LeadingEdge Inc.
Submitted by Gary Fluitt.
February 25, 1998
LeadingEdge Inc. is the worldwide leader in the manufacturing
of high end publishing tools for the Macintosh and Windows Computers.
LeadingEdge was founded in the eighties by two people and has
experienced continual growth. LeadingEdge now employs about 600
people worldwide, with offices in 14 countires.
Internal training and performance support were easy to handle
when the company was a small, one-office operation, but as the
company has grown dramatically, training has remained a small
part of the business with little attention directed at internal
training needs.
As a small company with limited resources, LeadingEdge does not
have a training department. About five people work on curriculum
and technical training for products, and one person serves as
a trainer half time in the HR department. The only formal training
that occurs at LeadingEdge for new employees is 3 hours of orientation
training. Customer Support Technicians are the exception with
a six week "boot camp" before they are left alone to
handle support calls. All other job functions such as accounting,
R&D, product management, et al, receive no additional training
once the employee is hired.
For existing employees who either change jobs or need to learn
a new skill, getting training on technology, procedures, or soft
skills, is almost impossible. It's expected that employees will
seek out the resources on their own to get the information they
need.
To summarize the problem; LeadingEdge maintains no performance
support personnel and no training department for internal causes.
Meanwhile the company is growing, the technology gets more complex,
and employees have nowhere to turn for training and support.
Analyzing Needs
How do I know that a training need exists for LeadingEdge? As
one of the senior trainers at LeadingEdge, I am called on weekly
by all sorts of employees, from new hires all the way to upper
management, who are looking for training on a number of different
topics. Usually there is no structured training for these people
to go to. This is a personal felt need that I have experienced
at LeadingEdge.
To confirm that a need exists, and to conduct a needs analysis
from a more objective point of view, assesment will be done, based
on felt needs as these are the best type of needs to listen to
in an environment where a gap exists in personal performance (Kemp,
Morrison, & Ross 1998). Interviews and surveying will be conducted
electronically through the company e-mail system to gather data
on the kinds of instruction employees desire. A cross-section
of employees will be interviewed including regular full-time employees,
supervisors, department heads, and senior staff.
Senior staff and management will be included in the analysis specifically
to gather data on future needs or anticipated needs. Upper
level management may have a perspective on training needs that
relates to future company/business direction that is unknown to
the test of the company.
Once the data on needs are collected and analyzed, some filtering
will need to take place to determine what fits within the scope
of this project, and what will have to be addressed in other ways.
Priority will be given to those training needs that can be addressed
and are the most urgent.
The strategy for the delivery of this instruction is already somewhat
steered by management's attitude and actions. In recent weeks
senior management at LeadingEdge has eliminated about half
of the training positions at LeadingEdge. The trend is for fewer
human trainers, not more, and as mentioned earlier, there is no
official training department and no efforts to create one.
A modern solution to addressing training needs like this is to
out source training to a professional third party training vendor,
but the classes are very expensive and they don't generally address
the needs. None of the training vendors I researched offered training
on the lesser technologies such as our e-mail system, or our particular
brand of network use, or in the very technical needs such as database
architecture or client/server concepts.
A third solution (and the one that is proposed for this project)
is to create a "virtual training department" within
the company, using intranet web technology to deliver and manage
enterprise wide training.
For LeadingEdge, a web based performance support and training
system is an excellent strategy for a couple of reasons.
Goals
The goal of this project is to provide LeadingEdge employees with
an on-line training department that is an effective learning environment
and is easy to use, without significantly increasing the resources
needed to develop and maintain it. In the absence of a physical
training department, this virtual training department will offer
classes, workshops, tutorials, and job aids, on everything from
sexual harassment awareness and time management, to technical
training and tutorials like "Developing a department budget
in Edcel, and "How to use your voice mail system". The
on-line training environment will be called the Learning Resources
Site, will be available to all domestic employees from their desks,
and will be attached to the company intranet home page, which
is under construction and eminently due for company release.
Another goal is that employees will go first to the Learning Resources
Site before occupying the time of a co-worker or product expert.
Because the site is always available to them, the hope is that
employees will use the site often, even perhaps as a reference
if enough depth is developed. Design of the site will be "return-user"
friendly to encourage more than just a one-time use.
A long term goal of the site is to include user profiles that
are connected to a database so that content providers, managers,
and employees can track their own use and progress, and so we
can figure out which resources on the site are being used the
most.
The Learning Resources Site is intended to provide training for
those subjects and content that lends itself to the medium of
on-line delivery. Learning how to use the company E-mail system
for instance, is an appropriate subject for the Learning Resources
Site. Alternately, learning how to value our customers, or conflict
resolution, are not easily transferable to a web-based class and
would likely be last priority for development. So the scope of
the for this project is mutually defined by what the needs analysis
determines is needed, and what subject matter lends itself to
the delivery medium. The area where those two spheres overlap
defines the scope of this project.
Technical Issues
The Learning Resources Site will be based on HTML, but the site
will be extensible and flexible so that anyone, from any department
can attach a piece of on-line training to the site as long as
it's deliverable using http protocols. This may include content
developed in a variety of authoring tools such as Authorware or
mTropolis, or less interactive material such as downloadable PDF
or Word files. The point of having the architecture of the site
open to different content types is to encourage submissions and
development from many users.
Another intent is to make the site dynamically driven from a database,
as opposed to traditional page based web delivery. This allows
people within the company to post training content to the site
without requiring that a site administrator revise the site to
make the new content available. The principal method users will
use to find the training they need will be search criteria, rather
than relying on an interface to offer up the content. This would
require significant CGI programming resources, so research into
using Microsoft ActiveNT are underway to determine if this is
a better method.
A major constraint of the system may be a technical one in that
users from outside LeadingEdge's firewall may not have access
to the site. This could exclude users in our international offices,
and some domestic offices that don't have a dedicated link to
the main office. More research into this issue is underway. A
possible solution is to mirror the training server by sending
the contents of the server to other servers at those regional
offices.
Language and culture is another constraint, not of the system,
but in the resources needed to localize the content. We have offices
in six non-English speaking countries (Denmark, Netherlands, France,
Germany, Japan, Singapore). Localizing the training content for
these countries would be very time consuming. One requirement
of employment with LeadingEdge however, is that the employee must
have good English skills, even in these foreign offices. For that
reason it's possible that even without localization, the Learning
Resources Site could be very useful to our international offices.
Another constraint of the system is political. Senior management
is sometimes concerned that too much information is a bad thing.
Some workers for instance, are not allowed to have browser applications
on their computers because it could take them away from their
regular duties. this is understandable given the job functions
where these restrictions occur. In order for the Learning
Resources Site to become ubiqutous, individual users will have
to take a great deal of responsibility when they use the site.
And in time, management will see the value of the site and allow
more access to it.
The plan for implementing this project is to conduct the needs assessment surveys, analyze that data, and to create a list of training courses and tutorials that are needed. Once we have defined what training is requested, we will classify the training into one of five areas.
The following diagram shows how the structure of the site is to
be initially developed. Users of the site will come to it via
the intranet home page. The diagram breaks the site into
the five areas described above. Each "educational center"
is linked back to the Learning Resources home page, which in turn
is linked to the company intranet home page. An additional component
that is critical to the success of this site is the "Adding
to the Learning Resources Site" section. This section gives
instructions on how to add individual training sections to the
site, including step-by-step instructions for uploading content
and getting that content linked to other sections.
Site construction has already begun. A button on the intranet
home page for Learning Resources has been added, and a directory
on the internal web server has been set up.
Prototyping of the Learning Resources Home page will begin in
March and user testing will conclude in the same month. The first
section to receive significant content will be the Product training
section with repurposed commercial training content. The second
priority will be to get the Procedures section up and running.
The Calendar section is a simple addition, but requires a new
version of our Calendar software called Now-Up-to-Date which publishes
in HTML format. The Certification section will likely be the last
to go up, as content for this section will need to be generated
by HR and validated by Legal.
Here is a summary of the scheduled goals for this project:
Database components - This development has much to do with selecting
the right technology to implement it. Research into ActiveNT and
Oracle 8 are underway. Schedule for this component is to be determined.
Initially this project will be developed by three people in the
Creative Services department.