Name: David Lloyd
Position: Senior Instructional Designer
Company: Lorien Connect
What does Lorien Connect specialise in?
Lorien Connect delivers Customer Experience Delivery (CXD) solutions for clients in 26 countries. Established for 25 years and directly employing a team of 45 individuals, many of our team members have a training background and are, first and foremost learning and development experts.
The solutions we develop for our clients concentrate on brand education, product knowledge, product presentation, sales management and customer relationship management. This requires our designers to become very knowledgeable about the brands, products, sales and customer processes as well as understanding the needs and expectations of the learners. We also produce systems training courses using our custom Flash shell, which has an interface emulation facility.
"A partnership approach is very different - it's predicated on sharing ideas, expertise, design approaches and assets."
You've been part of a partnership of e-learning suppliers recently, working for a single organisation. What's different about this way of working?
Just like in any other competitive industry, suppliers would normally keep their cards close to their chests. A partnership approach is very different - it's predicated on sharing ideas, expertise, design approaches and assets. The benefit for the client is that they can create a higher volume of courses, of consistent quality, in less time and use them - or parts of them - more than once.
Opening up and sharing your work with other suppliers might seem like a risk, but it actually helps to streamline things for us because we don't have to design and build everything from scratch. We can take something that works from another solution and re-use it. So, we can create content more quickly with less hassle and then move on to the next thing, which is good for business.
What is needed for this way of working to flourish?
The client company needs to drive partnership as a way of working for it to really take root. If you want a group of previously competing agencies to collaborate on your behalf, you have to communicate your expectations clearly. You need to explain up-front what you want people to do: for example, to review and learn from each other, to contribute and re-use ideas, and to develop and follow consistent approaches. If you want your partners to behave this way then you also need to reassure them at every opportunity. This will help to build trust, which is so important to making a partnership work.
"If you want a group of previously competing agencies to collaborate on your behalf, you have to communicate your expectations clearly."
However, for us a partnership is not just about the client always having to take the lead. We believe that we must take the client’s strategy and add value by also showing them leadership. For example, by encouraging the client to ‘break the mould’ and inspire them to consider alternative strategies, new tools and improved ways of working that them to exploit opportunities and efficiencies. We see that this is one of the key benefits we bring to our clients.
What helps to build trust between partners?
It's partly a question of setting the right tone in how you deal with them. Ideally, you'll treat your partners like they're part of your team - more as colleagues than suppliers. You need to do that consistently and without favouritism, so it's important that what you say to your partners collectively, in public, is the same as what you say to them individually in private. Our experience of this has been extremely good. We celebrate successes together and have a good amount of social interaction. Of course that informality means clients can be a little more forthright in how they feed back to you, but I think that's a positive!
"What builds confidence and trust is the knowledge that you are in a long-term business relationship."
What also builds confidence and trust is the knowledge that you are in a long-term business relationship. When you're signed up to work on a specific area for a longer period, instead of just being hired for a particular project, it takes some of the stress, tension and survival mentality out of the equation.
Again, we don’t see a trust in partnership as being a one-way street. We believe that we must ensure that we too are open with our clients, sharing information on solution development, project progress, on project issues and, of course, ensure we deliver the right quality on time and on budget.
Don't you risk losing your competitive edge if you're too much a part of the client company?
A bit of healthy competition is a certainly good thing, and as partners it's true that you are no longer competing with each other for work. Instead we find that when the client brings us together to share ideas and insights it creates a more productive kind of competition. For example, we recently had a partner ‘show-and-tell’ session on advanced learning technologies.
During our session we demonstrated that social networking could legitimately be seen as an extension of existing learning channels, such as eLearning, and is achievable now. Other presentations dealt with trends in eLearning, advanced image recognition software and mobile learning. Mohive looked at rapid content localisation. The result was a healthy cross-fertilisation of creativity and ideas between agencies and the client.
Mohive is designed as a collaborative system. Do you find it helps partnership working?
Yes, we really like the workflow management and online review aspects of the system. Workflow management enables us to track development easily and the online review tool, with its associated review cycle management, 'to do' lists and proofing sheets really speeds up the editing and amendment of courseware.
What really benefits partnership working though is Mohive's skin and shell architecture, which gives every piece of content a unified look and feel, as well as standardising navigation and reporting functionality. The shared media library, with its meta-tagging of assets, also enables partners to store and share media and with the addition of the Flash Widget API this enables partners to extend Mohive and yet do so in a way that still allows such custom assets to be shared and reused between the partner teams.
"What really benefits partnership working though is Mohive's skin and shell architecture, which gives every piece of content a unified look and feel, as well as standardising navigation and reporting functionality."
In my experience Mohive is what it claims to be: a collaborative rapid e-learning development system. It pretty much does everything as well as you would want it to do, but there are some compromises. Of course, being template based, it enforces a certain level of constraint and discipline on the instructional and visual designers, but this is offset by freeing up time to concentrate on the underlying instructional design and narrative. It also dramatically reduces the time taken on functional testing!
If your business is not in a hurry for its e-learning and you want to create a user experience that is on the bleeding edge of design and usability, then perhaps Mohive is not entirely for you. However, if your business demands lots of effective, attractive, well-constructed and reliable e-learning, and needs it now – then I would say you should be looking at what Mohive has to offer.
David Lloyd is Senior Instructional Designer and Developer for Lorien Connect. He has over 15 years experience in developing and deploying learning gained whilst working with wide range of high profile clients on large-scale projects. David has particular experience and skills regarding the specification and design of e-learning programmes for multiple markets and languages.