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

This is admittedly, not a very sexy aspect of instructional design and development, but folks interested in automation of workflows, and data-backed management may find this interesting.

Deming said, "You can't manage what you can't measure" and this is especially true of knowledge work, where you can't really see at a glance what people are doing.

Managing knowledge workers with industrial era approaches can be toxic. For example, is that guy who takes frequent walks and sometimes surfs non-work related content goofing off, or is he a highly productive team member, who works in short spurts? Looking around, everyone is typing and mousing, but are they IM-ing friends for a break, or working? Without data, it's easy to jump to faulty conclusions.

Beyond productivity issues, how do you keep track of quality when you can barely keep up with demand for instructional materials, and when creating tracking systems, how do you avoid creating additional clunky overhead for your already busy teams?

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.

 

These separate sites all worked together as a cohesive system to assist us in keeping track of projects, and making sure staff got better feedback.

These days, I use relational databases for this type of work, as development tools have improved, but SharePoint is still very useful for mocking these systems up. I think that the bottom line here is that integrated, well fitted project and performance management systems are important for any organization that values speed, morale, and efficiency.