2. David Suter – Old Mutual
Faster Learning Delivery with SharePoint
3. SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users
“Pushing the boundaries
of
learning delivery”
4. SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users
Faster Learning Delivery
• What was the problem
• Out with the Old; In with the New
• Creating a Learning Environment
• You don’t have to be an expert
• Questions
• Key Points to Take Home
5. SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users
What was the problem?
• Old Website
• Couldn’t customise the site ourselves
• Learning left hanging by a thread
• Constant need to call IT
• Limited ability to service internal clients
…it get’s worse!
6. SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users
What was the problem?
• No-one in IT aware of structure
• Service and maintenance an issue
• Technology out of date
• Continual breakdowns
• Frustration and sleepless nights
…need to find a solution now!
7. SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users
“Fortunate to have
like-minded people in IT”
8. SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users
Our requirements?
• Robust enough to handle anticipated flow of traffic (500+/- users)
• Provided role security
• Flexible and easy to use
• Enabled us to control content ourselves
…SharePoint’s that Microsoft thing; isn’t it?
9. SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users
Out with the Old; In with the New
“It’s so nice to see you, darling.
I just didn’t expect to see so much of you.”
My mum.
Finding new ways to do things in SharePoint each week.
10. SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users
Out with the Old; In with the New
• Deliver learning in a secure role-based environment to wider
audience than before, in a shorter period of time
• Manage capacity within the team
• Determine costing to clients
• Enable facilitators to deliver
11. SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users
“You are only restricted
by your own
creative ability”
18. SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users
Key Points to Take Home
• Partner with like-minded people in your organisation.
• Think big and extravagant and work back from there.
• Use what’s available to you
• You don’t have to be an expert
• Learning is a journey
• Invest time and grapple with your technology
• ID.10.T Errors happen to the best of us
19. SHARE The SharePoint Conference for Business Users Slide 19
David Suter
OMSTA Learning & Development
Old Mutual Life Assurance Company (SA) Ltd
dsuter@oldmutual.com
+27 21 5099590
Notes de l'éditeur
Good-day. My name is David Suter.
I am a Senior Learning Facilitator at Old Mutual, Pinelands, Cape Town.
At this point I would like to highlight the fact that I am not an IT specialist. I was promised that this conference was for business users, so if there are any IT folk out there, please forgive me for anything I am about to share with you
So, today I would like to share with you…
… Pushing the boundaries of learning delivery.
Just as a quick overview…
I’m going to start by sharing with you what kind of problem we were facing as a learning area; what we did to overcome this problem and then share with you some learning’s we found along the way.
If you would like to punish me further, you’re more than welcome to ask me any questions at the end.
So what was the problem we faced as a learning area?...
For a number of years our small team have been pushing the boundaries of learning delivery. A website was created for us but as Old Mutual have moved onto bigger projects, our learning site was left hanging by a limb with no one in the IT space aware of how the site was created and structured. Servicing and maintaining this site became a problem, as did servicing our internal customers. We were not in a position to customise the site ourselves and we developed a constant need to engage IT resources that bogged us down. In addition, the technology that was being used on the site was considered out of date, and the site continually broke down with regular requests made to reboot the server to fix the problem, or finding an IT resource to figure out the code to write a fix into the system.
We were very fortunate to have some like minded people in IT that were not afraid to try something new; people who were willing to push the boundaries and be leaders in their own field.
When we approached the IT folk for a solution to the problem, they wanted to try something new… dare I say outlandish!
The proposed solution was relatively new to the market and a bold recommendation.
Being a relatively small learning team, our requirements were quite simple.
The proposed solution seemed robust enough to handle the flow of traffic we anticipated. It had the role security we required to prevent access to certain internal documentation; it was flexible and was easy to use. It also seemed that we would be able to control the content and not have to log a thousand calls at high costs to change a line of text!
In December 2011 I picked up my mother from the airport. It had been two years since we last saw each other in person. When we saw each other at the airport, my mother said to me, “It’s so nice to see you, darling. I just didn’t expect to see so much of you,” referring to my ever expanding girth
I had the same reaction to SharePoint when we eventually implemented as our solution. The functionality was even broader then imagined.
Provided an interactive learning site that is role-secure and flexible
Allowed us to scale up from a content point of view
Enabled us to create customised solutions that meet our clients' needs
With the implementation of SharePoint, we have been able to:
deliver learning in a secure role-based environment to wider audience than before, in a shorter period of time.
Risk & Compliance was delivered to 3000 learners over 2 months. That’s about 68 people a day who went through learning; wrote an online assessment (via Perception); and completed an online survey (learner feedback) via SharePoint. An achievement we would not have been able to make in the classroom.
manage capacity within the team and determine costing to clients through record keeping on customised data-tables.
Previously recorded in Access.
enable facilitators to create and deliver multiple learning interventions from their workstations.
Design role to create, edit and publish content.
All we asked for was a new site that we could post our own content and apply security settings.
I’m not a SharePoint expert, but I can say that I didn’t expect so much. I am literally finding out new ways of doing things each day.
Whenever I consult with a facilitator who wants to create learning on the site. I will tell them that the site is only restricted to their own creative ability.
Rather think big and extravagant and work back from there.
I am happy to say that some very cool stuff has been created, and not so happy that some boring stuff has been created… if it is possible to “create” something boring.
Use what’s available to you! Create a content or web-part page, pull in and link learning, set permissions, enable interaction through discussion boards, surveys. Integrate other learning technology such as Adobe Captivate, Acrobat X Pro, Flash and Perception.
You don’t have to be an expert. We learn as we go and much of what we know has been looked up in the help function of Googled.
We initially created sub-sites for different clients, but realised the power of centrally located files and folders and the use of pages to keep menu items consistent throughout the site and promoting the sharing of generic material across clients – still working on this.
When creating user groups do not select a permission level… leave it blank. Permissions are inherited from the parent site. We are now in the unfortunate position of have to remove permissions when we create something new, before we can decide who we should grant permissions to and at what level. Sadly we have a huge task ahead of us in recreating these user groups and mapping them to the right places in the site.
Creating surveys where a numeric response is require, e.g. rating between 1-5. When exporting to Excel the fields are displayed as text fields making life difficult converting to meaningful graphs … converting to .csv then importing columns as numeric fields
Yes, help and Google do help, but nothing counts like investing time to explore the technology you have.
A colleague asked me earlier in February which document library he should publish his excel file. After a bit of probing it was found that the excel document is used to keep track of what work his team are busy with, something he can see at a glance. His team are required to update the excel file each week and he will have an overview of what and where his team are at. When it comes to updating a document, only one person can do this at a time.
I suggested that we rather create a Gantt view for his team page - as an experiment. We haven’t utilised this function at all, but I knew of its existence (through my own personal exploration of SharePoint). We sat down for 10 minutes and identifying what information his team needs to report on, created the view for him and then showed him how to add a new item. I sent him away to go and play with this new tool and let me know how it pans out for him and his team. I am happy to say that it met his needs and he loves the solution.
From time to time errors do occur. We’ve conveniently dubbed these ID.10.T errors – problem exists between PC and chair.
Our the last few years our learning team has amalgamated with other training areas and we’re now a happy group of some 30+/- facilitators who are developing learning and servicing more than 3000 learners.
It makes sense to enable these 30 facilitators to publish learning content on the site themselves and not leave this to a core group of developers.
This also comes with its own challenges, especially when your budget does not allow you to send all 30 facilitators on SharePoint training.
I’ve invested quite a bit of time coaching these facilitators on what I have learned. If I can do it, so can they. After all SharePoint is pretty easy and straightforward to use.
I have encountered what has commonly been termed ID.10.T Errors. For example, I will receive an email from a facilitator who has found that their client is unable to access one of the pages on the site. As I check the permissions, I find that I have forgotten to grant access to that group. I quickly grant access to the user group and respond to the facilitator that the ID.10.T (idiot) has been resolved.