Lessons from a Paperboy: Create the Right Process For Your Work!!!

We all use processes - specific sequenced steps - to accomplish our work. However, very often our processes are painful, inefficient, and ineffective. Perhaps the example below will illuminate.

My First Work Process
I first used a work process when I was a newspaper boy in the 8th grade. The process looked something like this:

1. Wake Up Late - Get up later than you need to, freak out, and move blearily into action.  
2. Assemble and Load - On the kitchen table, assemble the separate parts of the newspaper, bind them together with a rubber band, and place them in the bag.
3. Deliver - Using GIANT brand mountain bike, deliver papers to the appropriate houses.
4. Deal With Dogs - Curse at the various dogs on the route, attempting to kick or otherwise injure the small ankle-biters. Bike like hell to avoid attacks from the large ones.
5. Arrive Late to School - Walk in late to Ms. James' 8th grade typing class and receive a lecture about the importance of school and the relative unimportance of having a job as an 8th-grader.
6. Receive Additional Lectures - Later in the day, receive a phone call from Stewart Reese of the Newspaper Agency Corporation to chat with you about the need to deliver the papers in a more timely manner. 

Here is a newspaper delivery boy. This isn't me, though. I didn't live in Toronto in the 1940s. I did my delivering in Kearns, UT in the 1990s. Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_delivery#/media/File:Toronto_Star_paperboy_Whitby.jpg

As I look back at my experience delivering newspapers I have realized that (a) there were definitely things I needed to improve my process, and (b) I continued doing many of the wrong things for years.

Creating the Right Process
As professionals, we all use processes to perform our work, and these processes should be designed to minimize worker difficulty, create efficiency, and increase quality. However, just like my 8th grade self, many people and organizations continue to use processes that are painful, inefficient, and do not deliver quality results. And just like my 8th grade self, we continue to use these processes!

To be effective, you must select and create processes that minimize worker difficulty, create efficiency, and increase quality. What processes do you use in your work? Are they relatively painless? Are the efficient, or do they take more time than they should? Are they effective in meeting the goals of the organization? Analyze and document the processes you use and if necessary restructure and improve them. I would certainly have enjoyed my experience as a paperboy much more had I worked to improve my process. This is not to say that the dogs would have been interested in changing their own processes for attacking the paperboy...

Improving Your Instructional Design Process

In this post, I will share my ideas on maximizing the effectiveness and efficiency of an instructional design process. A design process is integral to effective instructional design. It can increase quality and efficiency and decrease waste and errors. However, very often these processes are very general in nature, and the individual is left alone to determine how to implement it effectively. This can result in varying degrees of quality and can cause designers to waste energy recreating work that might be reduced through an effective, supported process.

Methods for Improving Your Instructional Design Process
Based on my experience, processes can be used to empower instructional designers and give them tools and support that will help them be more efficient and produce work that is of high quality. Below are some excellent strategies for improving an instructional design process:

1. Document the process. Do a job analysis and gain some clarity on what the process and what the work entails. Be clear about what is going on and what is expected. 
2. Clarify the goals and outputs for each phase. Make sure that there is clarity on exactly what the designer should produce for each phase of the design process.
3. Provide rubrics and checklists. How can a designer know the work is done it properly? Create easy to use checklists and so the designer can easily pass his or her work on to the next phase.
4. Constantly refine the process. Gather data, discover gaps, and work toward the ideal. Encourage and facilitate sharing and enable the designers to continuously improve. Designers are good at designing, so enable them to design how they design!
5. Provide tools for design. Create and provide templates, examples, technologies, and other tools for making the work more efficient, effective, and enabling.
6. Create a performance support page. (I describe this concept in detail near the end of this post). The support page should include the documentation, goals, outputs, rubrics, and tools for the design of the course.

Keep in mind that this advice is not given so that a manager or director can more easily control the instructional design process. The goal should be to remove barriers and enable the designer to be successful. Instructional design is a creative process, and the manager's goal should be to remove barriers, to eliminate wasted effort, and create a process that enables designer creativity and energy.

Criteria of a Quality Instructional Design Process
The general criteria of a good instructional design process include:

1. Efficient - Your process should be efficient and waste as little time on unnecessary tasks as possible. You must identify what level of efficiency is possible and work toward that ideal through improved efficiency.
2. Effective - Your process should create quality instructional products that reach the goals of the instruction. You must define what quality is and create a process that will support designers to achieve that level of quality.
3. Enabling - Your process should enable designers and other stakeholders to design outstanding materials. There are always inherent restrictions in instructional design, but your process should enable and empower designers as much as possible.

An Instructional Design Performance Support Website
One effective method is to create a Performance Support Website that houses the goals, outputs, templates, rubrics, and other resources used in the ID process. The idea is that designers could easily use this site to support their work. The site should be something that is created collaboratively by the design team and that is constantly updating and improving. The image below is my very rough conceptualization of what that site might look like.

Layout of a generic Instructional Design Performance Support Website.

Evaluating And Improving Your Own Instructional Design Process
The following questions may help you as you scrutinize and work to improve your own instructional design process:

• What is our instructional design process? Is it documented? If not, why?
• How do we know our process is working effectively? 
• How long does it take to build a course?
• Where are we wasting our time or repeating work in an unnecessary fashion? 
• How can we eliminate the time wasters and decrease overall time for building a course?
• How do we measure the quality of our work? What is a better way to do it?
• How do we evaluate and improve our process?
• Does the process we use restrict or enable our instructional designers to create quality instruction?
• How can we empower our instructional designers in their work?
• What tools will make our work more efficient and effective?
• What tools will enable our instructional designers to work with greater power?
• What tasks can we eliminate, automate, or delegate?

There are my current thoughts on improving instructional design processes. I will continue to think about this as I work with and around the excellent designers here at Franklin. Do you have any insights on how to improve the process of designing instruction?

The 2012 ISPI Conference - Ideas and Experiences

As you may have read in my earlier posts, I recently attended the ISPI Performance Improvement Conference in Toronto, Canada. I had an outstanding experience and blogged some of what I learned throughout the week. If you missed the conference, these links share my experiences.

Before the Conference
Here are a few posts before the conference and during the trip to Canada.

• Preview to the conference
• My irritations when flying
• The hotel that looked like an IKEA display

Principles and Practices of HPT Workshop
In Toronto, I first attended the Principles and Practices of HPT Workshop, which was outstanding. My notes and thoughts from this workshop:

• Photos from the HPT Workshop
• Day 1 What is Human Performance Technology?
• Day 2 Tools for analyzing performance problems
• Day 3 Conversing with others about human performance issues

Podcast:
While I was at the conference, I had a few minutes to talk with my brother about some of the things I had learned and describe some of the basic concepts of the field of Human Performance Technology.

• Podcast: ISPI Conference Ideas and Experience

ISPI Performance Improvement Conference
After the workshop, I attended the ISPI Performance Improvement Conference. The ideas and the knowledge presented were astonishingly powerful. Here are my reactions from the conference.

• Day 1 Evidence-based practice and Return on Investment
• Day 2 Debunking common HPT myths
• Day 3 The HPT Model and Conference Themes

HPT Workshop: Day 2

This post is part of a multiple part Series on the 2012 Performance Improvement Conference.
#ISPI2012

I have been attending ISPI's Performance Improvement Conference 2012. Today was the second day of the 3-day Principles and Practice of Human Performance Technology workshop. Yesterday we spent a lot of time getting oriented to the field and doing some initial analysis activities. (I talk more about Day 1 here).  Today we focused in a lot more on Analysis, which is one of three major tasks that a performance consultant performs: (1) Analysis of problems, needs or gaps, (2) Implementation of solutions to those problems, and (3) Evaluation of the effectiveness of those solutions.

We learned about and applied 3 fundamental models for analyzing the performance needs and situations of an organization:
1. The Total Performance System - this is a model that allows the performance consultant to analyze the system in which the performance takes place. The model highlights several key components to the system and helps the performance consultant get a feel for what is happening in an organization related to the performance in question.
2. The Behavior Engineering Model -this is a model (developed by Thomas Gilbert) that helps the performance consultant identify what is needed to enable correct performance in an organization. These things can be categorized using the following table: 

	Information	Instrumentation	Motivation
Environment	Data – receives description of, guides for, and feedback on performance	Resources – time, materials, tools	Incentives – pay, benefits, opportunities, consequences for poor performance
Worker	Knowledge  - appropriate placement, training that matches performance needs	Capacity – physical capacity, visual aids, adaptation, selection	Motives – assessment of worker motives, recruitment of matching people

We did an interesting exercise with this model - Dr. Addison asked each of us to identify which of these sections was the thing that was standing in the way of our being able to perform most effectively. We all independently responded and the following numbers of people ended up in each of the categories:

	Information	Instrumentation	Motivation
Environment	6	17	2
Worker	1	2	2

So, most people felt that they just needed more resources so that they could more effectively do their work. Interestingly, Dr. Addison noted that Thomas Gilbert found that this was generally the case in most situations - people rarely need training to improve their performance - they often need the other categories, and mostly just need the right resources!

3. The final analysis tool we used what the Driver System Analysis Matrix. To be honest, I really struggled with this tool. It requires the performance consultant to look at many of the elements at the organizational level/administrative level. We attempted to use the matrix to analyze performance at a fictitious organization, and to be honest, I had a hard time with this for several reasons: (1) I am accustomed to thinking at the Work and the Worker levels and found the shift to the Workplace level difficult; (2) I was unfamiliar with the case study and had a hard time understanding the specific context; (3) I didn't sleep too well the night before and was having a hard time focusing, and (4) I was so enthralled by the other two models that I found myself looking back at them.

Really, this is a slightly more complex way to look at a complex system - I am certain that it is a great thing, I just need to revisit it sometime soon.

*     *     *

I really liked today's experience and I already have ideas for analyzing my own organization and work. As I wrote in previous post, humans have a tendency is to jump to conclusions. I see this happen all the time in the workplace among my peers, and I know that I often do the same thing. I have to force myself to slow things down, and it really takes more time to think clearly. I like the models presented in the workshop today because they really helps an individual focus on the things that are most important and really understand what is contributing to their issues and problems. I am excited to test these models out in my own work!

I look forward to day 3 of the workshop. The presenters have done an incredible job at creating experiences that are meaningful so that we can really grasp the content and consider how to use them in our own work.

The Upcoming ISPI 2012 Conference

This post is part of a multiple part Series on the 2012 Performance Improvement Conference.
#ISPI2012

This week I am attending the 2012 Performance Improvement Conference, which is presented by the International Society for Performance Improvement. Since I am fairly new to the field of performance improvement (though I have had some practical experience and related knowledge), I plan to post every day or two about what I learn at this conference, including my reflections on how it is important and how it might be applied.

As is apparent from my previous blog posts, my education, my research, and my career has been focused on instructional design strategies and effectiveness. However, as I have adapted to my new role here at Franklin, it is apparent that I need to build my knowledge and capacity in the important field of Performance Technology. To this end, my administration has graciously funded my attendance at this conference, including a three day workshop entitled Principles and Practices of Performance Improvement.

I look forward to the learning experience and hope to be able to share help insights as the week progresses.