How Development Works

Because of its complexity and the many tradeoffs involved, the creation of a custom training solution is best accomplished with a transparent process. In this way, during each step, you validate progress by reviewing and approving documents, designs, prototypes, and other intermediate deliverables. These steps also provide cost checkpoints to insure the project stays within its projected budget. Our comprehensive project management process provides full visibility throughout the lifecycle of the project. We use standardized templates and workflows to ensure consistent delivery of a quality product.

Rigorous Project Management

One of Envision Group’s three key commitments to you is that we will make the process of creating the training solution as predictable and painless as possible through rigorous project management. This ensures that you are always in control of the nature, scope, and cost of the training solution under development.

How do we do that? By giving all of our projects an organized and controlled start, an organized and controlled middle, and an organized and controlled end. Client sign-offs at each “gate” ensure that we never get too far into design or development without verifying our steps with the client. This ensures we do not waste costs through expensive re-work, and helps to ensure our clients are happy with the final outputs.

Organization

We organize and plan things properly before we begin. We then make sure that the content, features, delivery, and cost of the training solution is clear through the creation of understandable specifications. We then produce deliverables according to those specifications, so both the interim steps and the final product are always in clear focus. You are in the loop and are able to see progress based on clear milestones, and guide the project’s progress based on relevant facts at critical junctures. Our project plans are focused on delivering actual products (e.g., needs analyses, prototypes, designs, learning modules, questionnaires) so you can see physical results as the project progresses.

Project Manager

An Envision Group project manager does all the leg work and reports to you, keeping you informed of progress, gaining your acceptance of deliverables and authorization to proceed, highlighting any issues requiring resolution, and identifying the impacts of those resolutions on the project. This ensures that the project remains controlled, that work conforms to the specifications, that the project remains viable in terms of costs and benefits, and that completed products meet quality criteria and receive sign-off.

Communication

When you engage Envision Group for a training or performance consulting project, we invite you to use our Web-based project management and collaboration tool that keeps ideas, schedules, milestones, files, to-do lists, and more in a password-protected central location. This vehicle allows Envision Group and its clients a great way to collaborate and ensures clarity of key content and the progress of the project. Once the project team is set up, we can:

• Communicate via categorized and archived message boards
• Collaborate on documents
• Make to-do lists, keeping track of what needs to be done and who is responsible
• Schedule milestones and track when things are due and who's responsible
• Share files among team members

It's Really Worth It

This all may seem like a lot of effort to go through, but it ensures that everything needed for a successful delivery not only gets done, but that it gets done at the right time to avoid unnecessary re-work, missed dates and blown budgets, and to ensure the delivery of a successful learning solution.

It also gives you the information you need to make informed decisions throughout the entire development. Complex processes such as these often unfold in unexpected ways, with both problems and opportunities arising that can affect the ultimate shape and cost of the learning solution. So while projects are seldom completely predictable, having a rigorous project management process at least makes them controllable, so that each step of the way you are the one calling the shots and have the relevant information you need to do the job.

Our goal is to give you a learning solution through an active process that delivers the value you need for the money you spend.