Overview

This course offers business teams an effective process for solving complex organizational issues.  Alongside a step-by-step tutorial of the process, I tell a story of how one imaginary business team solved their issue. The learner gets a chance to solve the imaginary team's issue with their new skill. I developed the course using Articulate Storyline and Adobe Photoshop.   

The Client's Problem

This course imagines a management team who came to me asking for help in improving employee performance in multiple departments at their organization. 

The Solution

After consulting with an SME (Subject Matter Expert), I chose Force Field Analysis because it has helped organizations solve employee performance issues for over half a century. The tool will allow the management team to re-examine their issue and develop an effective solution. I would advise the management team to share this tool with their departments and include their employee teams in the process for the following reasons:

• The solution to employee performance is most powerful when the employees solve the problem themselves. 

• The people working within the forces that drive employee actions most often know exactly which forces drive undesirable employee actions.  They also often have the best ideas about how to change those forces. 

• Employees readily accept the consequences of the solution when they control the change in forces that determined the new, desired behavior. 

eLearning would provide a sound solution in this case. eLearning would allow their teams to learn the process quickly and apply it to their specific issue. The manager and employee teams would come together to arrive at an agreed-upon solution. 

Design Theory

People master skills through practice. Adult learners prefer self-directed learning and they draw on life experiences to assist. They want to use what they have learned in real-life situations immediately.  I assumed the learner will most likely have ideas already of how to solve the performance problem before they come to the course. 

I designed the course to give the learner a process to frame the issue clearly with their team, not alone. The course gives the learner a set of criteria to compare solutions with their team and a shared strategy for selecting the final agreed-upon solution that will become a reality.  I designed the course so that the learner can adopt the process quickly, then come back to their team ready to go and on their way towards mastery. 

Design and Development Process

Research: I interviewed a Subject Matter Expert (SME) who has 40 years of experience in management team consulting. I learned about common management team issues in a variety of types of organizations and effective processes for different types of issues. 

Script and Storyboard: I developed a written script and a narration script that the SME reviewed and edited. The narration connects the learner with the course author to add a social-learning element, establish credibility for the course material, and provide further information to enhance their understanding of the tool. 

Branching Scenario: The user gets a chance to practice solving an organizational problem with the tool so that they have experience using the skill when they address the real issue in their organization. To create this practice opportunity, I built a branching scenario in Storyline. I created a complex sequence of triggers that take the user to new scenes based on their choices and created sets of states for buttons. I created variables to save user data.  Using variables I could trigger new object states to provide feedback on the user's actions. 

I used Storyline's timeline to create complex slides with large sequences of object animations aligned to the timing of my narration. 

I contacted the helpful technicians at Articulate to solve issues with trigger sequences and variables.

Development:  I created the final project in Articulate Storyline using Articulate assets, iStock Photo, and Adobe Photoshop.  I used Amazon Web Services to host the course so that learners can access it easily.