My current company, Varian Medical Systems, Inc. acquired Calypso Medical Technologies, Inc., a privately-owned, Seattle-based developer and supplier of specialized products and software for real-time tumor tracking and motion management during radiosurgery and radiotherapy. The Calypso® System features GPS for the Body® technology and Beacon® electromagnetic transponders that together currently provide a solution to continuously and accurately track target location to improve precision of prostate cancer treatments. The transponders are implanted into the prostate or prostatic bed and then tracked with the 4D localization and tracking system so that radiation beams can be precisely delivered to targeted tumors during radiotherapy and radiosurgery with medical linear accelerators.
Organizational Analysis
The integration of this company brought about a whole set of unique challenges. One of which is providing technical and operational based customer service to new and existing customers of the Calypso System. Upper management deemed that Field service engineers would benefit from a formal training program that would provide a basic understanding of the system, its operation and daily service requirements. I am involved in the task of designing a training program for our current field service engineers on the new technology. I identified the stakeholders in this process as the following departments in our company: Field Service, Training, Sales, and Manufacturing. Field Service is the primary stakeholder because they are responsible for responding to customer’s requests for technical service to their equipment. Training is responsible ensuring that field service engineers have the necessary skill sets to respond to customer request. Sales is responsible for selling the customer the proper service contract for their installation. Manufacturing is responsible adequate numbers of parts are available to support the customer’s service needs. Each of these interests are codependent because they are all required to work together in order to provide a seamless product to the customer.
Person Analysis
The mid-level field service managers had already decided the criteria of who should be trained. They provided us with the number of students needing to be trained and the time frame in which it needed to take place. I assembled a focus group consisting of SME’s, project managers, training managers and instructors to begin laying out the foundation of the training course.
Task Analysis
Through job task analysis we determined the scope of the course. We then developed the course learning objectives to include knowledge and performance testing criteria.
Documents Reviewed
We reviewed sales orders to determine the number of units currently in the field along with sales forecasts to determine the upcoming demand. We reviewed technical documents to better understand the complexity of the training tasks and to prioritize the various tasks.
References
Noe, R. A. (2013). Employee training and development (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill
The analysis stage solves three issues for the designer:
ReplyDelete1. Defines the content required to solve the performance problem or avert a performance need. This is step is extremely important because most designers are designing content for which they have little or no knowledge.
2. Task Analysis requires that the subject matter expert work through all the individual steps, this allows for precision when defining steps that need to be followed.
3. The ID consultant has an opportunity to assume the role of the learner and can view the materials from their perspective. Because the instructional designer is generally unfamiliar they are likely to gain a better understanding on the most efficient way of presenting the content to the learners.