Edge Interactive

Estimating e-Learning Project Scope

As we all struggle to meet our business objectives with less resources, this issue will be devoted to resource planning and ways to leverage your resources. We will look at e-Learning project metrics and determining scope. In estimating e-Learning projects, the following table can serve as an overall guideline in determining project scope and cost. The table details three basic levels of e-Learning and the average resource requirements in their development. Each level is differentiated by the key design and production factors that determine the complexity of the work effort.

 

Planning e-Learning Development Resources

Recently I have gotten a lot of questions regarding e-learning development and ways to quantify the effort to produce e-learning. Like all of us, I see estimates from 80 hours to 600 hours as the number of development hours required to produce one hour of finished e-learning. This wide range of estimates is not particularly helpful in trying to plan e-learning development so I will attempt to develop a more precise way to plan for e-learning development resources.   To start my research, I went to Go ogle and typed in “training development ratios” and began to read through the 2,020,000 articles that my query produced. Fortunately, a colleague had already done this research and posted it on his blog Big Dog & Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition. In reviewing his research, I focused on what I thought to be the most common type of e-learning course. This was categorized as “standard’, “average”, or “medium” and the estimates of how many hours it took to develop a single hour of training seemed to average around 180 hours of development for one hour of finished e-learning.

Training Operations 101

Businesses today must constantly seek ways to minimize expenses and maximize the impact of their budget dollars. Corporations typically spend millions of dollars on the development, deployment, and maintenance of their training assets often without clear goals, standards, measurements or accountability. Industry analysts believe there is no other workplace activity where so much money is spent with as little accountability as training.

Quantifying Your Training Resource Needs

A challenge many training professionals face is determining training development and delivery resources. In developing e-Learning projects, we have found that five basic resource types are required with each resource comprising a predictable percentage of the project. For example, if we estimate the total development time for an hour of average e-Learning as 120 hours, we can create the table shown below.

Function	Percentage of Total Project	Total Project Hours
Project Management	10%	12
Instructional Design	37%	44
Course Development	28%	34
Graphic Arts	15%	18
Quality Control	10%	12

The percentages applied are based on our experience working with numerous e-Learning projects and indicate that to complete a 120 hour training project, we would need about 12 Project Management hours, 44 Instructional Design Hours, and so on.

 

Outsourcing Strategies

Many learning organizations are thinking about or doing some type of training development outsourcing.

Here are a couple of thoughts on outsourcing.

There are two typical options in outsourcing course development.

Option One: outsource complete projects on a fixed bid basis to vendor companies specializing in classroom and e-Learning development

Option Two: use independent contractors on an hourly basis to augment internal resources

Estimating e-Learning Project Scope

As we all struggle to meet our business objectives with less resources, this issue will be devoted to resource planning and ways to leverage your resources. We will look at e-Learning project metrics and determining scope. In estimating e-Learning projects, the following table can serve as an overall guideline in determining project scope and cost. The table details three basic levels of e-Learning and the average resource requirements in their development. Each level is differentiated by the key design and production factors that determine the complexity of the work effort.