Are You an ISD, a Business Process Engineer, or Both?

How often do you find that the training you are being askedto develop is actually a workaround for broken business processes, missingpolicies, inadequate standards, or poorly designed systems? These may often beroot causes of the human performance problems you are being asked to addresswith a training solution.

In order to produce effective training, you will probablyneed to investigate and identify these problems. Ironically, that puts you in aunique position to recommend solutions that may eliminate the need fortraining, or at least change its focus. However, you may feel that workflowdesign problems are out of scope. Should your role as an ISD limit your focusto training?

The Experience API (xAPI) can help you address problems forwhich training alone may not provide a lasting, effective solution: problemswhere business processes are not working as well as they should. xAPI helps youremove barriers between learning and work, and between training and businessprocess improvement.

Following is a fictitious scenario illustrating a mission-criticalbusiness problem. We will explain how you can use xAPI to trackworkplace performance and use your findings to optimize the design of policies,procedures, and systems that are part of the work environment.

The business challenge

Getsum Insurance has been insuring large businesses fordecades. Its growth strategy centers on expansion of its marine policyunderwriting. Marine insurance covers land- and ocean-based transport andcargo. The company has built a reputation for speedy marine policy underwritingand claims settlement. This reputation has attracted some very large accounts operatingin port cities and inland transportation hubs around the world. Underwritingthese policies is complicated, requiring general expertise in marine insuranceand specialized knowledge of regulatory requirements in each state, province,and country to be covered by a policy.

Over the next five years, Getsum Insurance anticipates adramatic loss of highly skilled employees in its Marine Insurance division whoare nearing retirement age. At the same time, the company faces stiff industrycompetition for experienced marine agents and underwriters. The success of itsgrowth strategy depends on the company’s ability to develop, retain, andattract marine insurance talent.

Your assignment

A few years ago, Getsum Insurance established a center ofexcellence called the Marine Solution Center (MSC). The MSC charter is toprovide information resources and tools to the marine insurance division tohelp agents, underwriters, and claims adjusters be successful while maintainingthe company’s reputation for speed and effectively managing risk.

Senior management has noticed that the MSC has the potentialto provide a rich professional support environment and is a valuable asset tohelp the company attract, develop, and retain marine talent. However, for somereason the MSC has been underutilized. Senior management assumes that peoplearen’t using it simply because they don’t know about it. So they’ve askedL&D to create a mandatory course that must be taken by all marine insuranceemployees to introduce the MSC, describe its benefits, and promote its use. TheL&D director has put you in charge of this important project. The MSC iscurrently being used far below its capacity, and management assumes that yourintervention will increase its utilization and meet the company’s goals.

Needs analysis

You begin by taking an MSC content inventory. You find thatmuch of the content is too generalized to provide much value to someone whoneeds help underwriting a policy or processing a claim.

You interview about a dozen marine employees who have usedthe MSC recently. The consensus is that the MSC is a good idea, but that it ismore useful to people who are new to marine underwriting. Experienced marinepractitioners see it as a waste of time and would not recommend the MSC toothers.

After conducting a focus group with MSC staff, you find thatit is run sort of like a library where they select and organize content bytopic. You learn that there are defined competencies for agents, underwriters,and claims adjustors, the three key job roles in the marine division. They havemapped MSC content to these competencies, but no one is sure whether themapping is effective or useful to marine employees.

Findings and recommendations

Table 1 summarizes your key findings and recommendations.

 

Your recommendation: improve the process and measure the impact

Based on the findings of your needs analysis, you explain tothe L&D director that creating training to promote the MSC in its currentstate is not a good idea. Awareness training may get more employees interestedin accessing the MSC initially, but based on current use patterns, they are notlikely to return. In fact, mandating participation in awareness training mayactually create a negative perception of the MSC by getting more people toexperience its shortcomings first hand.

Instead, you recommend overhauling the MSC standards,policies, and processes for managing content to ensure MSC offerings are betteraligned with its charter and that they address the real needs of marinepractitioners. You advocate the use of xAPI to monitor and continually improvethe MSC’s value, utilization, and business impact.

You can track metrics using xAPI and visualize them in adashboard. These metrics will enable the organization to continuously monitorhow much content is available related to each competency, the balance betweenhigher-level information and more specific performance support content, whatcontent is being used and valued most, whether content adequately covers areaswhere competency gaps and deficiencies have been identified, and whether usersare finding what they are searching for. By monitoring these areas, theorganization can take decisive action to continually refine, expand, andimprove the MSC’s value to marine division employees.

The L&D director finds your analysis and recommendationsto be compelling. She asks you to join her in a presentation to seniormanagement. After the presentation, you have gained the sponsorship and fundingneeded to implement your recommended solutions.

You will need to develop an xAPI model in order toaccomplish the goals of your project. With the right metrics in place, you caneasily identify content gaps and deficiencies and work with subject matterexperts to address them.

The xAPI solution

You decide to embed xAPI tracking into the MSC web andmobile user interfaces. The first step is to explore the MSC’s content metadatataxonomy. MSC content is tagged by three parameters: content type, job role,and competency. A single content item may be tagged with multiple values foreach parameter. There are five possible values for content type: rules and regulations,policies and procedures, sample work outputs, templates and tools, and informationalmaterial. There are three job roles: agent, underwriter, and claims adjuster.There are 20 competencies for each job role.

Based on your understanding of the MSC content metadatataxonomy, you create a diagram (Figure 1) to illustrate how xAPI can be appliedto generate the metrics listed earlier in Table 1. The diagram contains allthree parts of an xAPI activity statement: actor, verb, and object. The actorsrepresent the various types of marine division employees who are MSC users. Theverbs describe the actions users perform as they interact with MSC content. Theobjects represent the various types of content available in the MSC.

Figure 1: The xAPI model

Note that some of the actions users take could be describedusing the same verb. For example, the word ratedrefers to MSC users rating of content, but it could also refer to marinedivision employees rating their own competency in the self-assessment. In ourmodel, we decided to use self-assessedas the verb for people rating their own competencies because we want todistinguish that ratings are about content and self-assessment is about people.

When we create visualizations of the xAPI data, thedifference between people rating content and people self-assessing competenciesis clearer than it would be if we were to use the verb rated in both contexts. If we were to use the same verb, when weaggregate data for the visualizations we would find ourselves needing to takean extra step to sort all ratedstatements to separate the data that is about competencies from those aboutcontent.

Figure 2 shows an example of an xAPI statement based on thismodel. 

Figure 2: Sample xAPI statement

Preparing for implementation

Thereare five major steps that you must take to prepare your solution forimplementation.

1. Develop an online self-assessment that marinedivision employees are required to take annually to rate themselves against thecompetencies associated with their job role.
2. Change the configuration of the MSC to activatea previously unused system feature that enables users to rate content using a Likertscale.
3. Identify the trigger for each xAPI activitystatement in the MSC user interface and add the xAPI statements to system’scode.

4. Create a dashboard (Figure 3) using heat mapsfor MSC administrators to visualize the xAPI tracking results.

   
   Figure 3: xAPI dashboard

5. The fifth, and perhaps most important step is todefine and document a new set of guidelines (Figure 4) and processes for MSCstaff to manage content using the usage data in xAPI dashboard.

Figure 4: New contentmanagement guidelines

Conclusion

The xAPI provides a powerful approach toreimagine your ISD role and make changes that go beyond training. In thisscenario, you have used the xAPI to effect lasting changes to processes in thebusiness environment including introduction of a new competency self-assessment,MSC system enhancements, content management guidelines and processes, and adata dashboard for monitoring MSC effectiveness. Withthese business process improvements in place, the MSC is not likely to requirethis type of overhaul again in the future. You can be confident that byoffering more relevant content and better search results, the MSC willcontinually adapt to the needs of marine division employees. Sometimes being anISD or a business process engineer is not an either/or proposition. In order tobe effective in your job, you must sometimes be both.