Case Study: Using a custom designed SharePoint portal system to create self-maintaining systems and workflows in a learning and development organization

I spent four years building a large instructional design and development organization in a Fortune 300 corporation. For an organization of its size, and agility maintenance of curricula was not only challenging from a design and development standpoint. Administration and project management were also large, complex parts of our work.

Without available budget to hire a small army of admins, we created a system of four SharePoint intranet sites to facilitate automated workflows, project management, archiving of old materials, and learning content management.

 

The screenshot below is taken from the Internal site, and shows internal navigation to performance support resources for my staff.

 

In addition to teambuilding, and performance support, we also stored self- and manager-created employee performance and productivity data in our Internal site.

 

This is a shot, below, from our Workflow site, of a technician curriculum under construction. Here you can see module titles, which expand to show objectives, and other data, a document library, and discussion of project specs and relevant ID theory.

Without the ability to very rapidly create document libraries, custom flat files, discussions, and approval surveys, and make them all work together, a project like this would require extensive manual administration.

 

To prevent wheel reinvention, our Archive site stored old course materials, often scavenged for spare parts, as well as old staff performance data.