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.

In this session, you will learn about the agile project management methods adapted specifically for the instructional design and development “Lot Like Agile Methods Approach” (LLAMA) and how you can use them on the job. You’ll learn about the tools and supplies you need and how to choose a project to pilot. You’ll also see how agile supports estimating, planning, and managing tasks in an eLearning design and development project.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to build the business case for agile, LLAMA specifically, and iterative development with SMEs, project sponsors, and your own team
• How to kick off projects, create a shared definition of scope, and create action-focused eLearning that people actually want to take
• How to estimate and plan a project so you arrive on time and on budget
• How to build the environment to support an agile project team

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Click here for the session trailer

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.

During this session, you will explore “More Than Performance Support,” a five-point framework for creating a performance environment. This plan focuses on conditions (the culture, people, and environment), goal setting (how to share and evolve strategic goals), technology (the tools and how they are used), community (dialogue, collaboration, and visibility), and people (facilitating and accelerating performance). This framework can help you diagnose how performance-ready your organization is and what short- and long-term steps you need to take to get there. You will also receive a takeaway guide to help you apply this model in your work.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to apply the five-point framework to your context by exploring practical case studies
• How to diagnose your current learning environment, and where you need to focus to drive performance
• How learning needs align to real metrics that matter to the business
• About the skills that are required of today’s learning professionals
• Why communities are essential and how to build successful ones

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced project managers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
Learning portals, learner-generated content tools (including iMovie, learn.ist, Microsoft Snip, and Piktochart), iBeacons, mobile and wearables, virtual worlds, and VR.

Click here for the session trailer

Each project, whether agile or ADDIE, micro or massive, has components that must align in order to have a successful outcome. The first two to three weeks of a project set the stage for communication, vision, expectations, content preparation, and rapport. A misfire in the beginning can lead to extended time frames, disappointment, and lost profit.

In this session, you’ll learn tried-and-true ways to set your project up for success. You’ll learn which steps to take with your team prior to the client kickoff meeting. You’ll receive a PowerPoint template for kickoff sessions with clients. You will explore the six steps of content readiness and preparation and how to walk through them with a client. You’ll also create five-second, 30-second, and five-minute creative pitch presentations that generate enthusiasm and a common vision.

In this session, you will learn:

• About steps to take with your team prior to the client kickoff meeting
• About the six steps of content readiness and preparation
• How to create a pitch presentation
• An agile approach to prioritizing client requests

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, project managers, managers, and directors; a project management, leadership, or instructional design background is helpful but not required.

Technology discussed in this session:
Various project management portals, such as Teamwork PM.

“Curation” has reached buzzword status. But while everyone’s talking about it, not everyone is really sure how to do it. What does curation actually mean, and why is it important to your organization? While it’s important to know that curation has the potential to transform your approach to learning, you also need to understand the details of what it takes to make it work.

In this session, you’ll walk through a step-by-step process for building a robust curation strategy. You’ll explore the ins and outs of how to create an effective strategy for your organization, including what questions you need to ask, what tools you need to explore, and how to build a strategy that is detailed enough to create a solid impact but flexible enough to take you into the future. Finally, you’ll look at the broader roles involved in your curation strategy and discuss whether or not it should really be a one-person job at your company.

In this session, you will learn:

• The basics of how to curate content for learning
• How to determine your curation objectives
• About the difference between personal and organizational curation
• About the difference between collaborative and individual curation

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

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.

This session will explore the rationale and challenges of content curation and review a number of strategies for assuring your content is curated appropriately. You will learn the importance of becoming a good content curator in addition to being a good content creator, and find out how curators are less focused on finding more content than on making sure they have the right content. Finally, you will learn more about the focuses of content curation: accuracy, relevance, usefulness, and value of knowledge assets.

In this session, you will learn:

• What content curation is, and why it is so critical to learning and performance
• About the role of technology, users, and authors in content curation
• How to avoid risking poor content curation
• About six approaches to content curation

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

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?

In this session, you’ll learn how to plan for and manage reviews for instructional design, content, usability, functionality, and graphic design. You’ll explore how to set up the right systems and processes, as well as how to manage the many opinions and expectations that your stakeholders might have.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to plan for the appropriate number of reviews by the right people
• What guidance to give about what each person should be looking for
• How to set clear expectations about the scope of reviews
• How to effectively estimate and communicate the impact of out-of-scope changes
• How to manage all the little details needed to implement requested changes

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, project managers, and managers. 

Technology discussed in this session:
eLearning review platforms, Microsoft Word, and Google spreadsheets.

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.

In this session, neuropsychologist Art Kohn will review four techniques that can help you overcome the forgetting curve. These techniques include booster quizzing, social elaboration, strategic coaching, and depth of processing. You’ll explore how these techniques can be easily incorporated into your training programs and dramatically improve learning and retention.

In this session, you will learn:

• Valuable techniques that overcome the forgetting curve and maximize retention
• How to incorporate booster learning into your existing live and online training
• Why periodic polls and quizzes enhance recall
• How social learning can be used to boost memory after a training session has finished
• How to incorporate post-training coaching—a technique that involves minimum effort and maximum gain

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

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.

This session will cover communication, strategies for effectively meeting with SMEs and stakeholders, and how to map the process(es) from start to finish. You will learn tips for leading an effective project kickoff event and how to deal with feedback, scope creep, and fallout. Finally, you will learn some of the best practices for wrapping up a project with your SME.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to hold an effective SME and project kickoff event
• Methods for wrapping up the project with the SME
• How to cover lessons learned, evaluation, and handling feedback
• How to map the process and use it for effectively communicating with SMEs

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

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.

A collaborative platform for learning and performance support was required to achieve this feat, and Assima was selected in 2013 as the solution provider and consultant to enable the ambitious goals of this initiative. You will see how Coke used cloning technology to dramatically streamline the development and deployment of thousands of diverse training modules. You will learn techniques used to put learning within two clicks or less for thousands of users, and you’ll learn about the tactics employed to supplement live training environments. Finally, you will learn how Coke is leveraging a lean L&D team to successfully implement an electronic performance support system (EPSS).

In this session, you will learn:

• How to leverage existing resources and technology to deploy a lean but scalable learning and performance support model that supports a complex, distributed, and varied audience
• Tactics to sell the right solution internally, including gaining executive sponsorship and building a solid internal business case
• Strategies for streamlining large-scale content creation and maintenance
• How to leverage performance support technology and best practices to drive cost savings
• Methods of building and sustaining long-lasting partnerships that drive success across various cultures
• How to improve time to competency by using real-time analytics and reporting through an EPSS

Audience:
Novice and intermediate project managers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Have you ever been asked, “How do you know they’re learning?” It’s always unnerving when the higher-ups start questioning the validity of a training program that you built. How would you like to be armed with solid hard and soft data metrics that prove the effectiveness of learning and performance beyond the shadow of a doubt? Deeper learning analytics like this have always been a challenge—until now.

In this session, you will learn how Autotrader discovered new ways to guide and measure performance when the company completely reimagined its onboarding program for new sales employees. From surveying past participants and managers to updating all its learning objectives, Autotrader identified the key performance indicators that addressed the most important knowledge and skills all new hires needed to possess. By learning from this case study, discovering how to ask the right questions of your senior leadership team to uncover what they want out of an onboarding program, and then tracking and analyzing metrics that align to those goals, you’ll create training that you can clearly show the results of.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to examine key hard and soft performance indicators
• About the right questions to ask to uncover expectations
• How you can analyze learning performance quickly
• What solid learning metrics and analysis you can use to evaluate onboarding success

Audience:
Novice designers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
Microsoft Excel, survey tools, and LMS platforms.

Training and development in enterprises continues to change, and some of the field’s more recent challenges involve volume. It’s difficult to keep up with the increasing demand for ad hoc knowledge sharing and training requests. Also, there’s a growing need for training that is specific to more niche audiences (such as regional content) and that central teams struggle to support. However, there’s a solution to both these issues that’s starting to take off: user-generated learning content. But what are the pros and cons to this solution, and how can you ensure that it will bring value to your company?

In this session, you’ll hear the insight gained from recent research into user-generated content. This research used interviews with over 50 eLearning managers to uncover how this emerging training trend actually works in the real world. You’ll discuss the outcome of these conversations and look at a number of use cases to gain insight into the strategic decisions learning managers are making today in regard to user-generated content. In addition, you’ll explore a case study from Nielsen in which the designers themselves will share their experience implementing and supporting myTraining Builder: a toolkit designed to help Nielsen users develop their own training solutions.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the four key reasons that companies are leveraging user-generated content
• About two situations in which user-generated content isn’t a great fit
• Best practices for implementing user-generated content in your own organization
• How Nielsen’s talent engagement and development team strategically adopted user-generated content as part of its approach

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
SharePoint, Easygenerator, Skype for Business, and Nielsen’s LMS.

It used to be that people only worried about testing online training lessons on Internet Explorer and Netscape. Those days are long gone. Today, there are myriad testing challenges due to the vast number of hardware devices and display environments that learners are using. Developing and testing lessons to ensure that they will work for everyone is an incredible challenge. This session explores a variety of quality assurance test strategies that are currently being used in software engineering corporations to test their products, and shows how you can carry over those strategies into the world of eLearning and mLearning.

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.

In this session, you will explore the analysis and design methods and view the product of an innovative learning and performance ecosystem project. The example comes from a multinational industrial manufacturing company that recognized that it had excessively high inventory costs. You will learn how L&D conducted a thorough needs analysis, harvested knowledge from experts, and developed a solution using five ecosystem components: performance support, knowledge management, access to experts, social networking and collaboration, and structured learning.

In this session, you will learn:

• How L&D reframed a training project into a broader ecosystem project
• How a Level IV business metric was identified
• A proven process for analyzing and prioritizing different aspects of the business problem
• How the ecosystem solution addressed the problem
• Valuable lessons from this project

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, directors, and senior leaders.

Technology discussed in this session:
Learning management systems, document management systems, knowledge management systems, expertise location and management systems, communities of practice, enterprise search, inference engines, performance support applications, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

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.

In this case-study session, you will learn how Dairy Queen defined and implemented a strategy for scoping projects using rapid design and development techniques to create on-demand, role-based microlearning, simulations, and other video-based learning tools. Learn how this framework enabled business owners to articulate specific training needs within a limited scope and timeline. Additionally, you will learn about a mechanism for business owners to select from an assortment of pre-defined themes and design elements for the project. Within this framework, designers and developers are able to efficiently gather necessary project requirements, design elements, functional components, and content required to rapidly produce the final deliverable.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to create a framework that will meet strategic and budgetary objectives while building and expanding your training library
• How to adapt and fine-tune your instructional design process to support rapid development projects
• How to implement rapid development techniques to efficiently produce targeted learning deliverables
• How to increase learner confidence by delivering on-demand, role-based training throughout all learning stages

Audience:
Novice designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
Articulate Storyline 2, PowerPoint, and Camtasia.

Learning professionals often are not presented with the ideal infrastructure to make sure they get the right learning to the right people in the right format and, most importantly, at the right time. Companies are also moving at lightning speed, which means the need to navigate not only existing, but evolving, learning infrastructures is critical for the success of your programs and your people.

In this session, you’ll take a look at high-level strategies for identifying what tools and systems are already in place at your company (such as wikis, LMSs, house-built tools, and resources) and discuss best practices for leveraging the right tools at the right time for the right audience. This session will challenge the notion that there are systems out there that “do everything,” or that one LMS will solve all of your problems. Instead, you’ll discover how a true learning ecosystem needs to complement the complexities of how people learn and develop themselves.

In this session, you will learn:

• Why no learning ecosystem is perfect
• Who the unsung heroes of your learning ecosystem are
• How to leverage the right systems for the right audience and the right initiative
• How to navigate the complexities and imperfection of your existing learning ecosystem
• What a real-life example of a successful learning ecosystem looks like

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
Twitter, LMS (Saba Cloud), social learning and curation tools (Pathgather), ILT scheduler, internal wiki (Confluence), and WordPress.

Online and social learning reduces the cost of training, expands the ability to reach a larger audience for your content, and increases the speed at which learning experiences can be accessed and offered. Because of these growing complexities, though, it’s increasingly important to ensure that you’re looking at both how these ever-increasing types of content interconnect and how your learning architecture scales with the business needs of your organization.

In this session, you’ll find out more about the requirements you’ll need to consider to adopt new approaches to learning (such as blended, informal, mobile, and social). Through exploring topics such as the link between performance and learning, how new platforms and approaches can contribute to collaboration between learners, and how to use both synchronous and asynchronous content effectively, you’ll gain insight into the key factors you’ll want to consider when creating your learning ecosystem strategy.

In this session, you will learn:

• How learning paths will push people past compliance and “required” learning
• About new platforms that exist to give employees the opportunity to innovate through enhanced collaboration with peers and/or allow them to see new ideas emerge through informal learning activities
• About the link between performance and learning
• How using both asynchronous and synchronous content can give additional flexibility to your ecosystem

Audience:
Intermediate managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
Social platforms; performance support platforms; eLearning, video, and mobile learning; learning management systems; and HRIS system integration.

Your workforce and clients are mobile—is your content? VitalSource Technologies will present a session on the development and execution of successful strategies for the digital distribution of content. The expertise behind this presentation is culled from more than 20 years of experience working with hundreds of content publishers, corporations, and educational institutions, and providing content to over 10 million users. As one of the first digital content companies in the marketplace, VitalSource continues to build on its success and lead the market in technology that evolves with its clients’ changing needs.

Today’s companies and professionals need to build the skills that deliver exceptional results and fulfilling careers. The expertise management process combines benchmark-based competency assessments, personalized development plans, and collaborative progress management to deliver professional development that meets the needs of employers while supporting professionals as they build rewarding careers. We will also explore how to deliver this full-cycle process through always-on, easily available cloud solutions that eliminate the need for costly organization-wide implementations of packaged software.

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.

Microlearning, the process of learning complex topics in small, focused segments, meets learners where they are with short, effortless content delivered in the moment it’s needed. In this session, you’ll find out how and why this approach can have a large impact, despite the small size of each piece of content. You’ll also learn more about how to create a microlearning strategy of your own to meet the needs of your audience and the goals of your company.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the engaging power of digestible, point-of-need learning moments
• How microlearning engineers big transformation through tiny learning experiences
• How to create an effective microlearning program that people love
• Why traditional training isn’t enough

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, project managers, managers, directors, and and those responsible for curriculum development.

Given that the role of the eLearning professional has a wide range of possible responsibilities, hiring a person who has the exact set of skills and experience to meet the specific needs of your organization can be daunting. How can you ensure you find individuals who have the expertise needed to function successfully on your team and really hit the ground running?

In this session, you’ll explore the particular competencies you’ll want to look for when hiring a new eLearning professional. You’ll find out more about where to look for qualified candidates and what experience, education, certifications, and training you’ll want your new hire to possess. To help you dig deeper on your candidates’ skill sets, you’ll discuss what to look for in a candidate’s work, approaches to reviewing portfolios, and what questions to ask—including how you can use behavioral interviewing to craft interview questions specific to the position and your department’s needs. And while it’s great to know how to find new talent, it’s even better to not need to hire at all. You’ll finish this session by looking at actions you can take to develop and retain the talented eLearning staff you already have.

In this session, you will learn:

• Where to find qualified eLearning candidates
• How to identify appropriate competencies for your eLearning staffing needs
• How to craft behavioral interviewing questions
• How to review eLearning portfolios
• About actions you can take to develop and retain your current eLearning staff

Audience:
Novice and intermediate managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
eLearning development tools and LMS platforms.

Company changes are hard for most employees, and they can be especially hard for managers caught in the awkward position of having to communicate and enact changes they didn’t initiate. Yet the success of company change is critically tied to managers’ ability to lead their teams through it. Learn about the common challenges facing both managers and the HR and L&D leaders who support them, as well as solutions and lessons learned from people who’ve been there before. You’ll leave with practical ideas to help equip managers to survive, thrive, and lead effectively in tumultuous times. Audience participation is encouraged!

Over the past 15 years, organizations have accumulated massive amounts of digital content in the form of common document types, such as Microsoft Word and PowerPoint formats. Unfortunately, a significant percentage of this content is sitting on servers, undiscoverable, and in some cases irrelevant due to outdated branding, the inclusion of discontinued product and services descriptions, or the exclusion of current and critical information. This session will examine how to breathe life back into your organization’s digital content with a strategic digital transformation, and how to make it more relevant and impactful than ever by implementing a learning transformation strategy.

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?

This session will provide an overview of the Five Moments of Learning Need and how they can extend learning beyond the classroom. The Five Moments concept applies a complete approach to designing learning by blending both formal and informal learning. You will learn a defined process that blends the benefits of deliberate instructional design with the means to influence the “70” and “20” in the 70:20:10 mix. You will learn how to decide what should be the “10” and what should be in the “70” and “20” by correctly identifying the subject matter that can safely be left to informal delivery methods.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the Five Moments of Learning Need concept and how it compares to ADDIE
• How to identify business performance challenges
• About the ideal blend of resources at the task level to ensure sustainment of performance at all Five Moments of Need
• How to accommodate for procedure-based, principle-based, and knowledge-based solutions, as appropriate, in your learning programs

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced designers, developers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
Electronic performance support systems.

eLearning is a diverse and far-reaching field. While eLearning developers work in a variety of environments, few have examined self-employment, and by extension entrepreneurship, as a viable career option. Fear of failure, lack of information on how to start a business, and, perhaps most striking, lack of understanding of the huge opportunity for eLearning developers has led to few eLearning developers taking advantage of opportunities that exist.

In this case study session you will learn a model for eLearning entrepreneurship that has made many practitioners successful. You will build a specific plan, including relevant websites, checklists, and other resources that you can use to become an eLearning entrepreneur. The presenter’s company offers a case study within which you can explore the techniques used to build an eLearning entrepreneurship.

In this session, you will learn:

• The market for eLearning content
• How to sell the same course 20,000 times
• How to create an audience for your content
• The technical requirements for creating eLearning independently
• Why you should give your eLearning away
• How to market your company and yourself
• Topics you can build courses around
• How to transition from a full-time job to a full-time entrepreneur

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers and developers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Udemy.com, OpenSesame.com, Adobe Premiere, and Adobe After Effects.

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.

While representing diverse populations and cultures in eLearning in challenging, there are solutions. In this session, you’ll learn from the journey Johns Hopkins took in improving diversity and inclusion in its courses. You’ll explore why diversity and inclusion are so important, how to add diversity to your online courses, what you can do to build awareness in the workplace and online, and how to make diversity a priority. In this collaborative session, you’ll share your own input about current practices and projects, learn about best practices, and begin the process of strategic improvement.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to add diversity to your courses
• How to identify the benchmarks of diversity and inclusion for your workplace
• Best practices related to diversity

Audience:
Novice and intermediate managers, directors, and senior leaders (VPs, CLOs, executives, etc.).

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.

In this session, you’ll find out how to rethink your approach to project management by focusing on the mental side of this work. Using research from Tim Gallwey (author of The Inner Game of Work), Randy Englund (co-author of Project Sponsorship), and Johanna Rothman and Michael Mah (with Cutter Consortium), you’ll see why a significant mindset change is necessary to drive more successful project outcomes. You’ll also discover what you need to do now in order to manage your projects more effectively in the future.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the five critical success factors that research shows drive project success
• How to think differently about the project sponsor role and enable, rather than fight with, your sponsor
• Why you need to apply the critical concept of purpose/context to a project
• About the unhappy side effects of control and sign-off and what you can do to reduce them
• Why you only have 45 minutes to do a project charter

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

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.

This session will dig into the knowledge-sharing behaviors that have become so commonplace in daily life and share specific tactics to activate these behaviors in the workplace. The session will explore the role of technology and identify the capabilities needed to enable user contribution. Attendees will discuss proven methods for motivating employees to both share what they know and seek out the information they need to solve problems on their own. The group will also address common barriers to workplace knowledge sharing. The session will demonstrate how a well-crafted curation strategy can help your organization’s knowledge go viral.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to apply real-world knowledge-sharing behaviors in the workplace
• How to motivate knowledge sharing at scale within your organization
• How to select right-fit technology to maximize knowledge sharing
• How to overcome common organizational barriers to user-generated content
• How to leverage shared knowledge as the foundation of your organizational learning strategy

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors who have a basic understanding of knowledge management, user-generated content, and related tools.

Technology discussed in this session:
Various knowledge management, sharing, and social tools.

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.

In this session, you will discuss the components of successful social media use within a corporate environment. You will find out about skills that people in L&D need in order to benefit from social media and to implement it at work, including optimal characteristics, behaviors, and experiences. You will discover obstacles learners may encounter as well as the multiple benefits they can experience through participation. You will also explore different use cases that can help you build a stronger community of learners and enhance social learning at work.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the value of social media use for the learning professional as part of an enhanced toolkit
• How social media can help workers find expertise and solutions more rapidly, on a just-in-time basis, for increased performance
• About the optimal learner characteristics and skills for social media implementation
• About common barriers to successful social media implementation that you should expect
• About the specific benefits of using social media in a corporate workplace
  

Audience:
Novice, intermediate, and advanced designers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
Twitter and internal social tools such as Yammer.