SHOW HOME WHAT WE CREATE HOW WE WORK OUR THINKING NEWS EVENTS CAREERS CONTACT US TALK TO US Home Our thinking Article 11 SEP 2015 They said it couldn’t be done: Agile development for learning content Our Head of Production Colin Welch looks back over a recent project where a truly innovative production process brought Agile development and e-learning together. Here at Brightwave we develop software and custom online learning - the latter including good old e-learning courses and other digital resources tailored to specific needs. For software development, we use an Agile / SCRUM approach - our team work on the same products every week and they're co-located, so they can have daily stand up meetings to manage development sprints and prioritise features. Making great products and platforms is their full time job, and Agile works perfectly. Developing custom online learning for individual clients is different - we still work collaboratively, but our clients have the responsibility of their day jobs to get on with as well. We can't be co-located and have access to client-side subject matter experts (SMEs) and stakeholders 24/7 - it's not their full time job. Although we take pride in how well we work collaboratively with our clients, e-learning development has always tended to use a Waterfall project management approach. Anyone who's been involved with an e-learning project will be familiar with this process - by necessity we have to do much of the development on our own without constant client input, so we release deliverables for our SMEs and other stakeholders to review and sign off on at agreed intervals. This process is tried, tested, ISO accredited and works very well. It fits with the working patterns and preferences of many of our clients, and we continue to work this way regularly. At the same time though, we take pride in not applying the same approach to every project just because it's worked in the past. Every project is different. Every client is different, and we always adjust the process to do what's best for both.. In so far as we are always prepared to adapt our default practices to optimise outputs and efficiencies, Brightwave has always been an Agile organisation. But when the situation arises we can extend this approach into something else - Agile plus. For many people I've spoken to in the industry, perceived wisdom is that an Agile approach doesn't work for custom e-learning content development; especially where the SMEs are busy people and unable to commit a lot of their time. In reality though, SMEs' time constraints are one of the key causes of project delays. When something important comes up with their day job, which is usually their priority, then reviewing the eLearning script goes to the bottom of the to-do list. The project slips, resources have to be reallocated, the schedule is lengthened and the project takes longer to develop. Delays of this kind are one of the principal causes of projects being delivered late and over budget. It's not a failure of the client to commit or deliver - it's just the way things are in today's fast-paced businesses. Against the common wisdom, Brightwave have always felt that Agile can work for custom content development, so I was delighted recently when one of our favourite clients was willing to try it. We did it because the SMEs were all senior busy people, distributed globally - not in spite of that fact. And it worked! We developed around an hour and a half of content (in modules) in eight weeks. The project was delivered on schedule, to budget, and everyone - especially the client, most importantly - was delighted with the courses. So how did we do it…? Doing Agile for eLearning A confession: strictly speaking, the approach we used wasn't true Agile - we didn’t invite our client-side stakeholders to work in our office with us full time for eight weeks (though that would have been great, because they were lovely) - so we still worked in isolation. The key difference was that we did the work in sprints, punctuated by collaborative events, bringing our experience and expertise in software development into the learning content production process. These events were mainly long web conferences because of the geographical spread - but the key event that our project centred around was a two-day, face-to-face event in London, where the whole project team came together from around the world and worked on the project full time - no mobiles, no work e-mail, just the eLearning project - until we'd cracked it. Before the two-day face-to-face, we did a few important things: We took an existing course shell with a good on-brand UI and modified it in to a set of screen templates for these courses. We took the source content - which was already in good shape as structured PowerPoint storyboards - and identified where there were gaps. We asked the SMEs to fill those gaps as homework. We populated the content we did have in to the templates, building a straw man of the course with placeholders that we could put content straight in to at the face-to-face session. Hear that? The first thing we did was build the course! We DIDN'T DO SCRIPTS! As I write this I can see the faces of colleagues past and present contorting in horror. "Whaaaaat!! You can't just build the course from the start can you?!?!" Well it turns out you can. In fact, adopting an Agile methodology has a very welcome range of secondary effects, including making us better collaborators. How many times have you had a conversation that goes "Well it reads, OK but I won’t know for sure until I see it all on screen"? Having everyone in the room looking at the course live as it evolved and writing and building it together really worked. Everyone felt a sense of ownership of the work we were doing as a team. If we needed someone's opinion on something they were right there - we didn’t have to wait a week for them to review the script, or the Alpha, we just changed it there and then. In two days we completed the build on two courses - one per day - to a point where they were pretty much finished. We even shot video with a sub-team in a separate room that we used in the courses. What came next was therefore really just polishing - making better graphics, tightening up interactions, tidying up some of the wording. Over a couple more short sprints, we nailed it! What made it work? Before we all get carried away and run every project like this, there were some important pre-conditions that made it work: Having content in really good shape before we started. Using a rapid development tool - in this case Storyline - that we could write and build straight in to. Having the overall look and feel, functionality and tech specs agreed right up front. SMEs who could commit the events to their diaries and not move them. BUT - when one or two inevitably couldn't attend all the events, having already agreed that others could make decisions on behalf of the group. Strong facilitation of the events - and strict time management to make sure we got through it all, parking unresolved issues until the next sprint rather than getting bogged down in small details. All of which combined led to a really successful Agile project. And you know what? It was a lot more rewarding too, on a number of levels… I was asked recently if we could work in this way again and the answer is that with the right team, the right client and the right pre-conditions, I would never work in any other way. Follow Colin on Twitter: @colinwelch Agile SHARE MORE READING BLOG 02 Oct / 2015 DevLearn: Tech and Learning in Las Vegas 2015 - Day 3 BLOG COMMENTS AUTHOR Colin Welch Head of Production SEARCH TYPES ALL BLOGS ARTICLES EXPERT GUIDES TAGS Learning Design Social Learning Learning Strategy Opinion Total Learning DevLearn Interactive Film Virtual Reality #LT15uk Project Management Towards Maturity Onboarding Community Personalised Learning Culture Mobile Learning Curation Agile LRS Awards Systems Training SLPs Diagnostics CIPD CX Induction Customer Experience Curation Wearables BrightDays Curation LMS AUTHORS Colin Welch Lauren Keith Charles Gould Rob Keery Richard Calcutt Caro Walmsley Caroline Walmsley Ann Borg Hayley Maisey Sophie Costin Caroline Freeman Sean Pearce David Pearl Jonathan Archibald Cass Hoskins Dan Jones Kathryn Nixon Paul Draper Steph Berry Tony Bartholomew Richard Andrews Alex Reeve Nick Eastham Steph Bright David Leak ARCHIVE 2015 2014 2013 2012 SUBMIT YOUR RFP REQUEST A DEMO We'd love to talk. 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