Peer to Peer Magazine

41 WWW.ILTANET.ORG Mastering Management: Streamlining New Hire and Content Delivery FEATURES Analyzing and Implementing Solutions When analyzing workflows, knowing your soware's capabilities is crucial. Although our LMS can store copies of documents, I usually recommend that we use links instead, to avoid the need for uploading fresh copies aer revisions. Deciding which content from the "new hire binder" would be linked from the LMS was no easy task, with my New York paralegal manager reaching out to other managers to gain consensus. This also exposed the complication of the various ways that people might access the binder virtually. To address this, we replaced all the various direct links (to the DMS) with links through the LMS. In other words, if you found a DMS link on our intranet portal but the item was also in the LMS, the link would point to the LMS first. Clicking "launch" in the LMS would open the item from the DMS, but it would also "capture the click" for reporting purposes and would give credit to anyone who happened to have that item on a "learning path" (prescribed training pushed to user's desktops based on role). Codifying the list of content for our first learning path allowed us to take a dry run of how it might work for new hires. When I finished creating the path and ordering the items under the section headings we created, I pushed the path to management and let them try it out, where it soon became apparent that the way some content was offered would not work. Our LMS considers printed instructions to be a resource supporting classes, elearning or webinars, and accordingly, printed instructions cannot appear on the learning path itself. Instead, printed instructions must appear on a separate list, which can only be accessed with an additional click. This was a deal-breaker for my clients, and a workaround was needed. My boss wisely suggested that we bring in duplicates of this content—as if they were elearning items—so they could appear on the main learning path. Happily, a link is a link, whether the wrapper says "printed instruction" or "elearning," and this addressed my client's concerns. However, my librarian brain was racked with the worry that users just searching for this content would find duplicates and not know which one to view, so I decided to aach new-hire parameters to one version (the one A few years before I arrived at WilmerHale, the new LMS was deployed, but paralegal services felt at the time that their systems were working well and decided to continue to offer training and deliver instructions without involving the LMS. More recently, aer some experience with newly requested content being delivered from it, they became curious about ways the LMS might help economize efforts in their department, which happened to coincide with my arrival. Evaluating Needs Since their department (paralegal services) was coming to ours (information services), we already had good buy-in on the potential values of the system. I took it upon myself to ask plenty of questions and make sure the solutions I offered these internal clients would be perceived as valuable. Besides ongoing content delivery, reporting and classroom/elearning scheduling, we decided that the LMS would provide all new-hire resources in a virtual format, while allowing users to print whatever they needed. Much of the earliest meetings was discussions around the ways printed instruction and live training were then being delivered and tracked. WilmerHale has offices of varying size across the country, each with its own longstanding procedures. Since there were established traditions in each office, any anomalies in the ways they delivered content had to be uncovered and negotiated. Understandably, there were sometimes separate versions of the same instructions, describing the local contacts in each city for securing a "project room," for example. Since this information was likely to change with some frequency, these instructions were out of date. It was agreed that there would be one version of this document (and others like it), which described the steps generally, then listed for each city only the titles, but not the names, of who could assist. My goal was to create documentation that required less maintenance and could beer stand the test of time. Geing this content into the LMS posed new questions, like who would be updating the instructions (and how), and who would be creating the event templates for live training sessions. These questions were answered over a series of twice-monthly meetings. MISCHA KISCHKUM Mischa Kischkum is the Learning Management System Administrator & Technology Training Coordinator at WilmerHale, where he works with management to develop training programs and works with attorneys to automate processes. As LMS administrator, he troubleshoots for the service desk, writes instructions, suggests system enhancements, and trains other administrators on best practices. Codifying the list of content for our first learning path allowed us to take a dry run of how it might work for new hires.

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