My company bought out a smaller technology company
and absorbed all of their assets. We planned
to incorporate their technology into our main equipment suite. I was assigned as the technical instructional
designer on the project and tasked with building the training course for our service
technicians. The majority of the design
work was already done because they already had a training course with training
materials and supporting documentation.
We conducted a front-end analysis in order to decide if the established course
would meet our training needs. It was
decided that it was adequate and would only need rebranding and interface
descriptions.
I took the course material and technical
documentation and began work. As I reached
75% completion, I was informed that our technical documentation department had
also taken their technical documentation and made major modifications and
repackaged them into completely new manuals.
This meant I had to start all over to ensure that our new course
followed the new manuals that were being provided to the service technicians. The concepts remained the same but process
and procedures were drastically changed.
It was very time consuming to go back and ensure thing were in the right
order and were referring to the right page of the proper manual. As I reached 90% completion, a software
update was released. All machines were
not going to be required to be updated.
This meant I need to go back and include information on how the new
software physically and functionally changed the machine.
Had the circumstances been different those two
changes of scope could have been detrimental to the success of the project. Because there was no hard deadline date set
for completion, every time something came up more time was allowed for its
inclusion. The preexisting course
material was used until I finished the new course with all of the changes. If I were in charge and there was a hard
deadline. The software update
information would have been left out of the formal course material. The necessary information could have been
provided to the students as a handout.
