Learning from a Project "Post Mortem"

Project Phase I:  Need and Feasibility

Back in the day, I spearheaded a project to create a competitor training guide for the sales force at a technology company.  The notion of spending money and time to develop an actual training on competitor products was a brand new concept for the company, but one they had to admit the sales force was pleading for.  This was even before the rapid evolution of technology products we experience now, because it was during the dawn of email, computers (no laptops anywhere) or even wide spread distribution of cell phones.  The pricing and bundling packages for network connections to the internet were the real competitive “products”, and so quick to change as just promotional deals really.  The sales force was experiencing demoralizing undercut bids at the last minute of a close on the deal and their results were dipping, and the company’s profits were plummeting.  The need was clearly evident, but how to fill the need was not clear.

I was blessed to have been recruited fresh out of the field into the training organization, having just completed my most successful sales year ever.  So I really did understand what the sales force needed and I set to the ADDIE process immediately. When my team and I began to gather information, we had no idea of the enormity of the task.  It seemed there was a mountain of competitor information that came at us like a good New England Nor’easter.  The deadlines began to slip from the get go.  It was impossible to size the scope of the project as it had never been done before…anywhere in the entire industry in the entire country.

Project Phase II:  Create the Project Plan

We had the right personnel with the right expertise, but we underestimated our timeline by about three months. We projected about 3 months to be able to deliver the single most coveted artifact in the company:  a competitor’s product comparison guide complete with sales strategies to beat competitor product strengths and hype our own product strengths.  It took 6 months.  When I tell you that there were literally towers of competitor promotional materials on four desks, I mean the new Freedom Tower going up in NYC.  We made a hypothetical table of contents and split up the parts.  

It was a stealth operation because we had to pose as real potential customers to our competitors in order to get the latest information and the best pricing that they provided.  We also meticulously documented the competitor’s sales pitches and scripts and closing strategies.  Our big milestones were weekly update meetings to status our boss, who was sponsoring the project exclusively from his training budget, but who trusted us entirely.  His organization’s credibility had been seriously mocked in recent years as being a useless entity pushing outdated curriculum.  Our boss was desperate to win company favor back.

Phase III: Create Specifications for Deliverables  

The deliverable was to be a guide, a binder of sorts with easy tab sections and clear labels in which simple update packets could be inserted.  This was pre-computers, pre-cell phones don’t forget, so the binder idea was our only option. That three ring monster grew bigger and bigger by the hour it seemed.

Phase IV: Create Deliverables

Finally, the dates for delivery were set and the sales people trickled into the presentation room where they picked up their “quick reference chart” (basically the table of contents for the binder).  There were some snickers, but also some warm hellos from my previous colleagues, a tough bunch to please.  However, all the skepticism evaporated when the power point visuals displayed the long hours of valuable, price crunching analysis on chart after chart, all in hard copy in the binders.Then we handed out one segment at a time during the training.  It was so satisfying to watch their shoulders relax and their noses turn into the pages, avarice for more.  We hit the bull’s eye.  It was exactly what they had begged for…now, they exclaimed, they could sell because they knew what they were up against.  The feedback was glowing.

Phase V: Test and Implement Deliverables

It didn’t take long for the sales force to accept the guide as their own personal encyclopedia to improve quota results.

Sales overall improved within weeks of distributing the guide and conducting the training seminars. I was proud and relieved, but our success grew another sort of monster.  Who was going to maintain and update the binder so that it too would not become obsolete?  This was the one thing we didn’t actually anticipate, but really should have.  There were no job positions officially designated for “competitor product expert”.  Eventually, three new employment vacancies were posted to support this binder of materials and the effort to stay abreast of competitor products in general.  From our long and hard won training and design processes of developing the guide, sprang easy to write product specialist job descriptions and a whole new department, which our boss assumed control over and which earned him a nice pay raise as a result.

Conclusions:

Our training and design team’s expertise and contemporary expertise contributed to the success of this project. Unlike most instructional designers at the time who “are ill-prepared to manage the resource, schedules, and budgets associated with ISD projects” (Allen & Hardin, 2008, p. 75), we were well equipped from the sales environment to handle all these aspects of the project.  “These project objectives include planning, budgeting, scheduling and [especially] managing relationships with stakeholders” (Allen, p. 76), which are all very familiar tasks and roles in the quota driven world of technology sales.  Also,the company's diminishing bottom line helped propel our little project into high priority status, so we pretty much received anything we asked for and that made a huge difference in meeting objectives.

References

Allen, S., & Hardin, P. C. (2008). Developing instructional technology products using effective project management practices. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 19(2), 72–97.

Copyright by Springer-Verlag, New York.