Needs analysis experience

This week I wanted to share my views on my favorite part of the instructional design process, the needs analysis. During the past summer I worked for a large Scandinavian insurance company in Finland, and I was responsible for conducting a needs analysis for upcoming development projects for the company’s intranet. My task was to analyze the use of the intranet from the customer service representatives’ point of view. The proposed problem, as presented to me, was that the information necessary for the call center customer service representatives is too scattered and difficult to find while they are communicating with the customers over the phone.

Needs analysis is a vital part of the instructional design process. Needs analysis is conducted in order to really pin down the client’s problem, or the gap between the current and desired situation, as accurately as possible. Knowing the gap will help instructional designers to create training, which will solve the problem or answer to the training need more efficiently. If the needs analysis is not completed and compiled thoroughly, even the best training can completely miss the purpose and be useless in terms of the actual learning results.

Clients, who are not familiar with the process of designing systematic instruction, often doubt the importance of the needs analysis process. They have an opinion as to what the problem is in their minds and they see the proposed needs analysis as an irrelevant t extra cost on the budget. However, as instructional designers, we have to emphasize and explain the importance of the needs analysis to the client as it is in their benefit that it is completed. Even though the client has an idea as to what their problem is, often there is a bias underlining that thought. The client can’t be objective to the problem and on top of that might not have considered all the different angles of it.

I was hired for the intranet development project last summer to bring an outsider’s view to the problem. With very limited knowledge in the field of insurance and no previous experience in using the company’s intranet I was able to look at the situation objectively and with a fresh set of eyes.

During the eight week period I was assigned on the project I tried to compile as much information as possible and from as many sources as possible. I utilized

• observations
• interviews & discussions
• surveys
• website statistics
• information mapping

to find out as much information as possible. I talked to Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) who were involved in the use of intranet in different ways, for example;

• customer service representatives (working in the call centers as well as in person)
• intranet updaters (insurance specialists responsible for creating content for the intranet)
• web-masters
• call center internal trainers
• call center team managers
• “insurance support center” personnel

After asking millions of questions, spending hours observing, compiling notes from numerous meetings and interviews, crafting website inventories and structure maps, I finally compiled a needs analysis document with my opinion of the problem and suggestions on how to solve it. As a major conclusion I found that the underlying problem was the fact that the process of developing and updating the intranet was very unstructured and not standardized. The customer service representatives are dealing with a vast amount of information to begin with, and as the information is organized and presented in an inconsistent manner, locating it becomes very difficult.

From my analysis, the company gained relevant information for their intranet development projects, and last I heard the efforts were directed towards providing training and better guidelines for the intranet developers as well as creating standards on how the information will have to be structured and organized in the intranet.

I thoroughly enjoyed the needs analysis process and I was genuinely excited as I was able to solve at least a part of the problem for a company. Even though the result of the analysis was not a pure instructional need, the experience I gained from all the SME interactions and tools I used to gather data were wonderful for me.