Problem-solving and analysis

At AU, I began to explore using analytics as a way to quickly responed to the needs of learners. At work, I need to adapt quickly to changing business needs and resolve issues as they arise. Together, these opportunities have allowed me to identify and tackle a series of process and performance issues head on.

Instructional designers are often sent in to design training to solve a little problem but as they start digging they find out that the issues may not be as simple as everyone would them to be...

In MDDE 701 I had an opportunity to look in more detail at some of the challenges and issues facing my globally-dispersed instructional design team. 

This assignment gave me a reason to look a little more formally at the challenges facing my team. As always, the insight and good ideas floating around surprised me. I have included a concept map of a possible new approach to instructional design. (Step aside ADDIE!)  Not only were we able to identify several significant roadblocks to the types of performance gains we'd like to see, we also made headway in creating some actionable plans to improve the impact of our work. 

One of those actionable items was the development of the ID Playbook. It is a document that ties together a series of job aids and sets out expectations for content development within our vertical. The ID Process Flow in the middle column is one component of the playook. Although we originally created this resource to meet the needs of newer instructional designers on our team (see the blog post in the right-hand column), it is now being used consistently by even my most tenured instructional designers to ensure we are not missing any steps in the development process. Thus, completing this assignment has made me a better manager and also improved the performance of my team.

I've included a condensed version of the ID Playbook we are now using for download and my complete MDDE 701 assignment.