Make haste slowly
– Benjamin Franklin
We’re getting used to instant search, instant news, instant messages, instant updates, instant food, instant banking, and instant everything. In this world of instant gratification sometimes we need to take a moment and think is everything really necessary ‘now’? Aren’t there things that need more time to be created properly, created beautifully? While elearning itself helps the instant gratification needs of learners by being available whenever and wherever, elearning development needs little more time to be created well and can’t really be instant.
Every now and then we have prospects /clients wanting us to take up projects with unreasonably difficult deadlines maybe because they have internal or external commitments to meet, or just that their CEO has asked it to be ready on a particular date. We’re asked to comply or else they’d look for another vendor. I’ll admit, we do comply with such requirements at times to keep clients within our fold. More often than not, we try and convince our clients that rushing through design and development isn’t a good option for either of us. Eventually a rushed project leads to additional costs, lower quality, missed deadlines, and lots of heartburn. Sometimes the unreasonable deadlines could be a result of delays from clients; yet they don’t want the delays to affect the final; this makes every milestone along the way more difficult to meet. Our regular clients understand this very well (having been there done that) and don’t unreasonably rush a bespoke development project.
‘Haste makes waste’ is a proverb we are taught and surely we know it to be true from our own experience. Still, that’s one thing some clients are not willing to accept when it comes to custom elearning development. Here ‘haste’ is not to be confused with ‘Rapid eLearning’ which has its own place in custom elearning development and it works very well in certain situation, for certain programs. We ourselves do a fair bit of Rapid Authoring projects but with reasonable timeframes for delivery.
Earlier I shared 5 keys to make eLearning outsourcing work where one of point is to Follow Process. Usually while accepting a difficult deadline, the vendor is squeezing or doing away with some steps of the process which hurts the projects objectives later. Also it is very important to note the elearning development is an iterative process. The iterative aspect, if built into the process itself, will help you get better elearning output. If you wish to create effective elearning do not push for unreasonably difficult deadlines. Remember haste indeed makes waste when it comes to custom elearning development.
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