Learning Needs Analysis, Design & Development
Role: Senior Instructional Designer
Company: Accenture Learning, Bangalore • Client: Telstra, Australia • Duration: June 2008 to January 2010
Introduction
In 2008, Telstra, one of Australia's largest telecommunications and media companies, signed a five year application outsourcing contract with Accenture, the global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, to obtain their service and consulting support. This was during my tenure at Accenture Learning, Content Development Center, Bangalore. As part of the contract, our team was assigned to build a set of integrated learning modules for Telstra ground technicians.
Telstra was a huge account for Accenture. There were six teams across different Business Units (BUs) globally, working on multiple different projects simultaneously and they all had to maintain a consistent quality and style. Therefore, as one of the Senior Instructional Designers on one of the teams, my role expanded beyond:
Conducting research and analysis to identify the real people problem
Designing an appropriate suite of learning solutions and
Creating Facilitator and Learner Guides for the Instructor-led Trainings (ILTs) and functional wireframes for the mLearning solution
Additionally, I was also a part of the Telstra Quality Assurance (TQA) team that was formed to create and maintain a Style Guide for all Telstra products and solutions. The team included other Instructional Designers, Programmers, Graphic Designers, Interaction Designers, Project Managers and the client Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).
Approach
Identifying and understanding the real people problem is always the first step towards producing the most effective learning experiences. Telstra was facing challenges like, lowering Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSS) and frustrated and demotivated ground technicians. They needed a solution to their people problem, which might or might not have been a lone learning problem and our first task was to identify the real problem area.
Therefore, we created a Needs Analysis Framework to get to the root of the issue:
Started with a list of the most common customer problems that the ground technicians had to solve.
Dissected each problem to identify:
The tools required to solve the problem
The common challenges faced by the technicians, while solving the problem
Identified the gaps and the best ways to fill those gaps and prepare the technicians to overcome the common challenges:
Learning Nodes: These were the learning gaps, which could be closed by providing technical training and assistance or behavioral training or a combination of both.
Cultural Blocks: These were the cultural gaps, which could be closed by integrating the five Telstra core values into the work culture of the entire organization, by providing soft skill and behavioral trainings, on-the-floor group activities, cultural posters, postcards, decals and various other initiatives. The five Telstra core values were:
Show we care
Work better; together
Trust each other to deliver
Make the complex simple
Find our courage
Analyzed each Learning Node to identify:
The knowledge levels (Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced) of the technicians, who were most likely to be assigned to the problems
The Bloom’s level of the set learning objective to close the Learning Node.
Based on the knowledge levels of the technicians and the Bloom’s level of the learning objectives, we decided the appropriate learning solutions like, Instructor-led Trainings (ILTs), Job Aids and Mobile Learning (mLearning).
Needs Analysis Framework
For the purpose of this portfolio, here is a demo of one of the mLearning products in the suite of Telstra learning solutions. We had designed and developed this product for the Beginner Level ground technicians to achieve a learning objective at the third level of Bloom’s Psychomotor domain, the Guided Response.
mLearning Learning Demo
Challenges
Maintaining a consistent quality and style
It was important to maintain the quality and a cohesive user experience across all the learning solutions designed for Telstra. But given the scale of the project, it was a very difficult objective to achieve.
As members of the TQA team, we had to create a Style Guide that anyone working on the Telstra account could easily refer to, while we had ownership of the final document:
We used our internal Learning Management System (LMS) to create a live document. The LMS let us retain all versions of the document and gave us controlled user rights, which made it easier to access and maintain a live document to be used by multiple people across different BUs and timezones.
We divided the content into relevant and to-the-point topics, which made it an easy reference for anyone working on the Telstra account:
Language (Grammar, Tone and Voice)
Visualization (Branding and Communication)
Interaction (Instructional Design and User Experience)
We had to maintain the standards and yet, keep room for innovation so we could deliver the best solutions and continue to do so at scale. So having regular TQA team meetings and keeping the document alive by making any required changes was critical.
Lastly, with such a large user base, it was equally important to maintain our ownership on the document. So we had only two designated editors, who could edit the document post all the required approvals. For everyone else, they could only download a read only file and reach out to any of the TQA team members for any clarification.
Calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) for Telstra
At Accenture, we were committed to providing not only the most engaging learning solutions, but also the most effective ones. Therefore, it was important for us to calculate the ROI of all the learning solutions designed and developed for Telstra.
Based on the Needs Analysis Framework, we identified the three most important touchpoints for Telstra and used them as the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure the ROI of all the technical trainings:
Call time: Average time taken by a customer support executive to resolve a customer query.
Troubleshooting time: Average time taken by a ground technician to resolve a customer query.
Customer Feedback: Average CSS gathered by Telstra through their existing customer reviews and feedback system.
The Cultural Blocks were as important as the Learning Nodes and their effects on the overall business and CSS of Telstra. But it was difficult for us to measure the effectiveness of the soft skill and behavioral trainings and various other cultural initiatives that were aimed at implementing a customer-centric culture throughout the organization. Therefore, we used Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluation to achieve our goal:
Reaction: Evaluated the learner’s reaction through mandatory feedback forms and survey sheets at the end of various on-the-floor activities, classroom trainings and job aids on customer empathy, courteousness and collaboration, designed and delivered in collaboration with the Telstra Human Resources (HR) and Training and Development teams.
Learning: Evaluated the learner’s knowledge level through the before and after results of the quarterly online role-plays and quizzes on real-life scenarios.
Behavior: Evaluated the learner’s behavior through Telstra's internal productivity and performance metrics, by involving their HR and Line Managers.
Results: Evaluated the effects on the business by aligning the productivity and performance metrics to the overall Telstra CSS, earnings and profit, before and after the implementation of the learning solutions. This also involved various stakeholders like the HR, Finance, Line Managers and the Telstra Leadership.
Impact
The implementation of the learning strategies and products that we designed at Accenture, as a team, had positively impacted Telstra’s revenue generation and profit by:
Reducing their call time and troubleshooting time
Improving their overall CSS
Improving productivity and performance metrics of the ground technicians
Improving employee satisfaction survey results for the ground technicians
Streamlining internal processes
Implementing customer-centric culture throughout the organization
All these were reflected in the Telstra 2009 results announcement and analyst briefing, which showed a steady increase in their:
Sales revenue
Net profit
Broadband and mobile customer base
Recognition
Our people-centric approach helped us create an organization-wide positive impact for Telstra. It resulted in their increasingly satisfied customer base, which reflected in their 2009 earnings and earned us one of our highest CSS from Telstra.