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Turn Your Training Development Staff Into a Training Development Team
December 07, 2009
By Paul D. Swan
There is more to building an effective training development team than just following the platitudes of generic teamwork. You must organize each assignment and task to leverage the unique strengths of each individual on your staff. In addition, these strengths must be focused to fulfill the required roles necessary to develop effective training in a variety of media and delivery systems.
There are three areas to consider when organizing an effective training development team:
•Team Foundations
•Training Development Team Roles
•Secrets of Success (Best practices)
Team Foundations
Research by Larson and LaFasto (Larson, Carl E. & LaFasto Frank M. j. (1987) Teamwork: What Must Go Right/What Can Go Wrong. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications) determined that effective teams have eight factors in common. These same factors impact the success of your internal training development staff.
1. Clear, elevating goal: A worthy goal of a training department is to be a "profit center" instead of a "cost center." Improving organizational key performance indicators by improving human performance is another worthy goal.
2. Results-driven structure: Your staff should focus on results related to solving real business needs and not on busy work or false measures of success such as instructor ratings, test scores, or number of training hours delivered.
3. Competent team members: Build on the competencies your team already has. Put each person in a role and responsibility where he or she can be successful. From there, begin to build more competencies.
4. Unified commitment: "People tend to support what they create." Enlist the input of your staff as you organize to meet your responsibilities. The result will be increased commitment and dedication by all team members.
5. Collaborative climate: Build a tradition of collaboration not only among your staff members, but also as you relate with other departments and entities in your organization. Earn the reputation as a problem-solving team that is a pleasure to work with.
6. Standards of excellence: Keep your promises, meet your deadlines, and deliver quality work. Hold each member of your staff accountable for meeting well-defined project management and instructional design standards.
7. External support and recognition: When your team concentrates on solving important business or organizational needs rather than just delivering programs, you will gain the support and recognition you need to be more successful in future projects.
8. Leadership that facilitates collaboration and motivation: Your leadership in organizing your staff into a training development team is fundamental to the success of your team.
Training Development Team Roles
Training development projects are somewhat complex because they require a variety of unique roles to be fulfilled by the development team. Unfortunately, training staffs often are not organized to fulfill these roles causing important tasks to "fall through the cracks." The result is that your staff does not function as a team and the quality of the work suffers.
The roles listed below are the most common ones required on all training development projects. Ensure that your staff has the required project roles covered for each project and that their roles are defined clearly and communicated.
1. Project Coordinator: Individual responsible for the overall organization of the project, including coordinating communication between staff members, monitoring the schedule, and ensuring all staff members are supported.
2. Instructional Designer: Individual who synthesizes and operationalizes the subject matter expert’s input so the instruction contains the necessary and sufficient content to solve the training problem.
3. Subject Matter Expert: Individual who demonstrates, explains, and validates the relevant content for the solution of a training problem.
4. Trainer: Individual responsible for delivering the training and implementing the instructional design.
5. Target Audience Representatives: Actual students from the target population, past members of the target population, or individuals who have direct knowledge of the target population.
6. Evaluator: Individual responsible for performing the formative and summative evaluation of the instructional program.
7. Media Designer: Individual responsible for advising on the proper media selection and design.
8. Media Specialist: Individual responsible for the development and programming of delivery media (e.g., Web, computer, browser, Flash, video, etc.) .
9. Scriptwriter: Individual responsible for developing the storyboard, including writing the narration or dialog and specifying the visuals.
10. Graphic Artist: Individual responsible for the design and layout of the print and media materials.
Remember: These are roles, not people. For some roles, it may be appropriate to enlist the help of people outside of your department. Often, however, people on your staff will be responsible for performing multiple roles on a project. You must ensure each assignment is clearly understood and accepted.
Secrets of Success (Best Practices)
Here are a few lessons that we have learned working with internal training development staffs and with effective training development teams. Apply these secrets of success to help your team become even more effective.
1. Make sure at least one person on the team has superior writing skills. If it is a large project, have at least two people with superior writing skills.
2. Use the fewest number of people on the task/project that can still get the job done and represent the stakeholders.
3. Assign only one person as the primary writer for each product within a project (e.g., study guide, video, etc.)
4. When the project needs to be done quickly, use highly qualified people rather than more people. Then, ensure the team members are supported fully.
5. Make competency the most important criteria when forming a team for a task or project. List the strengths of each of your staff members. Use the list of strengths to combine staff members into effective project teams.
6. Find a temporary "ringer" who can be a member of a project team. Your staff can learn a lot from working shoulder-to-shoulder with a consultant or a very experienced instructional designer on a project. They will learn project management, training development techniques, and develop new competencies they can use in future projects—all while developing a successful training project.
In these tough economic times, we are all being forced to do more with less. It is a challenge to create effective training programswhen our staff is smaller and less experienced than ever. Hopefully, these tips and techniques can help you to put your staff on the fast track to better performance and better results.
Dr. Paul Swan has been designing and developing training for 20 years. He is an associate of Darryl L. Sink & Associates, Inc. (DSA), a firm specializing in human performance consulting, custom training development, and instructional design and e-learning workshops. E-mail him at pswan@dsink.com.
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