In early 2008, HSBC was looking to make a change to its Onboarding programme for regulated sales roles by delivering a mix of e-learning to support technical knowledge and face to face programmes focusing on the application of knowledge and skills.

Due to updates in the core product range and ongoing changes in the regulated marketplace, this programme needed to be delivered quickly and in a flexible way in order to recognise the previous experience of new entrants.

The challenge was that a more traditional e-learning development approach would mean that the roll-out of training would not meet the launch date requirements of the business.

It would take several weeks to gather the core learning content, time to write scripts and even more time to get these signed off. The concern was that the deadline for delivery would come before any of the modules were even ready to be built (let alone delivered).

To deliver on those challenging key business and customer requirements, HSBC needed a new way of working with subject matter experts – one that could get best value from their time and provide efficient and effective learning.

To achieve this, HSBC chose to partner with Kineo (the leaders in rapid e-learning), with Kineo interactive designers co-writing and developing content with HSBC subject matter experts. This smart approach meant that it took as little as one week to develop complete, signed-off e-learning modules. A finished suite of nearly 30 hours of e-learning was scoped, written, designed and assembled in just over two months

Rory Lawson, the HSBC Learning Design Manager who supported and managed the e-learning side of a complete blended solution, commented: "Partnering with Kineo on this project gave us fresh thinking on the way that e-learning can be developed. This insight enabled us to meet genuine business pressures to deliver faster and more flexible results that are fit for purpose and cost sensitive."

You can read the full case study by downloading this pdf, or read on below.

At Kineo we see rapid e-learning as an approach to the production and development of learning that includes the following key principles of collaboration:

1. Focus on service; ensure processes are streamlined to deliver best value and meet the individual requirements of a project.
2. Involve stakeholders in its creation.

Here we explain how we applied each of these principles in our collaboration with HSBC.

1. Focus on service; ensure processes are streamlined to deliver best value and meet the individual requirements of a project

HSBC had successfully organised a range of subject matter experts (SMEs) to be made available over a two-month period. None were experienced in e-learning development and so, bearing in mind the challenging timescales, they needed to work directly with an interactive designer right from the start.

E-learning design and development commonly follows a well established process: Scoping -> Scripting -> Assembly -> Delivery. This had to be streamlined to meet the deadlines.

Normally, you would expect a subject matter expert to commit a period of time (2–3 days) per hour of e-learning. In this case, each hour of content was going to have to be developed in a week as the SME was then needed to advise on another topic, often the week after.

The ideal development module was clear.

Scoping had to be done on the morning of Day 1 with the SME providing a simple PowerPoint breakdown of the key points and briefing the designer.

After an overall design was agreed together, the SME and the interactive designer would work together during Day 1 and 2 to directly script the content into the e-learning authoring tool (in this case Articulate and its range of Engage presentational tools).

As soon as graphical requirements were clear, the interactive designer quickly created briefs and these were worked on in parallel, virtually, by Kineo graphic designers and were sent through to the interactive designer as soon as each was finished.

By Day 3 most (if not all) of the content was in Articulate. Both the Scripting and Assembly stages were effectively combined. This meant that the SME could see the content as it was being built. The SME would be used lightly at this stage, coming in to look at things when they were ready to be reviewed.

Day 4 was devoted to polishing the interactions, ensuring questions worked properly, adding new images and doing some initial quality assurance testing. It was in effect a ‘day off’ for the SME.

Day 5 was a final review day The SME would go through the first beta version of the course and changes would be made on the spot. If it was a graphical change, this would be done as soon as possible.

The aim? To get a final sign-off by the end of the day so that both interactive designer and SME could move on to the next project on the following Monday. In almost all of the courses, sign-off was achieved within these time-frames.

The key was having the Kineo designers on site working directly with the HSBC team throughout the two-month design and production time-frame. The end result was nearly 30 hours of effective learning delivered by four interactive designers and a dedicated SME for each topic. An impossible result if using more traditional e-learning development approaches.

2. Involve stakeholders in its creation

The key to the success of this project was the close working relationship of the HSBC SMEs and the Kineo designers. This allowed the designers to provide the right design structure and interactive vocabulary and encourage the SMEs to do more than just provide content. Soon in the process, we were able to get SMEs to start to explore more engaging approaches to present information and check understanding.

Through the involvement of the SMEs we could apply the following principles:

• Sales people are goal-oriented. It must be clear that the learning will enable them to achieve a specific goal or objective. They’re busy, and don’t have a lot of time for ‘learning’. It must be short and focused.
• Sales people are relevancy-oriented. Engagement is as much based on relevancy to the task at hand as it is on any look and feel or entertainment factor. So it was important that relevant examples or scenarios were embedded in the learning.
• Sales people are also very practical, focusing on the aspects most useful to them in their work. They wanted examples showing concepts in practice, giving them a chance to pause and think.

We worked with these principles to create clearly structured courses, following a common approach across the board.

Summary

The complete HSBC solution involved e-learning, workshop delivery and a rich set of learning support and useful links, through a dedicated onboarding site that was built and maintained by the HSBC learning design team.

We believe that Kineo’s input into this overall solution, with its innovative SME/designer collaboration represented a significant improvement in how subject matter expertise can be unlocked and channelled into practical and cost-effective learning. It will be a model for similar projects in the future within HSBC.