Learning Launch

Challenge

I am working in a Learning and development firm, from quite sometime and my major work is to  design programs for Behavioural trainings. My target is to create as many training contents for our  Business clients in order to increase revenue and to spend business budgets on the right campaigns  of our programs. We need to develop more vILT (Virtual instructor led training) programs as  compared to ILT (Instructor led training) courses due to more promising features and results of vILT  programs.

The project scope included the business development department, social media as well as content  development team, with whom we work closely. The project was restricted to internal resources in  terms of, budget and employee time. The project had a strict deadline of 40 business days and the  solution should include a successful delivery of atleast one vILT course. We focussed on trying to  uncover what our team members, as well as key stakeholders considered to be ineffective or  challenging with respect to selling of content for our business.

Selection

We explored various design thinking activities/tools, so we were prepared to try the learning launch  tool. Precisely, the learning launch is an experiment meant to quickly assess an idea and  sample/prototype.

Application

In our initial learning launch, we focused on the structure/execution of our training content and  social media tasks to market our programs. Particularly, we wanted to see if we could structure our  tasks, projects, and processes to adapt to the need of our clients in an effort to become more agile.  This tested our assumption that the structure and execution were the main causes of our business  challenge. Our team went through a four-day training with a leading vILT course provider platform.

Then, we went through a series of meetings and discussions with various providers of elearning  portals to structure our tasks and delivery in a more streamlined manner. These meetings or  discussions occurred within a five-week timeframe. We expected to produce a document of our  process map with a clear description of our new, more streamlined processes of content  development.

In our phase two- learning launch, we focused on achieving precision about our process and  priorities. This tested our hypothesis of prioritization of tasks and designing content to make it more  attractive and insightful virtually, and this was the main cause of our business challenge to shift from  an ILT provider to vILT provider. Our team launched a dummy vILT course via one of the service  provider’s portal using their LMS (Learning management system), with five key stakeholders from  our company and five stakeholders from the portal provider’s side as participants, to test the  effectiveness of our behavioural training program.

The training program was followed by a participant feedback form which included questions about  our new, proposed process of delivering training, understanding the concepts covered in the

program, and feelings about the program, and feedback was collected within few hours after the  training ended.

Insight

By utilizing the learning launch tool, we discovered the assumptions and designed launches to assess  these assumptions. We were quite clear that a more agile approach would improve our business in  Learning and development vertical, and that both our team and the key stakeholders would agree to  the new prioritization or development of tasks and process.

The real outputs were slightly different from what we anticipated but we were open to the  development of tasks and processes and also the key stakeholders in our organisation and elearning  portal provider expressed some concerns. Our team will analyse this insight and feedback and  integrate it into future launch designs.

Approach

Understanding that our team has gone through certain design thinking activities/tools and at this  stage in the timeline, the learning launch is the most apt tool. We need to review the insight gained  from our initial launches and integrate this insight into future launch designs. Future launch designs  has to reflect insight gained, improvement made, and a fascinating solution ready for full  implementation.

