Author: Ing. Luis D. Arguello Araya, MPM, PMP. When managing a project, you need to document both the customer's expectations as well as the project's history, based on important decisions that will be made along the way. To do so, you can use the process groups that are suggested and globally accepted as best practices in project management and then develop templates that you can use during the project's lifecycle. You can choose which documents to use depending on the project's characteristics, but here's a list of the most common templates you should consider: Initiation Business Case: To justify the financial investment in your project, you need to write a Business Case. It lists the costs and benefits, so everyone knows what the return on investment (ROI) will be. Feasibility Study: Before you kick-off your project, you will need to determine whether your project is feasible, using a Feasibility Study. Project Charter: You will then need to document the objectives, scope, team, timeframes and deliverables in a Project Charter. Planning Project Plan: Create a Project Plan listing all of the tasks required to undertake your project from start to finish. Every task must be scheduled, so you know what needs to be done and when. Resource Plan: Next, you will need to plan your resources by documenting the money, equipment and materials needed for your project. Quality Plan: Set quality targets, so that the project deliverables meet your customer's expectations. Risk Plan: All of the risks need to be documented as well as their likelihood and impact on the project. Communication Plan: Plan your communications, so that you send the right messages to the right people, at the right time. Execution Time Management: use Timesheets to track time spent on your project. Then update your Project's Plan with your Timesheet data to see whether your project is still within schedule. Cost Management: Track your costs using Expense Forms. Every expense is formally logged and approved, so that you can confirm at any time that you are currently under budget. Change Management: Document each change on the project scope, using Change Forms. So you are able to control change ensuring that your project is always on track. Risk Management: Use Risk Forms to document each risk associated with the project. You can then manage project risk carefully to guarantee that nothing will affect the project's schedule or budget. Issue Management: As you move further along the project's schedule, you will see that issues tend to come up along the way, that's why you will need to research its impact on the project and then write it down on an Issue Form. You can then begin performing the necessary tasks to solve it quickly. Closure Project Closure Report: When your project is complete, document all of the actions needed for a proper closure. This includes releasing teams and suppliers, equipment and materials. Post Project Review: After your project has been closed, you can review its success and document the results for your sponsor. That way, you can show that all of the objectives were met and that the project was delivered on time and within budget. SHIFT and your project's documentation SHIFT allows you to store in a single location all the documents that, as a project manager, you are going to develop for you eLearning project. Keeping your PM documents in a single spot is a great way to control access and versioning of those documents. To do this, simply go to the Course Documentation section and then choose the "Project Management Documents" category. After doing so, you will be able to upload into the system as many documents as you need, considering the recommendations we have provided in this article to plan and keep control of your project. By completing each of the documents suggested here, you can boost your eLearning project's chain of success. Take advantage of SHIFT's functionality as a document repository, this will allow you to store important documents in one place and also to keep your team and customers informed at all times.

Author: Andrea Cruz, Implementation and Support Manager ELearning products, such as SHIFT, are well structured tools that provide the end user with an interactive form of knowledge transfer. In order to assure your eLearning project's success, you must combine a powerful, collaborative authoring tool with an ideal strategy for its implementation. Experience and theory lead us to the same conclusion: implementing eLearning requires a series of essential activities and organizational changes which are considered "success factors" in your company's eLearning strategy. Planning is the starting point in the process of embracing the eLearning methodology, and it should begin by analyzing your company's business environment, which will help you decide whether or not you will need to be prepared and make changes in case there is any resistance or lack of motivation from your staff. There are several "key success factors" for the implementation resulting from proper planning: Corporate objective training Corporate culture training Management or department levels in charge of user training Start training with firm leaders Easy training access Policies and procedures Training on competencies and partner personal development eLearning internal marketing Follow-up Recognition Proper planning can go a long way when it comes to implementation, but remember that not all companies undergo the same situations, that's why whenever you are thinking of taking the leap towards eLearning be sure to have all your team on board advocating for organization's new training methodology and all the changes that might come with it.

Author: Ing. Luis D. Arguello, MPM. The first step towards managing your eLearning project's finances is to define its budget and the budget's control process. It can be summarized as follows: Â Step 1: List the project´s financial expenses The first step when defining a financial plan and setting a project's budget, is to identify all of the different expenses that are likely to be incurred throughout its lifecycle. Typically, most eLearning projects spend the majority of their budget on labor but may also include purchasing, leasing, renting or contracting resources. Word of advice: take into account the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). This TCO takes into account not only the initial development cost, but also maintenance and updates through the useful life of the project. Step 2: Quantify the financial expenses Once you have identified a detailed list of the project's expenses throughout its life cycle, the next step is to forecast the unit cost of each expense type listed. The unit cost is the rate of a single unit of a particular item. For instance, the unit cost for labor may be calculated as the price per hour supplied. Now that you have gone through steps 1 and 2 listed above and you have forecasted the total amount of people, materials and other expenses needed to develop the eLearning project, you have defined the its budget. A best practice will be to find back up funding. This is additional funding that, if needed, can be used to deliver the project. Step 3: Develop schedule of expenditures The expense schedule enables the project manager to calculate the total cost of undertaking the project on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You can calculate it, based on your project's particular needs. This step consists on figuring out when the expenses will take place during the project´s timeline. By doing so, you can get an overview of your project´s cash flow, which tells you the amount of money you need at a given period of time during the its length. Step 4: Define the financial tracking process Now that you have an expenses schedule, you will need to define a process for monitoring and controlling it. This step is oriented to develop the mechanism that will track every expense, hopefully, on a periodic basis. If you can get your team to wait until an expense is approved before incurring in it, then you can control each expense more easily. In order to track the team´s operating cost, you will need to assign an hourly rate for each team member. The total amount charged for the hours undertaken by those resources must be shown in your schedule. Step 5: Track and manage Track, in real time (highly desirable) work effort accomplished versus your schedule. If you find that you are starting to spend more than you have budgeted, analyze the options you have to stay within budget: Re-forecast your expenses and present a new budget for approval. Start reducing costs immediately. This means spending less to get the same job done. Or alternatively, see if your sponsors will agree to a reduced scope for the project, so that you have less to produce. Start using your backup funding to get you through the project's crux. Cash flow management requires you to always have enough funds available to cover your spending over the months ahead and track your spending at least every week. SHIFT and your eLearning project's budget How can SHIFT help you manage your eLearning project's budget? At first, as a project manager you might think SHIFT is devoted to help instructional designers do their jobs better. However, SHIFT includes tools that will help you keep your project under budget: -SHIFT will give you visibility for the whole development process. -SHIFT will dramatically reduce your TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), driving down the variability in maintenance and update costs to manageable and predictable level: no hidden maintenance costs. -SHIFT allows you to assign tasks to different team members of your project and keep track of their progress within development environment. You will also keep track of the status of each task (really helpful in closing up all pending items before publishing a course). -SHIFT will give you real time status on each piece of work to be done in order to finish your project on time and on budget.

Author: Juan Carlos Vidal, eLearning Resource Manager Templates allow organizations to produce courses in a small fraction of the time it would take to do traditionally. According to our experience on more than 1600 courses developed with SHIFT, using SHIFT's templates saves at least 50% on labor costs and up to 75% on development schedules, consistently. There are several misconceptions around using templates. Top on the list is that templates reduce creativity: quite the opposite I think: having access a very large library of templates gives the Instructional Designer the tremendous flexibility of being able to choose from a very diverse, best-of-breed set of preconfigured interactions. It also gives our designers access to previously complex or too-expensive to develop interactions. Templates actually increase flexibility, they're easy to update, and they provide consistency across the enterprise. They can also reduce costs, training time, and reduce variability due to programming bugs. Templates allow our organization to: Incorporate best practices and effectiveness to the learning process: each new template goes through several effectiveness and usability tests before they're released to the production process. Its designing process incorporates best practices in usability from the ground up. Reduce error by exhaustive technical tests: before a template is released to the production process, it goes through several tests in different platforms and conditions in order to eliminate programming bugs. Be dynamic, by constant improvement and updates: templates can be improved regularly to meet technological and instructional requirements as well as the client's needs. These are easily tracked and updated. Templates mean results for our organization: dramatically reduce costs, time to market and most significantly, give the Instructional Designer more power, more choices, and much more independence.

A few years back, a group of entrepreneurs were pondering at the question every e Learning organization has: what is the right balance between cost, development time and quality. No organization is immune from this dilemma. The entrepreneurs were trying to figure out a way to break the paradigm and find a way where organizations would be able to reduce cost, development time while maintaining or even augmenting quality and reliability. It was no surprise to anybody that labor had, by far, the largest impact in overall cost and on time-to-market. The analysis took many different paths, but in the end, the conclusion was that a method to reduce labor without affecting the end product was needed. A detailed value chain analysis for the e Learning development process was conducted and several conclusions were reached: a- The instructional design process is critical and where the learning strategy is formulated and to a significant degree, executed. b-The graphic design process is essential for the user experience; however, parallel to the creative aspect, there are underlying mechanical, repetitive, time consuming processes. c- The programming stage, needed for most things more complex than a page turner, was mostly mechanical, prone to wrong interpretations, programming bugs and human error. The group also interviewed end customers and created a value matrix, where different stages were given different "value score". The result was that the end user appreciated an engaging story, dynamic, interactive and effective experience, usable interface, but did not care much how many work hours it took to design the interface or how many days it took to program the functionality. The user just cared for a great learning experience. A bit unfair for the development team, but users pressed for a better product, faster and as always, with a limited budget. After going through several options, the group chose the winning solution was radical process automation through technology. By automating those time consuming, repetitive tasks, organizations would be able to dramatically save labor, be able to deliver much more quickly and reduce human error. Next step: creating the technology..

We spend a lot of time supporting our customers when they're working on their initial projects for SH!FT, so we can see a lot of transformations taking place, especially in terms of how they think about publishing learning content across the organization, and how to take advantages of some real time-saving techniques. While a lot of change management purists and life coaches might espouse the approach "change one thing at a time", I'm inclined to suggest that if you are going to make change to the tools you use to build e-learning content, you should also include a change to the processes you use to make the build happen. If you're already working in a rapid e-learning framework what we're suggesting here isn't necessarily new because you're already thinking about some more rapid approaches to development, but a lot of folks - not all of them, but a sizeable contingent - are still using the tried & true standby of "ADDIE" when it comes to developing e-learning content. While I won't engage in a detailed criticism of ADDIE here (a Google search of "Criticisms of ADDIE" will yield substantial results), the simple fact of the matter is that the waterfall/cascade nature of ADDIE is too linear and non-scalable for the kinds of volume demands we frequently face in e-learning content development. Although we're certainly strong advocates for SH!FT and the concept of rapid e-learning development, you won't realize the advantage of the platform unless you're making an equally strong commitment to adapting your processes as well. We compare the linear approach of ADDIE with the concurrent activity model known as Rapid Prototyping.