Why this Project Was Needed:

Our client, Bridgeworks, provides industry-leading intellectual property and training on generationally related issues to help “bridge the generational divide” in all aspects of work and business. Their challenge is to customize and tailor their solutions into contextual training packages for a variety of industries to make the training relevant and tailored. Bridgeworks turned to us for their latest project, which was to take their content and customize it for financial advisors who are used to working with a very specific audience (Traditionalists and Baby Boomers), and help financial advisors see not only why but how they needed to change their working style to have future success with rising generations (Generation X and Millenials).

Tools/Technologies Used:

Adobe Flash.

Audience:

Financial-advising professionals in various firms across the United States and other English-speaking countries.

Completion Time:

Six months.

Problems/Challenges:

  • Design: Bridgeworks’ request was for us to take an existing course (intended for a charitable-giving audience) and repurpose and re-imagine the content for a financial-advising audience. This was not only from a design perspective, but also from a content perspective. Bridgeworks wanted an instructional designer who could become a “generational expert” and write the new content and scenarios quickly. In addition to the existing course, Bridgeworks provided a generous amount of white papers, articles, and books on the subject to help us come up to speed and be able to write new content.
  • Development: To save on time and cost, we decided to take the existing course files and modify them for the re-imagined course. This proved to be problematic and required additional problem solving in both design and development.
  • Project management: Because this course was being provided to a client of our client, we had to engineer double-review cycles and change some of our internal processes to accommodate the needs of multiple reviewer audiences at multiple organizations who required multiple reviewing formats.

Insights/Lessons Learned:

  • Design: Writing the content and getting up to speed on the intellectual property proved to be a success, and what we anticipated.
  • Development: The course files we received were not as expected, which ultimately resulted in a rebuild of the course from scratch. From this and other projects we have done, we learned from a design, development, and timeline perspective to count on rebuilding courses from scratch rather than trying to repurpose existing files .
  • Project management: Any project with multiple organization reviewers creates a significantly lengthened project schedule, especially when there are delays. This can also result in the need to consistently re-staff the project as it goes on and offline, and in unanticipated re-engagement hours/budget. We learned to anticipate and budget for schedule delays and re-engagement from the start. These are unavoidable events when you have multiple reviewers, and as a vendor, all we can do is to try educate and predict in order to make the experience smoother for our clients.

Project Screenshots:

Project Screenshots

Handout(s)

Recording