics:

• Learning Organization Leaders
  
• Subject Matter Experts
  
• Executive ("C") Level Sponsors

Learning Organization Leaders

Partner closely with your organization's training department. These departments can fall under an alphabet soup of different names, but they carry the torch for all learning and workplace performance activities in your organization. Make sure you have a tenured staff person from your learning organization to serve as the "go-to" expert, or liaison, for the consultant. He or she will need an ally who can smooth out the bumps that come up during the project.

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

An e-learning consultant relies on SMEs like we rely on oxygen. From my experience, SMEs openly share their knowledge on the course topic. They're usually glad to be in the company of someone who cares about their expertise and wants to pick their brains for the details needed for specific learning objectives.

The reality is, especially over this last year-and-a-half, SMEs are now performing the work of two-to-three colleagues (who were laid off) and have multiple projects on their work plates. They're "slammed", short on time to get their job done, and still have a nice annual performance review with a variety of other objectives that they are focused on meeting. Therefore, it's important for you and the SME's manager to give the SME permission to spend time with the e-learning consultant. Add some type of reward and recognition, and your project will soar to success.

Executive ("C") Level Sponsor

A couple of times, I worked on some e-learning projects where the primary project sponsor was at the V.P. level. The V.P. attended most of our project team meetings, and was a signature to sign off on the course at every review cycle. We had clear communications with the V.P. When we were about to deploy the course, the team presented it online to the one who signed everyone's check, an E.V.P. over the V.P.'s area. The result was a somewhat major revision of the course that delayed deployment for about two weeks.

So, unless you are 100% certain of your C-level executive sponsor's role, bring her or him to the project table very early on to understand and manage expectations. On another project, we brought the E.V.P. in at our brainstorming stage (the high-level detail design document phase) and we received excellent feedback that framed the direction of our development, and also a hearty "well done" after deployment.

Finally, feel free to prepare in other ways. Find out if the consultant prefers coffee, tea, or water; likes or doesn't like dark chocolate; and make sure his or her computer systems are all set up and ready to go the morning of that first day. Finally, a warm and welcoming attitude will win you a dedicated colleague.

How Escoe Bliss Can Help You

With over 15 years of leadership in consulting and workforce learning and performance, the professionals at Escoe Bliss have a large database of local talent at their fingertips. They can quickly assess your needs for an e-learning consultant, and work within your organization's budget. They can find the talent who will help you bring your e-learning project to successful completion. Escoe Bliss prides itself on our active and hands-on facilitation throughout the life-cycle of your project. We pledge to follow-up with our clients and our consultants by making regular quality checks from the time your project rolls out, until the time your project wraps up.

Jenise Cook, M.A., is our featured guest blogger for 2010. Her posts will appear monthly on Blogging with Bliss. Her professionalism and passion for her work in documentation design, e-learning development, and media production radiate from her writing and we consider ourselves extremely fortunate to count her among our guest bloggers. This is the third blog in Jenise's series on e-learning. Jenise's blogs on Why Use an e-Learning Consultant? and What to Look for in an e-Learning Consultant are the first of her series.

A Performance Analysis of Punxsutawney Phil

Here we are on the eve of Groundhogs Day! This evening a vast majority of Americans with spring fever will lay down their heads to sleep and think to themselves, "Please when I wake up tomorrow and check the daily news, PLEASE let the report tell us that our furry little friend, Punxsutawney Phil, did not see his blasted shadow and go back into hiding! COME ON, Spring!!!"

After all that is the rule. If Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow and scurries back inside his cozy, little stump then we are cursed with six more weeks of winter, but should he prance out and chose to remain there, then we have the tantalizing prospect of an early spring. Let's pause for a second and consider the cause of this shadow that strikes so much fear into poor little Phil.....it's LIGHT! Without some source of light to illuminate himself, Phil would never see his shadow and therefore would not retreat. Still, isn't a shadow just another view or perspective of HIMSELF? For arguments sake let's even say that a shadow is perhaps a dark side of ourselves and sure, the dark side can be a little scary. Ultimately though, will scurrying away really make it disappear? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the little guy is still going to have the very same shadow six weeks from now. What I would like to propose to Phil is that spring may actually come sooner if instead of scurrying away from himself, he appreciated his shadow, analyzed his shadow and took the opportunity to learn from the light that has been shed on him.

Being always of an optimistic nature, Blogging with Bliss is vowing that should we encounter our shadow, we will not retreat for further hibernation. Our new blog format and our inclusion of outside contributors has been an inspiring and educational experience that we are confident will help bring everyone closer to an early "economic" spring by turning our "shadows" into learning opportunities . Our outstanding blog contributors have all explained valuable methods for shedding light on the truths within our organizations, our processes and ourselves.

Enrique Baltierra, SPHR, shared with us that, "The 'New' Diversity for a 'New' Decade" involves a culture of inclusion and engagement. Illustrating a successful organization as one that continually values, recognizes and encourages individual employee contribution.
Michael Wichman, CPT, talked with us about "GAPS" in performance and the many ways we can turn these "GAPS" into areas of growth and opportunity both internally, within our organizations and externally, by being active participants in our communities.
Jenise Cook, our featured blogger this year, will continue to blog on the third Monday of every month with an informative series of articles on e-Learning and its many benefits.
Peggy Rang, M.Ed., revisited the topic of performance and took us a step further, in her blog "Taking Performance Issues Beyond the Training Quick Fix". Peggy explained how a well thought out and well implemented performance improvement plan could produce meaningful and lasting results.

We are so thankful to our blog contributors who have started out the year with us and we cannot wait to share the contributions that are still to come. Mark your calendar on Mondays or subscribe to our RSS feed.

In closing, I hope that you will continue to follow Blogging with Bliss and our blog contributors as we move forward, exploring the shadows of our business practices and cultures and continuing to work to bring new life and new success to our organizations. Tomorrow morning Punxsutawney Phil may see his shadow and retreat for another six weeks of hibernation, but that's his choice. Shadow or no shadow, Blogging with Bliss will be here every Monday. When they are ready, Phil and anyone else who wants to hibernate is just going to have to try to catch up, because our growth and our spring is going to be moving six weeks ahead of schedule!

Happy Groundhogs Eve, everyone! Here's to everyone seeing our shadows and learning from them together!

Taking Performance Issues Beyond the Training Quick Fix

Wondering why training is not solving a performance issue?

My grandfather first taught me you can lead a horse to water, but that horse would have gone anyway when it was thirsty. My 20 years of training and development experience has also taught me the valuable skill of resisting the immediate urge to fix things with training when someone says there is a performance issue.

Like many of my business colleagues, I want to lead that horse to water, but with performance driving our organizational economic factors we need training to be more than a quick fix. It must be the key that unlocks ROI (Return on Investment).

If training is just a way to lead that horse to water, we have to rethink how the horse would solve the problem and realize that training is only part of the solution.

If you are a learning professional, the best thing you can do is have and use a process to understand why training is needed. What problem are you really trying to solve? Critical thinking skills and inquisitive instincts will help us understand the situation and determine the appropriate intervention to best solve the problem.

Begin by asking these 5 "W" questions:

1. Why is there a performance issue (supported with hard data and facts)?
2. What is the performance issue (gap between expectations and results)?
3. Who is involved?
4. When did the issue begin?
5. What happened prior to the issue occurring (consider environmental issues and any changes such as job, procedure, policy, management, etc. Information/data for the previous 6 months is helpful if available)?

With this information we can create a performance improvement plan that will produce meaningful and lasting results. We will have an action plan for implementation and anticipated metrics to measure and demonstrate results.

Our guest blogger, Peggy Rang, M.Ed., is a Training and Performance Improvement Consultant.