Strategies for Analysis

February 13, 2021

Getting Started

Throughout my career, I have learned that there are several ways to become an instructional designer. To name a few, you can learn through on-the-job training, receive a certification, or attend a graduate school. I am lucky enough that I was introduced to my career on the job, and credit much of my experience to the on-the-job training I received. However, I always desired a formal education to help me grow as an Instructional Designer and Human Performance Practitioner. So here we are, officially one year into the Boise State Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning Graduate Program. As part of this program, I am fortunate enough to take a class, Instructional Design, that enables us to work on a team Instructional Design (ID) project with a real life client. So even though we are under the guidance of our instructor, we are able to be creative and work through the ups and downs of real project work.

In the past three weeks, our team has met with our client for a kick-off, developed a team charter to outline our team’s working style and vision, conducted three internal team meetings, and completed our project front end analysis work. By front end analysis, I mean our Training Requirements Analysis (TRA), Learner Analysis (LA), and Task Analysis (TA). Read more about what these mean in my previous blog post. The analysis work will shape the foundation for the ID project. Based on my professional experience, this is when you get to know your client and the project can really get off the ground. Preview our TRA, LA, and TA documents below to see our progress!

Image by Lukas from Pexels

TRA - Idaho Foodbank Receiving and Inspecting Dry_shelf-stable Food Donations_edited.docx

TRA

LEA- Idaho Foodbank Receiving and Inspecting Dry_shelf-stable Food Donations_edited.docx

LA

TAIdaho Foodbank Receiving and Inspecting Dry_shelf-stable Food DonationsFormatted_edited.pdf

TA

Learn new strategies and techniques

Below I will explain some of the strategies that we have used to improve collaboration with our client and drive our data collection, which enabled us to create the above documents.

Always prepare.

Take the time to prepare for every client and team meeting. When conducting an analysis with your client and/or subject matter expert (SME), be organized and prepared. Typically, your client is busy. Your project is a priority, but they are managing many different tasks, so don’t waste their time. For our client meetings and analysis, we are making it a priority to send out the agenda in advance to provide the client with information about our discussion. This has worked out to be very beneficial for our analysis work because we are also sending out the analysis questions in advance. Doing this has enabled our client to also be prepared and gather any outside information needed for our meetings. It also helps our team ensure we have developed intentional questions for our analysis.

Be sure to empathize.

Empathize with your client and SME. A few weeks ago, I realized the value of showing empathy during analysis. Check out my blog on Analyze and Empathize here. Being able to put this technique into practice helped my team gain a better understanding of the performance problem and the importance of solving it for the client. To apply this technique, our team spent time at our first meeting engaging with our client to get to know them, then we all shared our own experiences so the client knew us as well. We also worked with the client to ask specific questions like, “What keeps you up at night with the current process?,” “Where are your pain points?,” and “What does success with this project look like to you?” Asking these types of questions helped the client feel that they were being heard and their problems were at the forefront. This also guided the conversation and helped the ID team uncover key elements of the project during our analysis that wouldn’t necessarily come up in an unprompted conversation.

Use your resources.

Be resourceful and review all the data you have from the client before conducting your analysis. These resources might include process guides, procedure logs, organization websites, need analysis, etc. Reviewing this information will help you prepare your questions so that you can collect the most accurate tasks. You may also be able to identify additional resources you will need from the client to capture the performance, such as pictures or an observation. One of the best ways to describe the exemplary on-the-job performance of the task is to conduct an observation or interview (OPWL Instructors, 2020, p. 84). In our current project, we have a team member whom is local to the client, so with permission from the client, our team member will be able to observe the performance and take pictures so we can incorporate visuals into our training and job aids. Adding visuals can help you document and describe a task for learners who may be less familiar with the process.

The image on the right is a sample from our task analysis. This sample shows how you can add a visual to your task analysis to help document and describe a step.

Figure 1: Image Use in our Task Analysis

Photo by Анна Рыжкова from Pexels

Face the Challenges

Coordinating the availability of between the client and team members can be challenging, but it is important to do so. This was one of the challenges our team faced so we decided to be creative and flexible. To work through the challenge, we came up with an alternate approach. We split up the analysis into two shorter meetings, the first meeting was the TRA and LA, and the second was the TA. We established a team guideline that we would have at least two members present during all client interactions. This helped us ensure that information during the meeting wasn’t misinterpreted, questions were not forgotten, and this added a more conversational component to the meeting. We also recorded the meeting so everyone could review it when their schedule allowed. Another benefit of this approach was that we were able to regroup between meetings to make sure we understood the project and we could add more questions for the next meeting if information was unclear.

We haven’t had any major “Oh-No” moments yet because we were able to quickly resolve and questions by reaching out to our client for clarification. When we do have a major “oh-no” moment, I think clearly communicating the problem amongst our team as soon as possible will be key to resolving it.

Photo by Dids from Pexels

Celebrate the Ah-Ha moments

One of my "Ah-Ha" moments over the past few weeks, was realizing how much I enjoy the Analyze and Empathize phase of an ID project. Some of the things that make it enjoyable are:

o learning about the problem and the client’s perspective

o following a systematic process to collect data

o breaking down a process task-by-task and step-by-step

o analyzing data and brainstorming solutions

Overall, our team is collaborating well and moving along through the project. I am excited to see where we will go from here.

Reference

OPWL 537 Course Instructors (2020). Instructional Design Course Handbook. Boise, ID: Boise State department of Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning.

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