As an
Instructional designer and new project manager, I haven’t had much experience
estimating costs associated with a project.
I have considered the students’ time (usually calculated using an
average rate of pay for staff) but I never thought to weigh that against my
time and other SMEs time to produce anything resembling ROI (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton, &
Kramer, 2008). I often find myself feeling like there is way
too much effort expended on some projects to get the desired result. I would really like to pop some data into a
spreadsheet, let it calculate and know if proceeding with a project is the
right thing to do.
I was recently asked to convert a 2 ½ hour instructor led course on nursing documentation in to an asynchronous online course. In the request, she stated she would be willing to do all the work however; I don’t think she understands the number of hours that will go into this project. The search for cost estimators I found Big Dog & Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition website. It’s a great Instructions Design site in general but the reason I got excited initially is the development time to instructional time ratios. Based on their estimates, this course conversion will take approximately 550 hours before we can use it. Considering we currently hold the class once a month, it will take us until the end of next year to even out the instructor hours we would save. This is not a sound project, financially speaking. Since the content is based on software that has quarterly changes, we will likely need to update it before we realize our payback as well.
After searching for more sites with estimators, I came across several others that were close to the 220 hour estimate. One stood out at a whopping 490 hours for advanced eLearning design and development. If I use this it would take us about 1225 hours, with an equivalent instructor time at a little over 4 years. This would surly convince her that this is not a worthwhile use of our time but why the huge disparity? The Dashe & Thompson Social Learning Blog goes on to explain why instructional designers shouldn’t simply plug a number into a spreadsheet to get a time estimate (like I wanted). With very large, multi-chapter courses, development time will go down as you progress in the project. For example, if you need to create 20 chapters the first one will most likely take the longest amount of time. As you get a system going, you find efficiencies and by the last couple of chapters you spend very little time.
I was recently asked to convert a 2 ½ hour instructor led course on nursing documentation in to an asynchronous online course. In the request, she stated she would be willing to do all the work however; I don’t think she understands the number of hours that will go into this project. The search for cost estimators I found Big Dog & Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition website. It’s a great Instructions Design site in general but the reason I got excited initially is the development time to instructional time ratios. Based on their estimates, this course conversion will take approximately 550 hours before we can use it. Considering we currently hold the class once a month, it will take us until the end of next year to even out the instructor hours we would save. This is not a sound project, financially speaking. Since the content is based on software that has quarterly changes, we will likely need to update it before we realize our payback as well.
After searching for more sites with estimators, I came across several others that were close to the 220 hour estimate. One stood out at a whopping 490 hours for advanced eLearning design and development. If I use this it would take us about 1225 hours, with an equivalent instructor time at a little over 4 years. This would surly convince her that this is not a worthwhile use of our time but why the huge disparity? The Dashe & Thompson Social Learning Blog goes on to explain why instructional designers shouldn’t simply plug a number into a spreadsheet to get a time estimate (like I wanted). With very large, multi-chapter courses, development time will go down as you progress in the project. For example, if you need to create 20 chapters the first one will most likely take the longest amount of time. As you get a system going, you find efficiencies and by the last couple of chapters you spend very little time.
These are
both great sites that I plan to review in more detail; I wish I had found them
soon as I think they would have been a great help through some of the other
courses in this program. Hopefully you
can also benefit from them.
References
Clark, D.R. (2010). Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design. Retrieved from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/costs.html, June 4, 2014.
Clark, D.R. (2010). Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design. Retrieved from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/costs.html, June 4, 2014.
Matajcek, J. (2010). Why eLearning Development Ratios Can be Hazardous to Your Career. Retrieved from http://www.dashe.com/blog/elearning/development-ratios-hazardous-career/, June 4, 2014.
Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Hi Lisa, great blog post. You mentioned that you have not had very much prior experience with project management. I am in the same boat. I have had some exposure and experience with, I suppose what could be considered formal project management; however, it has been very minimal. I recall the words of a project management instructor I used to work with who taught the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification course. She stated that almost any work assignment can be related to project management if there are specific and measurable goals, a specific time requirement(s), and the person is designated a lead. I am curious. Does/did your organization have a separate project management function that is allocated across the other functional units?
ReplyDeleteCharles
Up until a few years ago, we only had Project Managers in IT. Now we have a few in other areas too but we have added a department of 3 Six Sigma Black Belts who have trained others around the organization. As you pointed out, lots of work that people do can be considered a project so it makes sense for an organization to choose a consistent approach. I got trained as a Project Manager over the winter and this summer I will be attending the Green belt training. I really liked the tools they use so I'm excited to learn more of them.
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