Product Launch 911: When Training Solutions Depend on Business Solutions

A multibillion-dollar financial services software provider was launching a new consultative service that would be delivered by an army of hundreds of support staff. The success of the new offering depended on the ability of the support staff to do a good job delivering the service (no pressure).

With the launch date rapidly approaching, the stakes were high and the clock was ticking.

Solving training problems often requires first solving business problems, which demands a different skill set entirely. Because of the client’s aggressive timeline, it needed to initiate curriculum design before most of the work procedures had been defined. This meant standard instructional design processes by themselves would not help us reach the finish line.

As soon as we learned that critical business processes had yet to be defined, we took off our instructional design hats and put on our business process consulting hats. We built a new process to integrate the business process design work with the training development, ensuring that we managed the project with maximum efficiency while aligning all key stakeholders. The business processes were broken into their smallest possible chunks. Working piece by piece, we defined and got alignment on each procedure before sending it into the instructional design process. This allowed us to simultaneously define business processes and the instruction.