Imagine you are running an eLearning courseware team and the pressure to build more and rapidly has never been more than now. You want to build a workflow to see how communication flows between different stakeholders. You log in to your project management tool, and it does not have everything in one place. You have to log in to different systems to see conversations between the clients and the teams. How do you understand how to close the loop? You ask your managers around and everyone is using a different system to track tasks, client reviews. How can you accurately predict what can be delivered in how much time? Is everything being tracked in one place?

Every course development team needs a solid eLearning development process to improve their review cycles and be able to have a productive team. In this article, I walk you through a guide that you can use to set up a process in your organization. We have consulted several of our large clients producing eLearning on their development process and implementing zipBoard.

After implementing a system to collect reviews, track tasks, and deliverables, you will have a good foundation to measure progress on your development process and timelines. As your team grows, you will have a benchmark to create a more predictable process and timelines and create data-driven decisions for your eLearning projects.

1. Create an organization structure

For a small organization, this may not be necessary as the roles are clearly defined from the start and the project owners also own the processes.

As the scale increases, it is imperative to set up a team or a system that would lead the process and define it for all project managers. The most important part is to ensure that all the teams and team members and their requirements are well represented.

2. Create an implementation workflow for your projects

Once you have set up an organizational structure, it is important to define the implementation workflow for the projects. This will become your project delivery template and will take care of defining roles, processes, stages, and how communication should flow between different teams and clients.

3. Define project structure and workflow

Before kicking off a project, a project manager should establish the stages in the project to be able to track its progress and share it with other stakeholders. Those stages could be defined to ensure communication and deliverables, deadlines for each stage. Those stages can then be defined in a zipBoard project using phases so that everyone on the team is in sync and can document and measure progress.

If you need help planning out the phases and the process to track projects, reach out to our services and consulting team to guide through and help you through the process.

4. Communicate your project delivery and implementation plan to stakeholders

Once the project planning documentation is complete, make sure to review the details with all stakeholders, especially with the client. It is important to set expectations upfront and get feedback on expected timelines before project implementation.

5. Start with the tasks for your first deliverable

The project manager can then start assigning specific tasks to the team to ensure the timely delivery of the tasks. The tasks can be defined directly inside zipBoard’s task manager and assigned priority, due date, or any other description and parameters to explain the task. This would ensurer that the designers, developers, and all internal team members are in sync and are on track with their progress.

See a snapshot from zipBoard dashboard for reference (refer to task properties on the right-hand side)

Image from zipBoard showing task details.

Additionally zipBoard also captures the OS information when a new task is created.

Image of details that are captured automatically when adding a new task.

6. Start an internal QA review for your deliverable

Before sharing the content, design, or actual developed course, it is important to set up an internal Quality assurance process within the internal team. The QA process makes sure that the content aligns with the expected outcome, is accurate, has no bugs and issues related to usability, or any other experience expected from the content. Once the internal QA review has been done, and the tasks assigned to the designated teams, the deliverable should be ready to be shared with the external stakeholders for review.

7. Share the content, design or course with your clients for review

Once your content is ready, it is important to share with the client along with the content for review, any limitations, a description that would help them with testing easily. Sharing the actual content with clients using zipBoard gives you the flexibility to share only the details that you would like to share and keep the clients from getting overwhelmed. They can then create reviews using the screenshot or screencast features easily without having to leave the content to review.

8. Process the feedback received into actionable tasks

Once you receive all the feedback from different stakeholders, ensure that it is properly triaged into trackable issues and everyone in the team is aware of the changes that need to be done in the order of priority.

This will help the team ensure that the content or course is ready for the next review cycle without compromising on the quality of the project.

9. Repeat steps 5-8 for all review cycles and deliverables

You can now repeat the steps from 5-8 for multiple iterations for the same development cycle and then for other deliverables within the same project.

This step by step guide should help you, your team, and your clients to stay on the same page through the entire project lifecycle and deliver a high-quality course, whether it is a website, web app, a course, PDF document or a creative asset.

Once you have a project process in place, it is easy to measure progress, predict timelines, make data-informed decisions about your projects, and deliver high-quality projects.

See how you can get started with zipBoard and speed up your e-learning development process.

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