Manufacturing Knowledge Capture

Role

Lead Instructional Designer

Ownership

• Client relationship
• Quality checking deliverables
• Scope and deadline management
• Template and boilerplate creation

Responsibilities

• Coach and manage team of four instructional designers, two developers, and three technical writers
• Partner with videographer vendor to shoot on-site SME interviews
• Lead virtual SME interviews worldwide
• Create predictable, manageable workflows
• Partner with Project Manager

The Challenge

Sandy Systems LLC had two converging problems that would uproot their learning ecosystem in the next five years.

• Tenured subject matter experts were reaching retirement age, threatening a massive loss of knowledge
• The current onboarding for new employees was informal leading to preventable knowledge gaps

The lack of cross training for sales and customer support led to inconsistant customer experiences depending on the application of the product purchased.

For example, Customer A who purchased precipitated silica to use in powder coatings for metal would receive a higher level of customer service and support than Customer B who purchased the same precipitated silica for use in toothpaste.

Discovery

Through conversations and needs analysis, we uncovered that 40–60% of the time, customer questions were being fielded by the experts themselves rather than being answered by sales/customer support staff first and then escalated to experts. Oftentimes sales/customer support staff would rely on the expertise and through the informal onboarding, bad habits had emerged and been passed down to slow the expert-level knowledge building.

Design Principles

Throughout the process I used a single criterion to guide the project: will this help build expertise. The root problem that Sandy Systems was experiencing wasn’t turnover or retirement—it was that no one was actively working towards replacing the current experts. Succession planning. The problem identified that the employee onboarding process was informal stunted the initial growth and identification of employees who would excel in certain areas and be excellent candidates for expert-level cultivation. The problem that many of the current experts were approaching retirement added an expiration date for their current system.

What was actually needed wasn’t just a structured onboarding or knowledge capture system. It was a clear pathway from new hire to expert.

Process

1. 01

   SME Interviews

   More than 50 subject matter experts from around the world were identified to interview. This phase acted as both the knowledge preservation and the information gathering phase to create the training courses. Many resources were created to assist in this and to set up a system of knowledge-gathering moving forward.

2. 02

   Prototyping

   Prototypes and templates were created for the seven major 'types' of training courses that would be created: platforms, industries, markets, products, processes, systems, and business capabilities.

3. 03

   Development

   Development of the comprehensive suite of onboarding materials with a phased approach. More than 100 elearning modules were developed alongside job aids and videos.

4. 04

   Knowledge Retention Toolkit

   A formal review and knowledge transfer system was created to continuously revisit the evaluation step of ADDIE.

Solution

Due to the scope, we had hundreds of deliverables in total. Each stage had its own set of deliverables, goals, and desired outcomes.

Stage 1: Information Gathering

Tradeoffs

Designing the solution had to take into account very real constraints. First being that the ongoing maintenance of the program had to be handed over to the learning enablement team at Sandy Systems. This meant that a templated approach had to be taken so the learning team could reliably reproduce additional courses and content. This also meant that all the developed assets had to be standardized and developed for the lowest-common denominator. All courses and content needed to be easily editable in either Microsoft Word or directly in Articulate Storyline. Articulate Rise was the first desired platform, but there was no easy way to share source files to include those in the delivery, so many of the Rise-like interactions were recreated in Storyline to use as a template.