Training You Can be Thankful For

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you're reading this at home, or somewhere over the river and through the woods, though I don't know any companies giving employees a week off for Thanksgiving (or any holiday, for that matter!) these days. Either way, I bet there's turkey in your very near future. And that's a safety issue, and thus a training issue, which is right up my alley for this blog, isn't it!

It's a safety issue because turkey is fraught with opportunities for foodborne illness from salmonella, campylobacter, and other bacterial contamination. There's danger when you buy your bird, when you store it, prep it, cook it, put the leftovers away, and get them back out for tomorrow's sandwiches and the next day's tetrazzini. It's a wonder we survive this gauntlet of doom!

OK, it's not all that bad. We can be thankful that safe practices can mitigate those risks. And we can be thankful that training can beget safe practices!

E-learning takes a lot of different forms, and this week's topic gives me a chance to expound on a quick chunk of philosophy. "Make it interactive" is Commandment #1 in the e-learning bible. At least, it is a key buzzword for sales departments in e-learning vendor teams. But like many lofty pronouncements, here's one whose vagueness leaves it open to a great deal of interpretation.

What's "interactive" mean? If there's a button to click, and something happens as a result of that button, well, that's interactive, right? (answer: yes. But interactivity is a continuum, and at the other end would be a highly detailed, visual simulation with multiple branches allowing a learner to make choices that steer down various wrong paths to learn from mistakes.)

The importance of interactivity - and the application of its highest levels - isn't a blanket thing. It's dependent on what the learning objective is. And in the case of turkey safety, give me a clear, accessible job performance aid, and save the expensively-produced, 3D animated simulation for something like learning to land an airplane.

One of the big sources of turkey danger has to do with the size of a turkey - it's one of the biggest pieces of meat you'll ever thaw or cook. What this means is that both thawing and cooking take place from the outside in. By the time the inside of the bird has thawed at room temperature, the outside has already reached unsafe temperatures where bacteria can thrive. And when the outside of the bird has cooked long enough to kill those bacteria, the inside still has a ways to go. So timing - for both thawing and cooking - is key. And timing depends on the weight of the bird.

What's the best instructional design to put this information into my brain and affect my behavior in the kitchen? I need to know this stuff for a few minutes each year, and the rest of the year, it doesn't really matter to me. I don't need to practice and drill until I've memorized the cooking time for a 13-pound vs. a 16-pound bird at 325º vs. 350º.

The design needs to take into account that different people learn best in different ways. I need a chart, dangit. That I can check while I'm cooking on Thanksgiving afternoon. Maybe some explanatory prose. And a meat thermometer. (I really need to set up an Amazon associates account so I can make bank off product placement like this!)

You might learn better from a video. And your neighbor might not speak English. There are free streaming videos on King County, Washington's website in English, Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

Someone else might not be as experienced as you and I, and need recipes to go along with the temperature/time charts. All that information has been made available by the USDA on their website at the aptly-named holidayfoodsafety.org.

Another learner might be a rank beginner who needs to know about everything from shopping to serving, from farm to table.

Not interactive enough? At least the USDA fakes some interactivity with a searchable FAQ: "'Ask Karen' is a knowledge base with information for consumers about preventing foodborne illness, safe food handling and storage, and safe preparation of meat, poultry, and egg products."

I didn't find any free training on cleaning up after dinner, so... let's just watch the game. Go Broncos!

Turkey photo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/banky177/ / CC BY 2.0

Adaptable Workers with Adaptable Tools

"Senior executives and managers say the people they work with are more adaptable today than a few years ago." CLO Magazine summarizes a study by NFI Research in a recent article entitled Recession's Silver Lining? Increased Adaptability. The article credits economic need and a new sense of frugality. According to the study's author, Chuck Martin, "Many in business today have had no choice but to become more adaptable considering the impact of economic conditions on business."

One participant in the study mentioned that "employees have become more adaptable since realizing the benefits and efficiencies that technology has brought to their work."

The relevance to training and the efficiencies technology brings to it should be obvious. The economic necessity for agility and the flexibility offered by e-learning create what should be a perfect storm for adoption of of web-based training.

E-learning is at its core flexible. The mantra has always been "anytime, anywhere." E-learning unbinds learners from the limitations of time (we don't have to shut down operations to get everyone into a class at the same time) and space (we don't have to all be in the same classroom to learn).

That's flexibility at its most basic. So why do so many consumers of e-learning speak of feeling trapped?

I talk to plenty of training and HR leaders who are feeling stuck, in three main ways. They're compromising on training quality with disputably relevant off-the-shelf content, they're forced to access courseware living on a server somewhere, and they're shackled into a subscription contract that requires them to predict how many seats in this course, how many in that course, and whoops, we're out of seats and have to buy more to get all our training done, and whoops, we hate this training but we're contracted through 2011 with this provider. (take a breath, Greg!) (OK! but how is any of that flexible??)

So what needs to happen to put training back into the realm of agility to match this newly increased adaptability of the workforce?

1) A number of e-learning content providers market their courseware as "customizable," but what that means is that clients can log into the provider's proprietary system, make minor changes to the existing course, and abandon their "custom" course when their contract with the provider ends. The only way to provide truly adaptable, agile course content is to provide source code and ownership of derivative works.

2) Via an internet connected computer is one way to access a multimedia course, but what happens when you need to train workers on site in the Congo or the depths of Siberia? What happens when your business has nothing to do with information technology, and your learning lab consists of a couple laptops in a trailer at the jobsite? What if you have 35 employees and no LMS? Courseware locked away on someone else's server isn't adaptable or agile - you need to be able to provide the same training via an LMS, company intranet, and CD-ROM or other portable media.

3) Whoever came up with the learner seat subscription model was a sadist, a masochist, or both. It's torture for clients - predicting how many employees need these seven courses, which subset need these other two courses, which population needs those five other courses... and in times of high turnover, those predictions go out the window, don't they. It's also no walk in the park for the hosting vendor - they've got to service all those changing needs, and assist in juggling someone else's learner seats. Painful all around! For max adaptability, a perpetual license for unlimited access to training content (especially when it's source code in the client's hands) is the only truly agile option.

If we don't capitalize on the adaptability of our people by giving them the most adaptable tools available, we don't win the economic battles we're fighting.

EITHER Agility OR Agility!

Last week I wrote about making a dilemma or controversy out of something where both sides were right, and I have more to rant about this week.

Tom Dupont posted a discussion topic in the LinkedIn Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group. He posted a question that's gotten lots of response: The live PowerPoint presentation is a powerful paradyme! We have learned over the years to minimize the words on each slide, and then just talk to the bullet points. Good for a PowerPoint presentation, but a bad design for an eLearning course?

Folks weighed in with their own strong opinions about the burning controversy. Someone even questioned why there would be text in an e-learning course at all. (Hmmm...)

But again I find myself asking, why the "either-or" here? Wouldn't the training you create be more agile if you made both available to your learners? Modern multimedia tools (in the case of GCPLearning, mostly Adobe Flash) give us the ability to be extremely flexible. We can very conveniently show and hide any feature and offer alternative means of access as a set of options in a multimedia course delivered online, so why in the world wouldn't we make BOTH forms of text presentation available to learners? ("make both available... make both available... make both available..." Repeating myself is sure sign of a passionate rant!)

We've been evolving our design along these lines ever since our self-proclaimed "3G Design Revolution" of 2002. Maybe we should have bragged about it more in the intervening seven years!

Here's our thinking on the topic. Adult learners come to training with a wide range of educational levels, life experiences, and reading and language abilities. They also bring the usual variety of learning styles to the table. So being able to choose the learning style - the form of access to information - that works best for them makes a big difference in their success.

In the e-learning courses we develop, we started calling it "user-controlled narration," though now I'm thinking perhaps we should call it "user-controlled access." In a nutshell, our learners can see and/or hear the course in whatever way works best for them.

Full text display is an option; the default is on-screen text synced with audio. This leaves more screen real estate - room in the frame - for instructive graphics and interactivity.

Similarly, since the learners can also control the audio narration, they can turn it up, turn it down, or turn it off to best suit their learning styles and personal preference.

These key features also make our courses accessible to sight- and hearing-impaired learners and those who don't have or want to use audio capabilities on their computers.

Built-in flexibility seems so basic, such a given to us, that we made "agile" part of our tagline and a big part of our e-learning entire vision. Agility is the cornerstone of our content, our delivery system, and our business model. It's beyond me why anyone gets so set on one way being right when the world demands us to be flexible.

A Whole Lot of Either/Or Noise

Two discussions inspired my posting this week, both about being all diametrical-like in approaches to facets of e-learning. Why is there an instinct to ricochet between the horns of a dilemma rather than just riding comfortably on the dang thing's head? (Look at that head: doesn't it look all soft and comfy? What in the world is your attraction to those horns!?) Does everything have to be a controversy; is everything either/or? or can we teach ourselves to make looking for the utility of two different approaches our default way of thinking?

Let's focus on the first one, a well-posed question by Bob Little on eLearn: Rapid e-Learning Polarizes Opinion. Bob says:

Much to the disgruntlement of instructional designers and other e-learning specialists, rapid e-learning tools are offering in-house subject matter experts excellent opportunities to produce e-learning materials relatively quickly and cost-effectively...The e-learning experts complain that rapid development tools are helping e-learning amateurs to turn out low-quality and poorly-designed materials that merely pay lip service to the ideals of instructional design.

The same issue is being discussed in different flavors in a couple different LinkedIn forums. I'll cut to the chase and tell you my opinion on the matter: SMEs with no ID experience can create one kind of excellent instruction, and PhD-level Instructional Designers can make another kind of excellent instruction. And we should look for perfect applications for both types of training, and be proud of ourselves for making efficient use of the resources at our disposal.

How about an example: my dad taught me to ski by being a great skier, and my mom taught me to fold fitted sheets because she knew a really cool trick for it. (OK, not a fair example - they were both teachers! But your parents taught you things too, without having ever heard of Don Kirkpatrick or Benjamin Bloom or Robert Gagne.) Point is, our parents were subject matter experts, and they didn't take a research-based approach to designing a learning event for us; they just showed us how to do it, watched us try, corrected our errors, and made sure we knew how to do it. Voila, learning.

Another example: Bill Preston was one of my high school English teachers, and because he was a thoughtful and deliberate designer of instruction, using a diligently planned approach, he managed to enable all manner of 16-year-old idiots to not just wade through McBeth, but to savor the intricacies of Shakespeare's games with language and actually get that play. Voila, learning!

SMEs with a will to teach can create richly applicable training materials. And expert learning designers with a will to learn the subject matter can create elegant and efficient training materials. Smart people (like GCPLearning, of course!) will utilize both approaches.

What's the controversy?

E-learning and Telecommuting - Inequally Evil?

Telecommuters will invariably end up ripping someone off - someone ALWAYS gets shortchanged.

Either their company, or the teleworkers themselves and their families.

At least, that was the declaration of a former boss when I proposed working from home at least a few days a week. When teleworkers slack off, with no one to supervise them, he said, they're stealing from their employer. Conversely, when they have a strong work ethic, they feel compelled to prove (to themselves as well as their boss and colleagues) that they're not slacking off, and end up spending more hours at their desk than they should.

Of course, you're a better teleworker than that - I know I am! Right? You and I are always responsible and mature in our use of the gift of flexibility that our telecommuting situation provides, right?

Well... knowledge work - for the chronically curious, the compulsive reader, the ADD-inflicted - is like a distillery job for an alcoholic. The web is a million constant temptations, and each one links to a zillion more. I admit that I sometimes have to "work" 16 hours in a day in order to get 8 hours of tasks completed.

But in general, I am indeed a better teleworker than that. It's incredibly productive to walk downstairs rather than having to drive for an hour and a half, to set my own schedule, to work in the comfort of my home office dressed comfortably, to not be around an officeful of interesting people interrupting me (and I them) all day long. I get a LOT done, and more happily and healthily than when I drove to work.

John McDermott posted an interesting question on LinkedIn's Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group: "Remote learning is great, but no remote workers, please!" Why are employers willing to allow e-learning but not e-work? Is this a fear of employees slacking off, or a devaluation of the training/learning function?

Most likely both, I say. The lack of trust employers have for telecommuting demonstrates a strong acknowledgment of the value of teamwork but lack of recognition of the utility of online collaboration tools to facilitate that teamwork despite lack of physical proximity.

And the apparently contradictory acceptance of e-learning acknowledges the ability of trainees to take responsibility for their own learning tasks, while failing to recognize the social aspects of learning.

A crucial aspect of all of this is the fact that some of both our work and our learning tasks are best tackled in quiet solitude with singular attention, while others are enhanced (or even made possible at all) by nature of interaction with one or more teammates. None of us at GCPLearning ever tell an HR, training, or environmental health and safety manager that our training was designed to replace trainers, the classroom, or any other tool they're currently using.

E-learning - like teleworking - is one arrow in the employer's quiver, to be applied thoughtfully and deliberately where it will do the most good. Employers would do well to recognize - no, embrace - this key fact and make business decisions, related to both task and training functions, accordingly.

Photo courtesy of slworking

GCPLearning Website Review Needed

Hello!

Someone's getting another brand new iPod nano for in exchange for a chunk of thoughtful feedback! It worked so well the first time, we're doing it again.

Kent Pennybaker of River City Engineering was the happy recipient of a sweet8GB iPod in our last drawing. (We'd share a picture of him, but he's keeping the big win on the hush-hush so his kids don't confiscate it from him - seriously.)

In our last round, you gave us feedback almost exclusively on our GCPWorldwebsite - most of you didn't review GCPLearning. We can't tell you what a difference your feedback made on our GCPWorld website - we learned several key things that were missing or easily misunderstood. Check it out again - www.GCPWorld.com - and see the revisions we made.

But we'd love to get that level of feedback on GCPLearning.com, which is our most important site for selling our products. So once again, we're contacting people whose opinions we trust - friends, family, clients, partners, and some folks we've talked with in the past and would like to get to know better - to tell us straight out about the impressions our new website makes. We're asking you to look through our revamped www.GCPLearning.com and answer some questions that will let us know if we have succeeded in telling the GCP story.

Your thoughts and impressions will have a big impact for us moving forward. So to show our appreciation, everyone who sends us a review will have their name in the hat for another lovely new 8GB iPod nano.

Here's how to play:

- Visit GCPLearning.com

- Answer the questions below - thoughtfully and helpfully.

- And with brutal honesty - we're counting on your insights.

- No, really, we can take it! If something bugs you - we want to know about it!

- Send us your review to info@GCPWorld.com no later than October 16.

- Forward this page to as many friends as you like, the more, the merrier

- Names in the hat the evening of the 16th - iPod in the mail on the 20th!

Here's what we want to know:

1) What's the impact of the GCPLearning homepage - does it clearly answer the who, what, when, where, why and how of GCP?

2) Does the "flow" of the website work - do you feel a logic to the movement from category to category and detail to detail in the site's design?

3) What's your impression of the video testimonials? How do they make you feel about GCP?

4) Imagine you're shopping for workplace training - does the website answer all the questions you'd need to answer to decide to talk with us further?

5) Are the calls to action clear and enticing? Is it easy to know what GCP wants you as a visitor to *do* as a result of coming to the site?

6) And do you feel enticed to make that next step?

7) What's confusing? What important information did we NOT provide?

8) What's too much? What parts did we drone on and on unnecessarily about?

9) Any other thoughts or advice for us?

10) Bonus question (your name goes in the hat TWICE for taking time to answer this one) Check out our "follow us" links. What do these links add to the effect of our site? Do you feel that our blog, our twitter, our Facebook and LinkedIn pages add something of value to your understanding of GCP?

Please send us your review to info@GCPWorld.com no later than October 16.

Training That's Good Enough to be Great

I recently read an article that resonated so well with me, on a bunch of different fronts. The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine by Robert Capps appears in the September issue of Wired Magazine.

The basic premise: our tastes and evaluations have evolved; "quality" often no longer means the fastest and shiniest and techiest offering. QUALITY means the thing that is convenient, flexible, and cheap. The article gives a bunch of excellent examples, starting in with the Flip camcorder, and going on to illustrate how "...companies that focus on traditional measures of quality—fidelity, resolution, features—can become myopic and fail to address other, now essential attributes like convenience and shareability." Capps cites the growing adoption of Skype vs. traditional phones, Hulu vs. television, cheap netbooks over fancier computers, and several more. "As the worst recession in 75 years rolls on, it's the light and nimble products that are having all the impact—exactly the type of thing that lean startups and small-scale enterprises are best at."

Our needs themselves have evolved. Or a better way to look at it, I think, is that our recognition of our true needs has evolved. As we shop, we're seeing more clearly what's most important to us in our real lives.

"The attributes that now matter most all fall under the rubric of accessibility. Thanks to the speed and connectivity of the digital age, we've stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists. Instead, we're now focused on three things: ease of use, continuous availability, and low price."

An example for me personally is cameras. I love to take photos. I love to look at photos. I can't seem to stop myself from taking photos. (Just ask my annoyed wife and sons!) I've got a beloved old Nikon 35mm I get out once in a... OK, come to think of it, it's been at least 5 years since I had it out. (I wonder what's on the roll of film that's still in there??) And I have dSLR ambitions, but most of the photos I take are with the crappy camera in my phone, or at best, with my waterproof, shockproof, freezeproof pocket camera. Why? Because the quality most important to me is, what camera can I have with me all the time? What's convenient and flexible? (The third quality comes into play too – cheap. My pocket cam was under $300, and in effect, I didn't pay for my phonecam... I bought the phone, and the camera's just an assumed part of it. And hey, in any given month, I don't seem to have a thousand bucks laying around after bills get paid – so no D90 for me, so far.)

Funny thing is, an evolution in taste has occurred - a cause or an effect of this revolution? I don't know. But there are those who actually appreciate this lower-resolution aesthetic in photography. Search Flickr groups for "phonecam" and find 691 different groups devoted to folks who love this or that aspect of the photos they get from their cellies. (example: PhoneCam Expressions is "...for all those who love to use their phone cameras, but with a sense of taste and beauty." And DBOLRL ("DBOLRL: a playground for a Drunken Bunch of Low Res Lovers") has a brutally light-hearted (light-heartedly brutal?) voting game that's been running for nearly 4 years, reveling in the wonder of chunky, noisy photos from cheap cameras.

So anyway... this is supposed to be my e-learning business blog, and I need to show why I'm babbling about all of this.

I propose that there is an elegance possible in a simpler e-learning solution for corporate training. I would like to suggest that there are bells and whistles in the more expensive "end-to-end, enterprise solutions" a lot of vendors push, that most training organizations simply do not need. I assert that if the training content itself is excellent, there are plenty of delivery features that upon examination, you might discover aren't as necessary as you may have thought when they were described to you in the sales process.

So I'm submitting for your discussion, that e-learning consumers need to ask themselves Capps' three questions as part of their evaluation: "Is it simple to get what we want out of the technology? Is it available everywhere, all the time — or as close to that ideal as possible? And is it so cheap that we don't have to think about price?"

If you have a staff of thousands, in multiple locations, by all means, you need to think Cadillac in selecting a tracking and scheduling and reporting system. But if you're training 20 people, or 50, is it really all that difficult to collect printed completion certificates from trainees, and manage your records by hand in a spreadsheet? Does your skill gap analysis really require the use of an elaborate database? Doesn't it make good business sense (especially in cash-tight times like these) to buy only the lean and nimble access to training that you need, rather than paying more for fat that isn’t adding any benefit to your training?

I'd loved to get feedback on these thoughts. For e-learning in your organization, what's good enough?

Getting Social, Getting Seen

Who knew when I first got online in... maybe 1993? and text-chatted for the first time with a distant friend using a text-based chat program called ytalk that I was starting to engage in the now trendy trend of Social Networking? I keep reminding myself of my office-mate's impression at the time.

"Dave! Check this out! I'm actually talking to a friend – in NEW YORK! Look! I'm typing, and she sees what I'm typing, and then I can see what she types!"

Dave nodded sagely. "I heard about another way to do that, where you punch in a series of digits and can then actually talk to the other person via voice."

"REALLY!?"

He grinned and pointed to the telephone. Groan! Gotta love tech-savvy luddites for keeping gear-giddiness in check.

MOO was next, with the announcement of the grand opening of schMOOze University for teachers and non-native speaking students of English. I started forming my long-standing hypothesis that human interaction was the best thing about the internet, and a key factor in any attempt at online learning.

In the past couple years, online human interaction seems to have finally come into its own as the web melded with the Internet, as apps got easier to use, and as more and more older people got online. My mom's got a facebook account, for goodness sake, and chats with us via gtalk using her webcam.

Social networking – used to be geeks and academics, now it's everyone.

So I'm finding it strange to have been at least a little bit of a pioneer in using the Internet for communication (as opposed to the old "information superhighway" idea of its main purpose being information retrieval) – and now feeling like a bit of a noob trying to figure out how to use it correctly for marketing. I've been using it forever to collaborate on projects, to co-author articles, to provide language learners with opportunities to interact in English, to communicate and share with my friends, but I'm feeling like a bit of a latecomer in trying to use it for marketing.

But we're diving right in, head-first, with both feet, or something like that. Micheal's up to his eyeballs in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), pimping every page in our websites (www.GCPLearning.com and www.GCPWorld.com) to help the spiders and bots find us and push us to the top of the list for people searching for what we sell. Meanwhile, I'm working in character – trying to maximize our human participation on the web by tweeting at www.Twitter.com/GCPLearning, poking and updating our status on the GCPLearning facebook page, becoming more active on LinkedIn, and lurking (for now!) on 4LearningExecs. Stay tuned!

Training in Transition

I talk to trainers, training coordinators, and HR personnel every day, all facing different training issues depending on their industry, their worker population, and the maturity of their learning organization. But they all say the same thing:

"Our training program is in transition."

Of course it is! I don't know why I had to hear it so many times before I noticed the pattern that exemplifies that obvious fact of corporate life: nothing is more constant than change, and the only training that is NOT in transition is training in a stagnant company.

("Training in Transition" sounds like a good session title for a presentation at ASTD or eLearning Guild... I wonder if it's taken yet! I should trademark it; Google only spots 900 instances of it, but I hear it every day.)

Anyway... I'm not brilliant, but I have my moments. When I do things right, when I hit the nail on the head, it's only because my business methodology is to instinctively do the right, brilliant thing, and only later figure out that evidence (of which I was oblivious) supported my approach all along. The positive side of this personal phenomenon is that I get to enjoy plenty of satisfying epiphanies, the sort where I smack my forehead and exclaim in amazement, "Damn, I'm smart!!"

So the smart thing this summer was this: collaborating with my partners, we dramatically expanded the options for acquiring our training content. The starting point of this revolutionary evolution was this – our "finished product" is great; we made our courses so that in their integrated player, they'll run in SCORM/AICC-compatible learning management systems, directly from the web or intranet, stand-alone on learners' PCs, or as auto-launching CD-ROMs. Very cool stuff; we're proud of what we created. And we've been optionally including uncompiled (editable) source files for some time. But it turns out that even with those flexible options, our clever clients are using our courseware in other ways we hadn't thought of, most notably as the focal point of instructor-led classroom training.

The big "ah-ha" was that behind the 91 courses in our library, there is a repository of some 50,000+ files. Not just the uncompiled Flash files. I'm talking about the digital photos (both the final course graphics and the extra shots). Storyboards. Assessments. Digital audio files (again, both final narration as well as the random "Please go on to the next screen" and "Correct!" and "Sorry, try again" bits and pieces that make up navigation and feedback. If our clients are using our finished courses as stand-up training aids, wouldn't the files behind them be just as useful? Why the heck is all that usable instructional content gathering digital dust, sitting idly in archives on our servers?

We tossed that idea at a couple crucial clients, and they were stunned. Shocked that we were willing to provide those files, and shocked that no one had done that before. "No-brainer," one said. Of COURSE all those digital assets would be useful to trainers and in-house training developers! At the minimum, they'll have the dressiest PowerPoints in the whole company. More enterprising developers will have new "custom" courses ready in a fraction of the normal development time, using our course materials as a foundation to build their own courses "from scratch." This is HUGE.

When another prospective client had no need for our finished courses but wanted to purchase storyboards only, we knew our thinking was moving in the right direction, and we formalized the idea. In press-release-ese (the way our marketing department states it), "Our eight Multimedia Curriculum Libraries are each available in three distinct editions - Developer's Edition, Business Edition, and Ultimate Edition - to put exactly the training materials you need – no more, no less – at your fingertips." There's more info at the site of a recent promotion I probably shouldn't be linking to here in my blog, but whatever... can't see the harm in pointing to it.

You can't outsource this

Early on in my particular outsourcing history, we were pretty careful about letting clients know about our offshore partnerships. It was actually sort of our dirty little secret, and besides, what if our clients bypassed us and went straight offshore to get their work done? Where would we be then??

One time a client realized after the fact that much of the work on the elearning course he'd hired us to create was developed by members of my offshore team, in India. He was a little incensed, and wondered why he was paying me instead of going right to the source and paying an Indian firm less to do the development for him.

What he failed to realize was how thoroughly I earned the money that he paid me to manage his outsourced project for him. He didn't know that behind the scenes, I'd had to schedule meetings around a 11.5 hour timezone difference, perform quality control on "final" products, and communicate constantly with folks whose native language is not mine and whose English is not my English.

That client is still my happy client, but things have changed. There's more recognition of two facts:

1. Offshore outsourcing is not evil; it's necessary and part of the evolution of the global economy.
2. Offshore outsourcing is not easy; it's fraught with peril and requires expense, attention, and more human resources here at home to accomplish successfully.

Our outsourcing is no longer secret; it's a selling point. It's a valuable and marketable expertise. It's what we do now.

It's a blog!

Commerce is heavy on the streets of Varca City. Teeming with life, smelling of fish, diesel exhaust, a million spices and a billion people, Varca is a microcosm of something or something else entirely.

Diving into the indoor market, we eased gingerly past the drying meats in the sausage-maker's stall. "Hey Robbo," we quipped. "There's your sandwich, ripening nicely!" Rob wondered to himself, "Did I really eat meat like that, or was it all a bad dream?"

Oh, you ate it, Rob. But the kindly ministrations of multiple and multi-hued bottles Kingfisher Ale and a shot of Jura before bed each night set his innards right, and indeed, all of us remained healthy despite pushing our luck repeatedly.