Narrative Summary - Cypress SVTL Basic Training

SUMMARY
The Cypress System Validation Test Lab Basic Training was initially designed to be instructor delivered training and then repurposed as an e-learning module for future use. The Basic Training was designed to meet the needs of an existing tester staff that was partially trained in some areas but not fully cross-trained. To better understand the purpose that this training satisfied, some background on the System Validation Test Lab and my role within that lab is required.

I was hired as a Test Engineer to establish the test lab, revamping a previous model of locally outsourced testing. I started with two to three product lines, each with between two and 25 sub-products. Rapid growth in the workplace occurred and within three months, the lab gained a manager and two temporary testers. Focus shifted to testing projects earlier in the product lifecycle, not just at the final product stage. In a little over a year, the team had grown to nine members. The company was being acquired and the horizon held promise of exploding growth for testing. Projects and products would come and go and there was a fair amount of turnover in the temporary testing staff. Though the need had existed for a long time, resources were finally allocated to develop training materials to outline the basic concepts and strategies of the test lab to the rapidly growing and changing temporary testing staff.

THE PROJECT
I volunteered my leadership and IPT skills to take on the project. Management had concluded that training was the best strategy. In looking back on this decision, I now see that a recommendation for a broader (systemic) needs assessment that would include the management, processes, tools, and outputs of the test department would have been more appropriate. This would have led to a recommendation for a combination of job aids, process modifications, and training instead of training only.

However, with training as the assigned goal, and not knowing any better at the time, I started the project by performing an informal needs assessment within our team to determine what the goals for the training were, exactly who the audience would be, what content needed to be included, and what the short term use vs. the longer term use would be.

Being an expert in many of the training content areas already, I did not need to consult with subject matter experts (SMEs) for most subject matter items. However, to understand the content on which I was not an expert, I worked with members of both the engineering team and our lab team, interviewing, observing, and documenting, in order clarify the KSA’s required for success in these roles. I solicited feedback in numerous areas from content quality, to accuracy, to style. We chose to use a Powerpoint template that was already in use within the training department of the new company we were acquired by, in order to maintain consistency of look and feel.

As is often the case, when it came time to document some of our lab’s best practices, we wanted to ensure that we were actually following “best practices” rather than just doing whatever we happened to end up with in the panic of getting things done. While test methodologies are important, information management is also crucial in this field. As such, I spent countless hours with a colleague working out logistical problems and designing information flow processes for our databases. We were forced to analyze which of the tools (which Test Configurations, Test Suite Worksheets, and ultimately Test Scripts), were being effective and which were not. These activities led to better workflow, better reporting, and more cost-effective testing. I came to understand later that these logistical and design problems would have come to light earlier and would have been duly accounted for and handled had a more systemic analysis been performed from the start. I discovered the performance issues were not exclusively training issues after all!

Finally, after revisions, delays, revisions, and turnover within our department, the initial release of this training tool was finished. The training was developed to be presented as part classroom/e-learning and part hands-on coaching. I presented the classroom training to the entire team. The hands-on portion was later used to generate a couple of job aids for reference, a result which, ideally, would have been designed in to begin with.

CONCLUSION
To do this project over, I would change three things. First and foremost, as stated above, a systemic analysis up-front would have revealed the process and information management problems that we later had to deal with on the fly. Second, I was disappointed that we allowed “feature creep” to occur. We designed the training to evolve via a series of changes as new information came along. The net effect of this was that the project never quite felt complete. This was further compounded by the first problem.

The Powerpoint continued to grow over time as we added new ideas and materials. A better model would have been to create a finite training module, then start another project to incorporate new materials, generating another training module. This would have encouraged better buy-in from management, clearer deadlines and deliverables, and ultimately better adoption by the trainees, as they would not have had to sift through training documents they had already been through to learn new content.

Finally, I would have incorporated audio narration clips into the design from the beginning, utilizing the strengths of media design that I know understand. I thought of adding this feature into the training but did not understand how to compliment the project properly with audio and therefore abandoned the idea. I have since modified the first section of slides with narration content to demonstrate the effect that I feel would have been ideal for the entire project.

This project incorporated numerous competencies from my skillset. Some of the skills I was able to exercise included project management, leadership, client interaction, observation and evaluation, and instructional intervention design and development. This project was an excellent learning experience for me.