Discuss the following:
Case Study 1 - School Bus Runners
The Cactus School District has a major safety issue on their hands. There have been multiple reports of motorists going around stopped school buses picking up or dropping off students. All of the district's buses have an automated "Stop" sign than swings out when the bus is stopped to retrieve or pick up students. The sign also includes flashing lights to warn motorists to stop. However, these safeguards do not seem to be working as many motorists simply ignore the warnings and simply drive around the bus.
Last week, there was a near miss as a young student attempted to cross the street and was nearly run over by a motorist who had decided to ignore the stop sign. Parents are angry and upset at this situation and demanding the district do something.
The district Superintendent, after researching many different proposals to solve this issue, has decided to use the services of Traffic Technologies USA (TTU). TTU offers a brand-new technology that places cameras on the swing out Stop signs and also on the school bus to record the image of the violating drives as well as the license plate number of the car itself.
The system seems to work flawlessly and the Superintendent and other District officials are ready to equip all of their school buses with this new technology. This is TTU's first major contract and its CEO and employees are ecstatic with this news.
As the work contracts are signed, TTU's CEO realizes that they will also be responsible for providing all the user training for this system.
The main users of the system are the bus drivers. They need to ensure the system is working properly every morning and afternoon before they leave on their route. All video is captured by two cameras and streamed to a removable hard drive that the driver removes back at the office and plugs into a server. The server then retrieves the video data and sends it back to TTU's main office for processing.
In essence, drivers need to know the following:
- How to start up the system
- Verify it's working correctly (via a set of diagnostic screens that appear at startup)
- Troubleshoot basic problems that could go from a bad hard drive to a blocked camera
- How to correctly shut down the system at the end of their run
- How to remove the hard drive and upload the data to the TTU server back in the office
You have been hired as a permanent employee of TTU as the company's end-user training director and this will be your first project. The training must be well-matched to your users (mainly working Moms and some retirees), easy to take and should contain some basic testing to ensure users are operating it correctly.
TTU management wants to see a proposal from you that includes the following:
- What modality of training you'll use. In other words, what will the training look like? How will it be delivered?
- How many people do you need to get this training developed and delivered?
- What equipment do you need?
- How long will it take you to develop, pilot and be ready to go?
- How will you ensure that the drivers are using the system correctly?
You will need to present your strategy proposal to a Management Review Committee (MRC) who will have the ultimate approval authority for your project.
Case Study 2 - Managing Managers
The Intek Corporation, one of the area's leading microchip manufacturers, has recently gone through a massive reorganization and now has hundreds of new managers who have never managed people before.
Working with Individual Contributors to successfully transition them to management roles involves two major fields of knowledge; The first is all the legal knowledge they need to know about hiring, firing and other kinds of disciplinary information; The second involves more the "art" of being a good people manager, which includes skills such as building trust and camaraderie in your team, using your power appropriately and managing conflict.
After extensive interviewing, you have been chosen to lead the new Manager training development team to provide these new managers the best and most effective training possible. You will have to decide how and when to train these new managers in the shortest possible time and in the most effective way possible. These new managers are scattered in over 32 countries.
Your budget and headcount allocation is not set yet as your management would like to hear from you as to how many people you will need to make this program a success as well as how you plan to tackle this challenge.
The management team is also interested in making sure whatever training you deploy is reusable as the company will be hiring new managers on a consistent basis so it needs to be an ongoing program, not a one-time program.
How will you tackle this? What training delivery modality (ies) will you use?
How will you measure the success of the program
What resources do you need to make it a success?
You will need to present your strategy proposal to a Management Review Committee (MRC) who will have the ultimate approval authority for your project.
MRC Roles:
Here are the different roles you will be assigned during the presentations. Try to think what a person in that role would be concerned about and therefore ask as a result of the presentation:
• GM - Is the proposal coherent? Will it fulfill its mission and results based on the problems stated? Can you present this proposal to the executive staff with no reservations?
• Finance -As the finance person, your role is to make sure that spending is within the allocated budget. Do you think the proposed spending covers everything? Is the project likely to go over budget?
• Employee representative -As a likely recipient of this training - Do you believe that the presented proposal will solve the diagnosed problem based on the strategy proposed? Why?
• Training Representative - As the SME, Instructional Designer or Instructor assigned to this program, do you have any concerns? Is the project really executable as presented?