Team Catalog of Services

  • Role: Instructional Designer

  • Timeline: 2 months

  • Tools: Google Workspace, Typeform

  • Stakeholders: CS Training and our stakeholders

  • Problem: Teams we worked with didn’t understand what we could do for them beyond “making things pretty” or how long it took to create training content, which often resulted in us being looped into projects too late in the process.

  • Outcome: I delivered a document that broke down the most common types of content we build, how long they take to develop, and links to live examples.

Prep

An instructional design team is a little like a consulting firm tucked into an organization: There’s a variety of skills—and some services you wouldn’t even expect!

My team was struggling to get stakeholders to loop us into their project plans earlier in the process.

This is because there are often things we can consider (like the cognitive load a process will have on the user, or how adult learners might respond to a situation) that can have impact long before anyone even thinks about training.

I kicked off this project with two goals:

  1. Define the types of content we create and how long they take

  2. Determine the self-identified strengths and development interests of people on the team

Development

I started by splitting the things we developed into three development categories: eLearning, Instructor-Led Training, and Misc. Media. From there, I listed out the different types of content we might create within that category.

For example, within the eLearning category, we created training that could last anywhere from 1-3 minutes to 20 minutes, which meant a developer could require anywhere from 1 day to 72 business hours to build a course. That’s a pretty big differential!

So within the two primary development categories, I defined three “lengths” of training to help categorize them further: Singles, EPs, and LPs — Spotify is all about the music, after all!

Once I had everything categorized, I needed to learn how long things took for each person to complete. With a wide range of tenure and experience within the team, I knew it was possible that there would large swings in the estimated times it would take people to complete things. Still, I wanted to try!

I created a survey for all three of my development categories. For the first two, I asked the same questions: How long would it take you to complete X piece of training content? And based it on the descriptions I’d written of the Singles, EPs, and LPs, along with sharing industry averages for each type.

Here’s how that shook out for the eLearning category when everything was finalized:

  • The time expectations set below for each of these eLearning types is an estimate based on team surveys and industry standards.

    The timeline for a course from assignment to launch will also need to include the team member’s current workload, an average development time of 20 hours per week, review time, and padding for blockers or other delays.

  • A weekly course we produce to inform advisors of current and upcoming launches, product updates, etc. This course has a standardized format and template for a quick turnaround of less than three business days.

  • A short-form course that takes <5 minutes for an advisor to complete. Minimal interactions. Created to share a few quick points about a launch, update, process change, etc. This type of course takes approximately 4-8 hours of development time.

  • A short-form course that takes <5 minutes for an advisor to complete. Minimal interactions. Created to share a few quick points about a launch, update, process change, etc., but also including one or more basic Storyline interactions. This type of course takes approximately 8-12 hours of development time.

  • A mid-sized Rise course that takes <10 minutes for an advisor to complete. This may also include multiple interactions, a knowledge check, or the inclusion of different Rise blocks to further engage the user. This type of course takes approximately 12-16 hours of development time.

  • A mid-sized Rise course that takes <15 minutes for an advisor to complete. This may also include multiple interactions, a knowledge check, or the inclusion of different Rise blocks to further engage the user. Storyline blocks add to the interactivity of this course and may be basic or more advanced interactions. This type of course takes approximately 32-40 hours of development time.

  • A short to mid-length eLearning that takes <15 minutes for an advisor to complete, fully developed in Storyline. This course includes multiple interaction types, knowledge checks, or FAQs to engage the learner within the course. It may or may not have been built using a full template, or sections pulled from existing templates in order to shorten dev time. This type of course takes approximately 32-40 hours of development time.

  • A mid-length to longer eLearning that takes <20 minutes for an advisor to complete, fully developed in Storyline without utilizing existing templates. It includes multiple interaction types, knowledge checks, or FAQs to engage the learner. This type of course takes approximately 48-72 hours of development time, depending on complexity.

Next, I needed to guage everyone’s skillsets for our Misc. Media section. This was the “dessert” of our menu: the different media types the team was able to incorporate into an eLearning or ILT, or create as a standalone job aid. Adding in additional support from this section added time and complexity to a training, but are “party favorites” of learners in the classroom.

This survey was simpler, and just asked each team member if they’d like to be listed as skilled in any of the following areas:

Illustrations

  • Avatars

  • Backgrounds

  • Full-bodied characters

  • Infographics

  • Logos

Job Aids

  • One-pagers

  • Process flow visuals

Motion Graphics

  • Illustrated gifs

  • Image gifs

  • Textual gifs

  • Animated builds

Narration

  • Vocal narration for eLearning

  • Vocal narration for videos

Videos

  • Compilation videos of advisors

  • Process walkthroughs

  • Videos animated from screengrabs

  • Scripted video content

Writing

  • Creative (scenarios, characters, etc.)

  • Proofreading

  • Scriptwriting for narration

  • Scriptwriting for video

What I’d do differently today:

 

Rollout

 

When we rolled this out, we shared it with our organization in Workday, but didn’t do much else to try to get people’s eyes on it. There should have been a more robust launch associated with it — a rebranding of the team.

 

Rebrand

 

If I was rolling this out again, I’d pitch it as a rebrand of the team’s engagement style, moving from reactive and at the end of a funnel to proactively getting involved in your project as a consultant and stakeholder.

 

Less is more

 

We ended up with so many extra categories of learning because I was determined to define everything we could possibly have to create! But I’d simplify it down to 3-5 types of training per category, and anything else would be a case-by-case scenario.

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