On time. Within budget. What they need (even if that changes!). These are moving targets, and yet you’re expected to deliver all three. The software development industry is embracing agile methods to address these issues, and there is much that the eLearning development world can learn from it. Agile provides a framework for adapting to change as it happens and working with the client to deliver content that learners need most.

Learner-driven, adaptive, engaging, future-proof, innovative, and business-aligned—you need to deliver all this and more! Constructing a strategy to match, though, is tough, pushing L&D to redefine its role in the business. However, by applying a performance lens to learning, you can engage everyone from the board to new starters, construct a holistic strategy, and put learning at the heart of the workflow.

The Internet is a terrific knowledge repository. The sheer size of the content stored on the web is unimaginable. Within organizational intranets, the amount of content that is available is also impressive, but is it good content? Is it the right content for the right purpose? Is it up to date? Is it understandable? The more you have to ask these questions about online content, the less efficient your search for the right information will be. Even more of a concern is that you might be more likely to find bad content, act on it (believing it is correct), and suffer the consequences.

Content that’s unclear. Links that don’t work. Buttons that aren’t aligned. These things can distract from your eLearning course. You want to make sure your course is good, but if you aren’t careful, you could spend more time in review cycles than it took you to design and build it in the first place. How do you strike a balance between thorough review and your time and cost constraints?

Training professionals work hard to help train employees and produce meaningful behavior change within organizations. But modern cognitive science shows that, in spite of their efforts, people forget most of what they learn. Research indicates startling facts about retention: Within only an hour, people forget 50 percent of what they just learned. A week later, that number jumps to an astonishing 90 percent.

Do you have a subject matter expert (SME) who makes everything more difficult than it needs to be? How about the SME who just doesn’t seem to grasp the work you’re doing together? Or the SME whose idea of dates and deadlines is not at all aligned with the project needs? It isn’t their fault. SMEs are a vital part of the process, and of whether or not the project is a success. However, they don’t always understand that fact because, of course, they already have a “day job.” It is your job to build the plan, communicate it well, and stay on top of the details so they don’t have to.

Large-scale system transformation initiatives are challenging at the best of times. But when you factor in a rollout that involves restructuring, growing existing operations, and establishing new franchise owners to enable strategic expansion and remarkable customer service as part of the initiative, they become substantially more complex. In 2013, Coca-Cola faced this very issue in North America when it needed to replace outdated systems with a common enterprise solution. With an accelerated plan to transition more than 60,000 users to a new operating solution, this initiative required innovative approaches to train and support users rapidly and efficiently.

Learning and performance ecosystems represent a new way of thinking about L&D. Many agree with this approach in concept. But where are the examples? This session showcases a real-life learning and performance ecosystem solution.

Dairy Queen, like many organizations, experiences challenges in knowledge retention following formal training. Dairy Queen needed a strategy that would equip learners with tools and resources to help boost learning retention of role-specific knowledge and skills throughout all learning stages. What Dairy Queen required was a rapid development process to create role-based learning tools to remedy these challenges and address real-time training needs of thousands of Dairy Queen franchisee employees.

Learning and development professionals strive to help people get better at what they do every day. But acquiring knowledge isn’t enough to improve performance. In order to do better work tomorrow than they did today, people need to change their behaviors. That’s when learning becomes effective and gets results. However, behavior change is hard. It takes time, energy, and commitment. The only way to keep people engaged in the project of real transformation is to give them an experience they love.

Are you meeting all Five Moments of Learning Need? You already teach the moments of “new” and “more.” But what are you doing to support the moment of “apply,” when your learners become performers and have to use the knowledge you taught them? What about the moment of “solve,” when things are broken and need to be fixed? Or the moment of “change,” when they have to unlearn old habits?

When a new director of diversity and inclusion reviewed the courses offered at Johns Hopkins Medicine International, the eLearning development team was surprised to find out just how much work its content needed in order to be current and inclusive. Staff had thought they were practicing diversity and inclusion at a high level, but this review showed that they were way off the mark. Both this review and feedback from newer members of the team helped the eLearning development team realize the nuances to incorporating diversity and challenged them to do better.

It’s not uncommon to focus on trying to find the perfect project management tools for a project. With all the exciting options out there, it’s easy to be tempted. However, research shows that the most important component of project management isn’t the tools you use but is, instead, your mental game. Do you choose collaboration over control? Sponsor communication over hiding, purpose over tasks, or trust over politics? Do your stakeholders believe you can do it? Learn how to get your mental game right to drive project success.

People never want for information at home. When they have a problem, they search the Internet or post a question on social media. When they go to work, everything changes. Vital knowledge remains hidden in a variety of silos. Organizations are unable to leverage the same knowledge-sharing behaviors that drive resources like YouTube and Wikipedia. Employees are then left to fend for themselves—often with negative results.

As communications and technologies continue to change, there is increased pressure on corporate workers to keep up with these changes, learn on the job, improve time to competency, and increase productivity. In addition, demographics are changing. Older workers are retiring, resulting in a loss of valuable internal corporate knowledge, while organizations must continually hire new, less experienced workers to replace them. There is a need to capture and share the knowledge that helps new workers improve performance and continue to learn over time. Using social media at work can be a compelling solution to this dilemma, offering informal learning solutions on a just-in-time basis.