As you know if you are following me on twitter, this semester I am taking two performance classes. This means I’m paying more attention to things that measure performance and performance gaps. Since I’m always hyper-focused on social media, I’m also looking at how emerging tools can be used to close performance gaps.

This report from McKinsey talks about the importance of collaboration to knowledge workers. Interestingly enough, they did an analysis on how things are right now, or the current state of performance of knowledge workers. The report says in some industries knowledge workers make up about 75% of the workplace. The authors found a “performance gap between top and bottom companies in collaboration-intense sectors is nine times that of production- or transaction-intense sectors”. So organizations with knowledge workers have not figured out what sorts of remedies need to be apply to close performace gaps for knowledge workers.

Its actually worse than that – the researches also found that measurements for effective “collaboration productivity” doesn’t really exist. Everyone says they want a highly motivated, highly collaborative workpace, but no one knows how to measure what’s going on now and no one knows how to get people to that highly collaborative state.

The report has a neat tool that breaks up well-known roles by tasks and possible social media tools that could help them be more effective (in a tag cloud no less!).

The report also suggests a very strategic approach to choosing the tools to create the desired collabortive state:

1. Understand the specific requirements of interactive tasks
2. Identify which tasks create disproportionate value for the organization
3. Determining the types of inefficiencies and wasted efforts that bog down many interactions

It is a great report. More and more we’re talking about disruptive technology, but this technology is also going to disrupt our known ways of doing things. We’re going to need folks to get their arms around this idea of measuring performance by what is really going on, not by how things used to get done. And this approach seems like a practical way to blend the new technology into current organizations.

What are you seeing?

In my Human Performance Theory class, we have to turn in Executive Summaries (ES) and mindmaps for selected readings each week. Since I know so many people who are experts on performance, I thought I’d share what I am doing on this blog.

Background

OK, I’m doing this for selfish reasons – I know my PLE is very experienced, and also most of you are not shy about correcting a misguided grad student’s ideas (I love you guys for that!!!). I’m hoping to generate discussion that goes beyond the theory I’m learning to real world practical application. Several of my classmates read this blog, so you’d be helping out the next generation of Instructional Designers!

Our official book for the course is an ASTD Press book: HPI Essentials which is a compilation of articles edited by George M. Piskurich. Our first ES/mindmap assignment is based on Chapter One: What is HPI? What makes you a Performance Consultant? How Can You Tell if You Already Are One? by Ethan S. Sanders.

Week 1 HPT Homework

Here’s a link to my mind map: Chapter1 MindMap

Here’s my ES:

This week’s reading was from Chapter One in the HPI Essentials book. The chapter explains the three principles of HPI and describes the type of individual best suited to be an HPI practitioner.

Human Performance Improvement (HPI) is the practice of identifying business gaps between an expected performance outcome and the actual performance outcome, and then identifying and managing the application of interventions that will resolve the root cause of the problem and improve organizational performance. The steps in the HPI module include Business Analysis, Performance Analysis, Cause Analysis, Intervention Selection, Intervention Implementation, and Evaluation of Results.

One key to a successful implementation of an HPI intervention is to focus first on the results that an organization expects to observe. Results, or performance, are what drive key business objectives.  Sometimes individual behavior can be a cause of a performance gap, but often times there are other contributing factors. If the individual behavior is addressed with a training intervention but the other contributing factors are ignored, the performance gap will never be closed and key business initiatives will continue to fail. By starting with an evaluation of the desired business objective, all factors required to meet the stated business objective can be identified.

HPI is successful because the concept of systems thinking is built into the model. It is important to acknowledge that there are more indicators of performance than human behavior. There is an organizational level of performance which includes how the business is performing in the marketplace. Organizational performance also includes how the business has been set up operationally. How do the individual departments interact with each other, what is the formal hierarchy for communication, what are the value networks that dictate the informal communications? Process level performance is how the work actually gets done throughout the organization. What are the inputs and outputs required to enable the successful completion of the business objective? What are the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between the individual departments? What are the underpinning contracts between a department and an outside vendor that may affect how the work flow? Finally, the job level is important because the work is performed by people. Have the right people to do the job been hired or promoted? Have the correct performance goals been set for these individuals?

An HPI practitioner is someone who enjoys the challenge of being in the midst of change. An HPI practitioner has to help an organization solve problems, deal with broken systems and disillusioned workers, and be determined to cut through all of the drama to find the root cause of the performance problem.

Fall semester starts tomorrow. Part of me is anxious, mostly because I am already so busy I’m not sure what my class load is going to do to my life.

But the other part of me is really excited. I was one of those nerds who loved going back to school because it meant you got to read and study. I love new books, I love researching, so starting class again makes me happy. I know, I’m weird.

Here’s what I am taking this semester:

• Introduction to Program Evaluation (or, is what you designed actually working)
• Performance Systems Analysis (this is the first HPT – Human Performance Theory – class I have taken, should be interesting)

After this semester, I have to do an internship and take one more class and I’m done!!

So what did I do in the 3 weeks I had between summer and fall semester?

• Went to PodCamp, caused a stir because myself and some other ladies pointed out that people still face discrimination
• Worked on updates to the Ionix Network Configuration Manager courses
• Presented to EMC Education’s upper management about value networks, web 2.0 technologies, and all the work we’ve done to drive participation in the EMC Proven Professional Community
• Got my son off to college
• Talked about zombies
• Started reading Secret Six (which is probably going to be the first thing I’ll have to give up)

Looking at the list of what I did and of my classes, it looks like there are some synergies between all my activities having to do with information. My undergrad degree had a heavy emphasis on usability, particularly how users approach information searches. Of course, since one of my kids is on the autism spectrum I have been a life-long observer of how differently people can see information.

It sure seems like there is probably a thread that runs through program evaluation, HPT, discrimination, and value networks. Its very strange how I see all of that the way I do an IP or FC network…

But that’s a post for another day. Its my last day of summer break, so I should go do something fun. I’ll probably be a nerd and read my new schoolbooks though.

I’ve posted before about the Dick & Carey method of instructional design – while I was taking a class based on the Dick & Carey method. This method of instructional design is very popular because it represents a systems method of designing instruction. Click on the image below to see a diagram of how this method works:

But what does a systems method of designing instruction actually mean?

The definition of system is:

A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.

from thefreedictionary.com

What are these “interacting, interdependent elements” that may affect the development of instruction? Here’s a list from The Systematic Design of Instruction (Dick, Carey & Carey) along with my comments based on my experience in the world of designing technical instruction:

Individual Components of the System

• The instructor: What sort of training do they have? How much experience do they have with the product? How about the protocols, or the environment in which the product will be used?
• The learners: What sort of training do they have? What sort of information do they need about the product – will they be selling it? Will they be installing and configuring it? Will they be answering support calls from customers about it? Are they the customer? Or will the learners be a combination of all of these groups? Are they being forced to come to training, even if they think they don’t need it? Will they still have to answer customer calls and emails even if they are slated for training?
• Materials: What materials will be created for instruction? I develop training for software products that have some sort of revision every three months. Do we update our materials for each update of each product? What if a critical update is sent out for a product two weeks after we finish the materials?
• Instructional Activities: What instructional activities are needed? With software training, most of these activities are hands-on practice in labs built with the product being taught. But what should the activities be? How detailed should the lab instructions be?
• Delivery System: How should the instruction be delivered? Instructor led? Asynchronous eLearning? Synchronous eLearning? M-Learning?
• Learning Environment: In what kind of environment will the students be consuming the training?
• Performance Environment: In what kind of environment will the students be performing the activities that are taught during the training event?
• What have I forgotten?

Changing one component will impact the whole system

Each of these individual components work together with the other components. This means that if you change one thing midstream (lets say you make the decision to move from Instructor-led to eLearning, changing the delivery system), this will mostly impact other components of the overall system (the instructors, the learning environment, the materials, the learners all will most likely be impacted by the move from an Instructor-led to an eLearning delivery system).

And what happens if there is a component of the system that you haven’t even identified?

The systems way of thinking and performance

The systems way of thinking about instruction has been attributed to Larry Israelite (see Elliot Masie‘s Learning Rants, Raves, and Reflections 2004, review here). This way of designing instruction helps find performance problems so that the appropriate instruction can be designed. It provides a framework for systematically looking at a performance problem, and designing instruction so that the performance gap can be closed.

One reason it is important to apply a systems approach to instructional design is that one of the goals of instructional design is to  close human performance gaps. According to another one of my books, Mastering the Instructional Design Process (Rothwell & Kazanas) some of the things to consider when trying to lose those gaps are:

• Individual Performance: Does an individual worker have the right skills? Do they want to perform well? Do they have the tools to perform well? Do they have the ability to perform well?
• Work Group Performance: Can people work as a group? Is there a clear leader (that people are willing to follow?) Do individuals understand their roles? How do group members feel about the methods prescribed by the leaders to achieve group goals?
• Organizational Performance: Does the organization anticipate change? Does the org react well to change? Is there a culture of sharing in the organization? Is work being done in the most up-to-date fashion for the organization’s field?

If the real goal of “training” is to close performance gaps and enable a state of readiness in an organization, then it becomes pretty clear you have to think about a little bit more than creating power points, designing a lab, scheduling a classroom and sending invitations to students. A systems approach of designing instruction must be applied so that the effect on each individual component as well as factors affecting human performance are considered.