How to Successfully Manage High Risk, High Reward Learning Projects

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It was mid-December, when we heard that Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) was selected to create three games for a global healthcare companys dynamic shift towards customer centricity. Excellent, games! We love to create games. Theyre new, theyre different. We havent yet bored ourselves to tears, as the industry has with eLearning courses, by enforcing unsophisticated templates and locked down navigation. We had 11 weeks, start-to-finish, to deliver the games. Eleven weeks to create 1.5 hours of visually complex, competitive and audio rich games with branching content. And the content didnt exist. It should take at least 16 weeks. Not to mention this overlapped with Christmas and Chinese New Year, where wide swaths of customers and subject matter experts intended to be unavailable. Still, we signed up readily for the challenge. And then we heard something incredible. During the proposal process, 16 other vendors indicated they were unable or unwilling to meet the project requirements. At TIS, we were stunned. Maybe this isnt surprising, though? The Project Management Institutes (PMI) 2013 research indicates that, fewer than twothirds of projects meet their goals and business intent (success rates have been falling since 2008), and about 17 percent fail outright.1 Perhaps there is a gap in qualified vendors who can fulfill high risk and high value business initiatives?

What is a high risk, high reward initiative?

While there is some evidence that budgets are stabilizing, in the past ten years TIS and the Learning industry increasingly have been asked to do more with less. In 2009, 45% of companies surveyed for Masies Learning Resources Barometer indicated that their learning department had to do more with fewer resources. 2 Doing more with less is widely understood to mean, as Mark Royal and Tom Agnew put it, shorthand for continually raising the bar on goals and expectations while spending less money,3 but we always find there is a time constraint involved, too. Many of these requests are about doing more (more engaging, more global reach, more performance support, more results) in less time. Additionally, we often find that most of these initiatives with time constraints also fall into one or more of the following categories:

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High Visibility - the public or target client of an organization will see the initiative & its results may drive perception, loyalty and revenues High Impact - the results of the initiative will have huge efficiency, cost and/or safety results Technical Complexity - Information Technology, logistic & geographic variables that complicate process and delivery Any initiative that starts out with a limited timeline automatically increases the risk of achieving a successful outcome. When combining any of these additional factors, you have a high risk project that, if handled correctly, can lead to high reward, or value. In these cases, value generally refers to the payoff to the customer, which isnt always about revenues and the organizations bottom line. Value can mean more efficient services, safety, or continuity of operations, for example.

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What does it take to manage a high risk, high reward initiative?

So why were so few learning vendors interested in considering the healthcare opportunity? What made TIS able to produce something 16 other companies wouldnt even start? It likely has to do with how well prepared a vendor is and perhaps their level of exposure & experience. Lets take a look at some examples where TIS has met the challenge of such high risk, high reward projects. A former Vice President of Canadas leading communications and media company asked us How do we decrease time to proficiency for new hires without compromising on learning effectiveness? As we engaged to understand a 12-week onboarding program for new hires, we found that while creating solutions that cut time but increased productivity there was an imperative business driver for the solution to be implemented quickly. We overhauled the training program reducing 51 training days to 40, turned out 400 online courses in 24 weeks, which resulted in 22% productivity increase for the client. At Nielsen we worked on a global process improvement and enterprise application initiative that rolled out to 30,000 employees in 42 countries including three releases of 70 hours of training developed over ten weeks each.

At a major US telecom, we developed 1000 learning (seat) hours in nine months as part of a strategic initiative to transform the company both from an operations and a learning perspective. Likewise, for a leading telecommunications company in Australia which needed an engaging induction program for new hires, we reduced standard instructor-led training costs and created world-class eLearning with a 150 hour training program developed in just 16 weeks. The content, covering a variety of topics from soft skills to customer interaction, ranged from Level 1 WBT (Overviews, etc.) to Level 3 WBT (Game-Based Training, Branched Scenarios).

For TIS, it all started with an initiative nine years ago, one at a fraction of the size of some of the above projects, but nonetheless one that seemed impossible at the time. It was a challenge to produce a large number of courses in a years time which would have a multimillion dollar savings for the customer if it could be done successfully, which included meeting host of federal regulations. This challenge, like so many of the others, also required a higher level of instructional fidelity, i.e. no page-turners. So we created what is informally known as our project management for corporate initiatives approach.
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Project Management for Corporate Initiatives

That approach includes: People & Training A point of contact at the client site or in the clients primary time zone Specialized teams focused on core components of the lifecycle Full lifecycle teams responsible for oversight & QA Utilization of the 24 hour global advantage of multi-geography resources Removal of cost model variability for ad-hoc local consultants Executive sponsorship

Process & Procedure, Tools & Best Practices Process Flexibility - as a standard Best practices & guidelines for each phase of the lifecycle Internal centers of excellence on products & design Proactive, not reactive, risk management using a Risk Matrix Development tools for efficiency Subject Matter Expert management as part of the process Metrics tracking & reporting at the program and course level

With executive support, weve refined & institutionalized our process and created tools, such as our Project Management & Collaboration portal and our proprietary rapid development tool, LearnX, to ensure the success of corporate initiatives. Weve trained our team and we re-train them per initiative. All of which are standards you cannot do without if you expect to achieve successful outcomes, as PMI indicates in their 2013 Pulse report about high performing companies. The best performers standardize and mature their project, program and portfolio practices over time to drive organization-wide efficienciesbut they dont stop there. They also deploy these tools with talented staff and empower them to lead their projects not just manage themby training them in best practices and carving out defined career paths. High performers drive project, program and portfolio management strategically, with top management visibility, active executive sponsors on projects, and use of consistent and standardized project management practices.4
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Best Practices for Managing High Risk, High Reward Initiatives

TIS provides more detail on best practices that are critical to successfully managing high risk, high reward initiatives, in the table below: Critical Elements for a Successful High Risk Initiative Service Provider (Vendor) Client (Purchasers) Service Provider (Vendor)

You will not succeed if you do not have executive buy-in and Sponsorship. The Initiative must align to the executives and business objectives; else it will stall or fail.

You want a vendor who also shows they value the importance of your initiative. Ensure you meet leadership. Expect to have a Director level and above participating in your initiative. You need a vendor who has the proven ability to execute. Check for similar scale and scope. You also need a vendor who has more access to resources than you could possibly get your hands on, since the vendor does the bulk of the heavy lifting. It will be necessary to have parallel teams and overlapping work tasks. And you want to check for qualifications of the team member.

Skin in the game

No vendor, no matter how great, knows how to navigate your company better than you do. In order to push through an initiative you must have a primary point of contact, a dedicated team who will drive to completion. Dare we say it? You need a PMO.

Plan early to remember the forgotten

You will want to reach outside of your direct network or line of business to find out who else needs input, approval & access. Involve them early or the most common result is delay and re-work (more time & cost).

Expect your vendor to alert you during project kickoff to look out for groups that need to be included in the analysis & design phases (at a minimum). Commonly forgotten groups are: marketing, branding, legal, international HR and IT, for example. Look for a vendor that has SME management practices & procedures. Expect your vendor to estimate # of resource hours.

Subject Matter Experts

You probably cannot do this well without involving a cadre of your own experts to provide inputs & review. Realize that it takes more time than you think to contribute to and review & approve materials.

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In the event that you do not have your own experts, make sure your vendor supplies them. But still assume that you will need to provide for approvals. Its your business & reputation at stake. Map it out You will have multiple integration points, internal and external teams with their own timelines and deliverables that must roll up into your overall plan. Even if you have a Prime coordinating the entire program, you want and need to be involved in the entire timeline tracking.

Look for a vendor that can bring in experts to augment your own team, if needed.

You want a vendor who can detail the exact lifecycle, deliverables & responsibilities this includes pointing out integration tasks with other vendors and with your team. Your vendor should provide you with a timeline that shows what you need to know (not what the vendor has to do to get a deliverable to you.) Expect the vendor to stick to the timeline, i.e., no changes without prior approval.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

You will need to drive communication up and down within your company. You also want to ensure that silos are not created to the extent that you have duplicate work, assumptions, or lack of information. Often, when multiple vendors are involved in deploying an initiative, they are kept in silos. Then you find that say, your developers didnt create a testing database therefore the QA team cannot do their job. Dont forget end user audience & external customer communications. These need to be planned for early in the project.

Look for a vendor who has a communication plan. Expect your vendor to participate in status, progress & planning meetings not only for their own portion of the work, but as part of the collective team partnering to ensure you have a successful end result.

In summary, we are still surprised that there are not more vendors who are willing or able to pick up higher risk projects. But we believe the critical factor behind this is lack of preparedness. To consider managing a high risk, high reward opportunity, a vendor has to be prepared with processes, tools, trained teams and best practices in place. To further extenuate your success you must partner with the customer organization and provide coaching towards the balance of interactions that are needed to meet success. Lastly, a vendor must have experience proactively managing the risks inherent in the opportunity.

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About Tata Interactive Systems:

Tata Interactive Systems (TIS), a division of TATA Industries Limited, is an acknowledged global leader in the e-learning industry. As part of the Tata group, TIS has an international presence and offers diversified and innovative bouquets of learning and training solutions to corporations, universities, schools, publishers, and government institutions across the US, Canada, the UK, , the Middle East, India, and mainland Europe. Our offerings range from Web-based Training, Instructor-led Training to Simulation-based Learning Objects (SimBLs), Story-based Learning Objects (StoBLs), Courseware and Curriculum Design, Special-needs Education, Assessments, Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS), Mobile Learning, and Game-based Learning along with other Corporate Training and Consultancy Services.

About Anna Kuehl, PMP

Anna is the Vice President of Key Accounts - North America, holds her PMP, and has worked in project and program management for 12+ years. She specializes in management and client relations for learning programs that are high risk and high reward.

References
1,4 Source: 2013 Project Management Institute, Inc. Pulse of the Profession, March 2013. http://www.pmi.org/~/media/PDF/Business- Solutions/PMI-Pulse%20Report-2013Mar4.ashx accessed July 2013. 2 Source: Masie.com 2009 Learning Resources. http://masie.com/ Surveys/learning-barometer.html accessed July 2013. 3 Source: Businessweek.com, Four Ways to do More with Less, 2011. http://www.businessweek.com/management/four-ways-to-do-more- with-less-really-11012011.html accessed July 2013.

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