E-Learning Maintenance Strategies — Why You Need One
By Coley O’Brien

Does your organization design or procure custom-built e-learning? Is your desire to create e-learning solutions that are widely successful? Do you aspire to be perceived as a strategic thinker within your business? If you answered yes to these questions, then an e-learning maintenance strategy is something you should consider.

The key steps to putting an e-learning maintenance strategy in place are

• selling the strategy as a critical component of your overall e-learning methodology
• determining how robust your strategy needs to be
• building the strategy based on your assessment.

Before we uncover these three key steps, it’s necessary to do some level-setting on what an e-learning maintenance strategy is.

Defining the e-learning maintenance strategy

Many e-learning projects focus almost entirely on the “original” course. All efforts are centered on building, implementing, and deploying the course with little, if any, consideration for the life cycle of the course. The life cycle takes into account all of the maintenance issues and updates that occur between the original launch date of the course and when it is finally removed from the deployment system and archived.

Long-term maintenance issues can range from basic text and graphic changes to editing complex animation and video to wide-scale translation and localization requirements. These changes can be very costly and time intensive if not planned in advance. An e-learning maintenance strategy will help you not only better anticipate these maintenance issues, but also can influence the design and development of the original course to help you minimize the negative impact maintenance can have over the course life cycle.

An e-learning maintenance strategy is a project deliverable that looks both to the future and the past. When building the original e-learning course, it helps ensure that you’ve considered future maintenance issues in your current design. Once built, the strategy provides a historical perspective of original design decisions to help you make more efficient and effective maintenance decisions throughout the course's life cycle.

Requirements of an effective maintenance strategy

There are four critical success factors for building an effective e-learning maintenance strategy.

Focused time throughout the project lifecycle. You should start drafting your e-learning maintenance strategy the day you start the original course project. You should continue updating your strategy document until the course is officially removed from your deployment system and archived. An effective e-learning maintenance strategy will outlive all of your other project deliverables, including the actual course. To make sure you spend the necessary resources, you must recognize the strategy as a key project deliverable, as well as identify it as part of the overall methodology. Hours required to build and update the strategy should be allocated to key project resources.

Consistent and thorough documentation. An effective e-learning maintenance strategy requires a tremendous amount of detail. It also requires that details be as up-to-date as possible.

Involvement from project leadership. This may be the single most important factor in determining the effectiveness of your e-learning maintenance strategy. While the project manager, instructional designers, and developers will be instrumental in building and updating the strategy, it's up to leadership to ensure its sustainability. If someone isn’t routinely asking to see the updated strategy, it will likely fall by the wayside.

Input from cross-functional stakeholders. To identify the necessary details of an effective e-learning maintenance strategy, you need to solicit feedback from multiple stakeholders outside of the training function. These stakeholders are will likely have a major impact (positive or negative) on future maintenance. It’s important that you solicit input early and frequently throughout the design, development, and implementation.

Selling the strategy

Meeting the requirements of an effective e-learning maintenance strategy is not achieved easily. In many cases, the project team may be challenged to justify the time invested in creating and sustaining the strategy. Have you heard any of these statements while working on your e-learning projects?

•  We don’t have a lot of time for analysis. Let’s just get the course built.
•  Let’s not spend too much time worrying about the details right now.
• Let the vendor focus on maintenance issues, that’s why we pay them.
• We’ll have plenty of time to address maintenance issues after the course is up and running.
• I don’t want my budget being spent to develop maintenance plans.

Maintenance strategies sound great in theory, but they take time to develop. You must be willing to invest time during the initial course development to save both time and money during future maintenance. You’ll soon discover that e-learning maintenance strategies are not much fun to build. To make them effective, requires discipline on the part of your design and development team.

Because of these factors, you will likely need to sell the concept of the e-learning maintenance strategy at various levels within the organization. These levels could include the training department, project sponsors, and senior leadership. To do so, you can look at some basic factors to build a business case for including these strategies in your methodology.

E-learning outcome continuum

One way to sell the importance of your strategy is to position it in terms of being able to better manage expectations, costs, and risks associated with your e-learning project. The graphic below represents a continuum of possible outcomes based on what type of e-learning maintenance strategy you have in place.

For example, when it comes to overall expectations for the course life cycle, you may overlook or underdeliver on the course life cycle expectations. However, by having a robust maintenance strategy, you’re more likely to meet or exceed those expectations. When it comes to costs, exceeding or meeting planned budgets is a probable outcome without a plan. With a robust strategy, you have a better chance of minimizing or significantly reducing the overall costs.

Similarly, effectively managing risk is often overlooked in not only e-learning projects, but all projects. Without an e-learning strategy, it’s feasible to accept all risk rather than mitigate or transfer some risk. A robust strategy may enable you to avoid all risk.

There isn’t anything here that you didn’t learn in basic project management training. But selling the benefits of an e-learning maintenance strategy as it relates to expectations, costs, and risk is all you need to get people’s attention about the value of the strategy. But once you have sold them initially, you will inevitably be challenged to quantify some of these components. This is where defining your e-learning maintenance strategy will help.

Determining how robust your strategy should be

Not all e-learning courses require the same maintenance strategy. Criteria such as the complexity and shelf-life of the content, target audience, available budget, and organizational priorities are factors. You can use some basic diagnostics to determine what type of maintenance strategy will be most effective for your team. I have provided two diagnostics: one simple and one complex.

Simple diagnostic

The following chart provides a simple way to quickly assess how robust your e-learning maintenance strategy should be. It looks at three key components of maintenance:

·         frequency or number of updates during the course life cycle

·         amount of time available for each update, typically in months or weeks

·         budget available for updates, as a percentage of the original course budget.

To the right of these key components are mutually exclusive qualifiers. You should assess whether the ranges are appropriate for your typical projects and adjust accordingly.

Here is an example of how you would use this simple diagnostic:

You anticipate that the original course will need to be updated approximately 10 times during the course life cycle. You estimate three to four weeks during each update. You estimate having approximately 5 percent of the original course budget available for maintenance. By placing an “X” in each of the appropriate qualifier boxes and drawing a line that connects each box, the diagnostic will tell you that a more complex strategy is somewhere between strongly recommended and a must have.

Complex diagnostic

The complex diagnostic requires a much more detailed assessment, which reviews 15 components that are organized across three categories. Each component is framed by a key question.

Design

·         Design complexity – How complex is the course design?

·         Media required – What type of media is used in the course?

·         Stability of content – How often will are updates required?

·         Update time – How much time will you have to make future updates?

·         Translation – How many languages may be required for future translation?

Resources

·         Vendor involvement – How many vendors will be involved with the course?

·         Budget – What percentage of overall budget can be dedicated?

·         Experience of team – How experienced is your design and development team?

·         Deployment – How knowledgeable is your team on the deployment system?

·         Content availability – How difficult will it be to obtain future SMEs and content?

Organizational Impact

·         Legal – How much involvement will Legal require to review and aprove?

·         Level of importance – How important is the course for the target audience?

·         Sponsorship strength – How would you rate the overall sponsorship of the course?

·         Procurement – How much involvement will procurement (purchasing) have?

·         Demand increase – What is the potential for demand to increase in the future?

To assist with this more complex assessment, I have developed an automated diagnostic using Microsoft ExcelÔ that quantifies the answer to each key question and provides a recommendation regarding how robust the e-learning maintenance strategy should be. An example of a completed diagnostic is below.

It is important to understand how the diagnostic calculates the recommendation so that you can customize it to better meet your team’s needs. There are three influencing factors that you may want to customize.

Weight. The weight is on the far left column and has an impact on the value of your overall score. A unique weight for each component within each category is assigned, with the most important being assigned a weight of 5 and the least important a weight of 1. It’s not necessary to assign unique weight values. You may determine that of the five components within a category, three are of a greater equal value (perhaps a weight of 3) and two are of a lesser equal value (perhaps a weight of 2). Adjusting these weights directly in the tool will alter the potential range and overall rating at the top.

Rank. The rank is indicated across the last three columns on the right and determines the spread of the overall score. A unique ranking for each qualifier within each component is assigned, with the qualifier with the least impact assigned a ranking of 1 and the most a ranking of 3. You may want to use a ranking system with greater spread, perhaps a “1, 3, 5” ranking. Similar to adjusting the weight, you can change these values in the category row and it will alter the potential range and overall rating at the top.

Range interpretation. The range interpretation at the top of the diagnostic is the most important factor when it comes to your recommended strategy. The tool is currently designed for an even range spread across the three recommended needs and levels of detail. With consistent weight of 5 to 1 in each category, and a rank of 1 to 3 for each qualifier, the minimum score is a 45 and the maximum score is 135. Dividing the 90-point spread evenly into thirds determines your low, medium, and high ranges. The ranges are also adjusted by a point to ensure mutual exclusivity.

You can adjust the formulas in the spreadsheet to alter the range if you want to base the recommendation off of an uneven range distribution. However, as opposed to adjusting the calculation, I think the more efficient alteration is to just apply good common sense based on the overall score. For example, your assessment may result in an overall score of 103, which would provide a recommendation within the middle range (e.g., a one- to two-page strategy overview is recommended). But, because your score is on the high-end of that middle range, you may want to err on the high side and recommend the more robust strategy.

Building your maintenance strategy

Once you’ve determined the required strategy having used either the simple or complex diagnostic, it’s now time to draft the strategy. I've developed a template strategy that includes six key sections. 

1. Project summary. Provides two tables for documenting a high-level summary of the initial course and anticipated maintenance requirements over the course life cycle. These summaries should include points around the purpose, goals, target audience, sponsors, stakeholders, complexity, timelines, and resources.
2. Maintenance roles and responsibilities. Provides a table for documenting key roles for both internal and external project team members and basic contact information.
3. Archive information. Provides a table for documenting information about key project documents.
4. Needs/design. Provides an area for you to address design complexity, media required, content stability, and more.
5. Tools/resources. Provides an area for you to address such issues as vendor involvement, budget, team experience, deployment system, and availability of SMEs.
6. Organizational impact. Provides an area for you to address the involvement of your legal team, stength of sponsorship, procurment team, and so forth.

The last three sections (4, 5, and 6) are structured similar to one another. You’ll notice that the sections are the same as the categories in the complex diagnostic. Each of these sections has a dedicated page for each of the five key components within that section. Each page is then broken up into three focus areas. 

• Key questions. This area includes four to five key questions that require greater detail than what was asked on the complex diagnostic.
  
• Maintenance impact. This area asks for specific examples of how your answers to the key questions could impact your maintenance in the future.
  
• Strategy. This area asks for specific strategies that you will implement to manage the impacts. 

The template is designed for a more a complex strategy and should be customized to best meet your organizational and project needs. To create a less robust strategy, you would simply remove the template components that are not applicable. The template has been created using Microsoft Word Ô and includes a number of tables to make is easy to add and remove information.

Bottom line

The table below includes some final thoughts regarding wrong and right approaches to building effective e-learning maintenance strategies. 

The tools provided here should help you begin to build effective e-learning maintenance strategies and can be customized to best meet your organizational and project needs.

Published: August 2005