Sarah Slade

How I wish I had kept the screenshots for this one. This was my first major project for a consultancy firm. The end-to-end project took about four months to complete, and was released in late 2019.

The Brief

The consultancy worked across a wide range of industries and sectors and specialised in innovative, transformational programmes that could be a six-week department review to a nationwide, cross-disciplinary remodelling of a government service. There were a number of project management practices and disciplines, and the organisation wanted to bring the best/most successful practices and behaviours into a firm-wide framework of best practice.

The stakeholders mapped out a five-stage framework and collected some examples. It was my job to turn it into a piece of digital learning that would be available to anybody involved in project management, hosted on our learning experience platform, FUSE.

What we did

FUSE works on the principle of “Resources, not courses”: it’s a great way to collect and curate learning resources and we saw this as the perfect way to showcase a more constructivist approach to learning (I was in the middle of my MA at this point). We would present the learners with some resources and approaches, and then give them a real-life opportunity to reflect on what they learned, and think about how they could apply it to their working life.

Also known as Learn, Reflect, Do. Which also became our template.

I took the framework and the examples for the Learn section; this told the story of the practice, gave some examples of how it could be used, and added a couple of case studies.

The Reflect section was the fun bit. We found project managers who had worked on some of our larger projects and asked them to describe a particularly knotty issue that related to what we had discussed in the Learn section. We also asked them to propose three possible solutions – but only one of them would be the path they took. And then one morning we asked them to come to a studio in Shoreditch, where we filmed them describing the problem and giving feedback on each of the solutions. We turned this content into an extended knowledge check question. Learners would give their answers, and be able to see how other learners had responded. And then they would get feedback on their answer.

In the Do section, we gave some ideas on how this new concept could be applied tomorrow, asked learners to share their ideas.

The result

We had no benchmark metrics to measure this learning against, but we noticed a significant uptick in engagement with our learning platform.