What was your experience of your last digital project? Was it a smooth, effortless transition? Or a painful, misleading and ultimately disappointing journey that left you frustrated and disengaged?
If it was the latter, you are not alone. Our clients speak of solutions providers over-simplifying projects and over-committing to delivery.
A common complaint is that publishers are not made aware of the amount of time and resources required to see a project come to life before embarking on the journey.
Often, solutions providers are technically strong with excellent tools. Unfortunately, these tools are all-too-often handed over without the appropriate support services. Publishers are left alone to manage what can be a disruptive transformation.
How do you use this new technology? How do you encourage your content authors to use it? And quickly, because submission deadlines don’t move. Where is the support and guidance?
The consequence is cash. Spending more to fast-track the work, breaking the budget and forcing a project to completion to hit the deadline and deliver the end goal.
You’re left with disgruntled authors, scorched finance directors and bitter editors. Where to from here? How can educational technology be embraced when the support surrounding it is so dire?
Three things that will help guarantee the success of your next digital project
Adaptemy’s foundations are in adaptive learning. We provide solutions that adapt to the learning needs of the individual student-user and the curriculum and culture of the country.
For more on adaptive learning, read our article: An Introduction to Adaptive Learning for Publishers
Having deployed multiple solutions worldwide, working hand-in-hand with our clients from concept to delivery and beyond, we have refined an approach to these projects that mitigate the risk involved. While nothing in life is guaranteed, these three approaches to your next digital project will set you up for success.
Prepare or build the right internal team
Experienced educational authors are invaluable. Years of industry experience mean their creation is seamless and their insights on point.
But will introducing a new technology slow them down or turn them off? Or will they take to it like a duck to water?
Before you embark on your digital journey, understand what your workforce can do. This will ensure foresight into training and recruitment requirements before you commit to the project.
Work with a supplier that can help you identify the skills gaps within your team and recommend the best way to fill them. It might be training. It might be recruitment.
Either way, you’ll be prepared.
Work with tools that are intuitive
Experienced content authors aren’t getting any cheaper. Time is important and a confusing new interface does little to support your fight for digital.
Make sure the tools you are working with encourage efficient, effective working practices. As well as an intuitive user interface (UI), this should be a system that:
- supports tracked changes, version control and team collaboration – replicating existing internal process
- provides real-time validation – ensuring authors are alerted if they forget to input required text
- is operation system agnostic – easily interfacing with your existing technology
- is based in the Cloud – eliminating the need for time-consuming installations or updates
- ensures platform stability – removing technical obstacles ahead of deadlines
- supports XML authoring – allowing you to effortlessly output content in multiple formats
With quality tools powering your project, you will enable your team to more easily migrate to the new world of digital.
The process
Your existing processes work. When you’re creating a textbook, you understand every person, input, output and required element of support. It is optimised, maximising your profits.
But what does the digital process look like? What does digital authoring look like? How does QA work? What about version control?
The process is different but it is not unchartered. There are best practice approaches to the digital authoring process and an experienced team can help you define, refine and activate them to best suit your organisation.
Don’t start your digital journey without this team behind you. With their knowledge of the risks and pitfalls ahead, and their ability to partner with you throughout the project, you’ll safely and assuredly succeed in your digital endeavours.
