September 18, 2006

The eLearning Guild’s

SM

Practical Applications of Technology for Learning

THIS WEEK: Management Strategies

Process and staffing are two of

Microsoft Learning’s Portfolio the most difficult issues in e-Learn-

ing production, especially in large-
Design Model: Design Once, scale publishing operations. But
Deliver to Many every size e-Learning organization

By Kim Field can benefit from understanding

the approaches that others find

I f you are a publishing or training professional with

a passion for using technology to delivery high-
quality content to a worldwide audience, it’s hard to
successful, and so this week’s
article gives you insights into one
very large publisher’s production
beat Microsoft Learning as a place to work. model. Along the way, you’ll also
Software development is Microsoft’s core busi-
see an interesting approach to
ness, but the company’s investment in content cre-
defining the roles of subject mat-
ation is substantial: over 2,000 Microsoft employees
ter experts and instructional de-
spend their working hours creating training and refer-
ence content. While other technology companies signers, the use of XML, and the
have cut back in this area, Microsoft continues to invest in publishing and train-
business model that drives every-
ing. User assistance content; Web properties like MSNBC, MSN, and Microsoft.
com; employee and partner training programs; and online technical resources
thing.
such as MSDN and TechNet are only some of Microsoft’s many content offerings.
Microsoft Learning’s mission is to help external customers — business deci-
A publication of
sion makers, information workers, IT professionals, and developers — get the
most out of Microsoft software. While other Microsoft groups focus on develop-
ing content included in our software, training internal staff, and ensuring that the
company’s partners are ready to take advantage of upcoming software releases,
the 300 employees of Microsoft Learning are responsible for five major busi-
nesses that generate millions of dollars of revenue. We publish retail books

through our Microsoft Press imprint. We develop
classroom training delivered by a channel of 1,600
authorized training centers around the world. We host
e-Learning courses on Microsoft. com. We create
academic learning products. And we are responsible
for Microsoft’s official technical certification programs
and the exams and assessments associated with
them. (See Figure 1 on page 3.)
This is an awesome content domain over which to
have responsibility, and it’s also an extremely complex
one. In the next year Microsoft Learning will plan, de-
sign, and develop over 1,000 training products for
millions of customers in multiple languages and five
different learning modalities, from print to online, for
all of Microsoft’s customer segments.
Few training teams have charters this broad, but at
Microsoft Learning we struggle with the same funda-
mental challenges confronting any learning or publish-
ing organization. How can we become more efficient
in planning and designing our products? How can we
be sure that we’re building training that customers
really want? What is the best model for designing a
portfolio of training products that use multiple delivery
modalities? How can we put the customer in the dri-
ver’s seat during design? After publication, how can
Publisher David Holcombe
Editorial Director Heidi Fisk
Editor Bill Brandon
Copy Editor Charles Holcombe
Design Director Nancy Marland Wolinski
The eLearning Guild™ Advisory Board
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LEARNING SOLUTIONS | September 18, 2006 2
Management Strategies
we enable them to find the targeted training they need
whenever they need it?
Microsoft Learning has adopted a portfolio design
model that has enabled us to start making real pro-
gress against all of these challenges.
The model is working for us today. Over the past
two years, we’ve applied it to the design of four major
product portfolios. It’s now core to our content devel-
opment process, our vendor strategy, and our meta-
data approach. We’ve made organizational changes
based on our success with it. It’s made us more effi-
cient, and it’s provided a better way for us to work
with the Microsoft software-development teams.
Our former model
Figure 2 on page 4 shows how Microsoft Learning
used to plan, design, and develop titles before we ad-
opted our portfolio design model. Each product went
through a title-approval process to see if it met our defi-
nition of a viable title. If approved, the product planner
wrote a vision document for the title and handed off the
effort to the appropriate development team for design
and development — we had distinct development teams
for books, certification exams and assessments, instruc-
tor-led training, and e-Learning products.
Learning Solutions e-Magazine™ is designed to serve as a catalyst
for innovation and as a vehicle for the dissemination of new and practical
strategies, techniques, and best practices for e-Learning design, devel-
opment and management professionals. It is not intended to be THE
definitive authority ... rather, it is intended to be a medium through which
e-Learning professionals can share their knowledge, expertise, and expe-
rience. As in any profession, there are many different ways to accomplish
a specific objective. Learning Solutions will share many different per-
spectives and does not position any one as “the right way,” but rather
we position each article as “one of the right ways” for accomplishing an
objective. We assume that readers will evaluate the merits of each article
and use the ideas they contain in a manner appropriate for their specific
situation.
The articles in Learning Solutions are all written by people who are
actively engaged in this profession — not by journalists or freelance writ-
ers. Submissions are always welcome, as are suggestions for future top-
ics. To learn more about how to submit articles and/or ideas, please visit
our Web site at www.eLearningGuild.com.

Obviously, this was not an efficient process. Put-
ting 1,000 products through an approval process one
at a time was a huge challenge for our product plan-
ners, and our development teams were designing
each title individually. This fractured approach wasn’t
good news for customers, either — the products didn’t
cover the technology consistently and, because there
was no overarching design framework, there were no
clear learning paths across products.
In 2004 we got down to the business of changing
our approach. First, we analyzed our title plan. We
discovered that we could tie about 60% of our titles
to a product portfolio — a set of products supporting
the new release of Windows, Office, SQL Server, or
Visual Studio, for example.
We then looked at our revenue figures, which con-
firmed that these portfolio-centric titles represented
about 75% to 80% of our projected sales revenues.
The next major product portfolio Microsoft Learning
would develop was the suite of products in support of
the release of SQL Server 2005, Microsoft’s flagship
database product. We committed that, for this family
of training and reference products, we would plan the
entire portfolio of products across all form factors,
bring them through the approval process as a portfo-
lio, and apply a new design model to the entire portfo-
lio. On the development side, we wanted to create a
design framework that all our products, regardless of
form factor, would snap to and that would enable dis-
coverability and reuse after publication.
We looked to the design process that we applied to
our certification exams. That process began with a for-
mal job/task analysis of how our customers used the
software product. This analysis then drove the creation
of an object domain, which we used, in turn, to design
the exam and develop the design items. We liked the
customer-centricity and rigor of this approach.
Many content developers have successfully used a
single-sourcing approach, writing content once and
then leveraging it across different products and form
factors. Because we were in so many competitive
businesses, and because our products carried the
Microsoft brand, we were concerned that single-sourc-
ing, while efficient, would not give us the high-quality
products in each form factor that we had to deliver.
Instead, we would design once and allow the form-
factor-centric development teams to optimize their
designs to suit the needs and preferences of each
audience and the unique aspects of each form factor.
The new Microsoft Learning portfolio
design model
Before detailing a new process, key stakeholders
sat down and documented their goals for this effort.
Here are the guidelines they devised:
LEARNING SOLUTIONS | September 18, 2006 3
Management Strategies
First and foremost, we would achieve the best
learning experience for customers. We would en-
sure relevancy by allowing customers and industry ex-
perts to drive the design of our products. We would
achieve truly blended learning by providing customers
and partners with a consistent learning path regard-
less of modality or form factor. We would enable cus-
tomers to find the targeted content they needed by
using search tools and assessments.
We would adopt the best content-develop-
ment strategy for Microsoft. We would put cus-
tomers in the driver’s seat. We would enforce a disci-
plined, streamlined approach to product planning. We
would replace a handoff between our product plan-
ners and development teams with a collaborative part-
nership. We would remove risks in our vendor strate-
gy (Microsoft Learning outsources product develop-
ment) by providing vendors with a predefined design
framework and rich audience profiles. We would ena-
ble multiple products to share components such as
labs. And we would design our framework so that it
could be leveraged by third parties.
We would learn from our past. This wasn’t the
first time we had tried to establish a portfolio ap-
proach or to become more efficient, and we wanted
to avoid problems that had kept prior attempts from
being successful. For instance, we would avoid over-
lapping with similar projects, maintain focus and mo-
mentum, ensure that we had support from executive ì
management so that we wouldn’t be subject to chang- Figure 1
ing priorities, and avoid a tools-centric approach. We Microsoft Learning
would document and refine our approach every step develops training prod-
of the way so that in the end we would have a pro- ucts on multiple tench-
cess that was flexible (applicable to different skills, nologies in several
audiences, and products), scalable (suitable for port- modalities for varied
folios of varying size and complexity), and repeatable audiences around the
(applicable to our next portfolio effort). world.

We would not change Microsoft Learning
organizational structure. In 2004, we had just been
through a difficult reorganization, and at that point in
our history another round of restructuring would have
been counterproductive.
We would have a shared vision of the learning
experience we wanted the entire portfolio to
achieve. We would focus on a collaborative design
approach based on a shared vision. We would bring
customers, the business teams, and the development
teams together during portfolio design and then allow
the siloed teams to optimize for each audience and
form factor as long as they mapped to the portfolio
framework.
We would develop a unified skills domain that
all products would share. In the new model we
would avoid boiling the job-task-analysis/skills-domain
oceans by creating separate skills domains for each
unique job role and by focusing only on Microsoft
technologies. We would have customers who lived
those roles drive these efforts and we would provide
guidance to the vendors who would design the indi-
vidual products.
Figure 3 on page 5 is a visual representation of
Microsoft Learning’s new portfolio design model. The
old one-at-a-time approach to product planning and
approval has been replaced by a process in which a
high-level plan (e.g., the number of training products
or hours and the total investment required) for a prod-
uct portfolio is reviewed before portfolio design.
In the following sections, I’ll detail the various phas-
es of the portfolio design model and the outputs that
result from each step in the process.
The envisioning phase
The envisioning phase begins with the creation of
the portfolio vision document. This is the shared
vision across all Microsoft Learning teams of the
learning experience that the portfolio is designed to
achieve. It is co-authored by the product planner and
the curriculum designer (a highly skilled instructional
designer) and is based on input from the Microsoft
product groups and customer and industry research.
The portfolio vision document includes the business
rationale for the portfolio, a detailed audience descrip-
tion including the number of job roles to address, the
number of training and reference products planned
for the portfolio, and the cost of developing those
products.
The design phase
The initial step in the design phase is a critical one:
the development of the unified skills domain, or USD.
We create a USD for each job role addressed by the
LEARNING SOLUTIONS | September 18, 2006 4
Management Strategies
portfolio. We bring experts from around the world on Putting 1,000 products
each job role to Redmond, and spend one to two
weeks working collaboratively with them in focus through an approval
groups, charting all the tasks they perform on the process one at a time
job and translating those tasks into a skills domain
for that job role. was a huge challenge
It’s important to note that our staff has found this to for our product planners,
be a very exciting way to design products. It’s always
energizing and inspiring to work directly with cus- and our development
tomers. We’ve also been amazed at how passionate teams were designing
these external job-role experts become about the
USD work and about their impact on Microsoft prod- each title individually.
ucts. They return to their jobs as committed evangel- This fractured approach
ists for our training products.
USDs follow a strict, hierarchical structure that main- wasn’t good news for
tains the integrity of parent/child-relationships bet- customers, either — the
ween tasks and subtasks. What was initially a solution
to a design problem becomes a structured framework products didn’t cover the
that can be output as an XML schema, and leveraged technology consistently
to make content discoverable via search functionality
and assessment tools. and, because there was
Microsoft Learning doesn’t make final decisions no overarching design
about which specific titles we will include in the port-
folio and which topics they will cover until we com- framework, there were
plete the portfolio vision document, the focus groups no clear learning paths
with customers, and the USDs. The entire portfolio
then goes through our title-approval process as a col- across products.
lection, thus saving us a lot of time compared to the
old process.
In the course of the focus-group sessions, we learn
an enormous amount about the context in which our
customers work: what they like about their job, what
they don’t like about their job, the skills that are most
important to their job, what the next step in their career ì
path is likely to be. The portfolio design guide cap- Figure 2
tures this rich audience, and job-specific, information. Microsoft Learning’s
The teams that design the individual products in the former product design
portfolio then leverage that information. model.

For the designers in the siloed development teams,
the new process is dramatically superior to the old
one. Instead of starting with an often-sketchy vision
for a single product, these teams fully leverage the
portfolio vision document, the skills domain frame-
work, and the portfolio design guide. This frees them
up to concentrate from day one on designing a killer
customer experience — all the while knowing that the
other form-factor development teams are using the
same design framework to guide their efforts.
The teams that design the individual titles also lev-
erage the product design specifications that the prod-
uct planner and the curriculum designer created during
the envisioning phase for each title in the portfolio.
These specifications contain descriptions of the scope
and objectives for the course, a high-level course out-
line, and a USD map that shows exactly how the topics
in the course outline map to specific skills in the USD.
It’s important to note that we don’t use exotic tools
to create our vision documents, USDs, portfolio de-
sign guides, or the courseware design specifications
(CDS). We author them all using Microsoft Word
XML.
Once we have created our USDs and USD maps,
what do we do with them? How do we find them
when we want to make changes to them or to lever-
age them in future efforts? We store our USDs and
USD maps in a metadata- and taxonomy-manage-
ment system and use that tool for USD change man-
agement.
The delivery phase
Once the design phase is completed, we need to
ensure that the channel of authorized training centers
that delivers our instructor-led courseware is ready for
the new portfolio. This is the goal of the portfolio
delivery guide, which is aimed at owners of training
centers and our certified trainer community. Written in
Word XML, the portfolio design guides summarize the
new portfolio approach, give trainers our vision of the
learning experience and the target audience, and help
our business partners jump-start the rollout of this new
curriculum.
Resource and time investment
How many internal resources does this model re-
quire? How long does portfolio design take at Micro-
soft Learning?
The typical portfolio design team is comprised of
five Microsoft employees:
• A project manager, who is charged with keep-
ing the effort on time and on budget
• A product planner, who is responsible for ensur-
ing that the portfolio meets the needs of its audi-
ence
LEARNING SOLUTIONS | September 18, 2006 5
Management Strategies
• A curriculum designer, who co-authors the port- [W]e were concerned
folio vision document with the product planner,
facilitates the USD focus-group meetings, and
that single-sourcing,
is responsible for the USD, the portfolio design while efficient, would
guide, the portfolio delivery guide, the CDS, and
the USD map
not give us the high-
• A technologist, who is an expert on the audience quality products in each
and the technology and who is responsible for re-
cruiting job-role-experts for the USD focus groups
form factor that we had
• An editor, who provides editorial support for all to deliver. Instead, we
portfolio design documentation.
Because USDs target a specific job role, we can
would design once and
complete the focus group sessions, the USD, and allow the form-factor-
first drafts of the relevant certification-exam objective
domain in about five weeks. Because we use internal
centric development
staff for portfolio design work, the cost of a USD is teams to optimize their
limited to the cost of bringing job-role experts to Red-
mond and housing them for one or two weeks. Each
designs to suit the
USD typically costs us between $30,000 and $50,000. needs and preferences
The portfolio design model has made Microsoft
Learning more efficient and has reduced the cost of
of each audience, and
product design. We scope and envision a product in the unique aspects of
70% less time. We can complete a USD for 50% of
the cost of our old exam-only job-task-analysis efforts,
each form factor.
and affect many more products and customers.
The portfolio design model has been invaluable to
our vendor strategy. We have greatly reduced design
changes during development thanks to the prescrip-
tion we now give our vendors. Last year we had to
replace a vendor for an entire portfolio midstream; ì
because of the USD framework, the courseware de- Figure 3
Microsoft Learning’s
sign specifications, and the portfolio design guide, we
were able to make a smooth transition to another ven- new portfolio design
dor and still meet our original ship dates. model.
 LEARNING SOLUTIONS | September 18, 2006 6
Management Strategies

What’s in it for Microsoft Learning?

To date we have used this portfolio design model
to develop five major portfolios — our product offer-
ings for SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, the
upcoming release of Exchange Server, and Vista. A
total of 32 instructor-led courses, over 200 hours of
e-Learning, a dozen certification exams, and more
than a dozen Microsoft Press Training Kits have bene-
fited from this model.
Over the past two years, then, Microsoft Learning
has realized the following benefits from this approach:
• Our products are more relevant because we have
allowed our customers to drive their design.
• Our products are more consistent because they
share a skills framework.
• This common framework enables us to create
learning paths across multiple products that are
easy for customers to understand.
• Our internal staff has discovered that this is a
much more interesting, rewarding, educational,
and motivational way to work.
• The portfolio design model has made us more
efficient at product planning and development.
• The portfolio design model has made it much
easier to work with vendors.
• The use of structured content and XML has ena-
bled customized training, discoverability of our
content through assessments or search, and the
sharing of components such as labs when appro-
priate.

What’s in it for our customers?

When we began work on our portfolio design mod-
el two years ago, we understood that whatever ap-
proach we decided upon had to have a tangible im-
pact on Microsoft’s customers. We’ve shown that we
can use it to move large product portfolios from envi-
sioning to publication. Proving that our model has
made a difference for customers will be a major focus
for us in the coming year.
The first portfolio of products driven by this ap-
proach, our SQL 2005 products, launched in waves
beginning this winter, close on the heels of the re-
lease of the software itself. It’s still too early to glean
much from the sales figures for these courses, which
typically surge about twelve months after release of
their related software products when broad adoption
of the new software creates a demand for training,
but the customer-satisfaction scores our USD-driven
instructor-led SQL 2005 courses we’re seeing in sur-
veys have been higher than usual.
The early reaction from partners and trainers has
also been very positive. One trainer we heard from
saw the value in our new method: “From a trainer’s

viewpoint, what you are doing seems exactly the right
approach to improve and strengthen your learning
products. Microsoft Learning seems to be taking the
design of training materials to a whole new level. Well
done!”
Another saw a difference in the resulting products.
“Congratulations on the new SQL 2005 design course,”
his email read. “In my opinion, it is the finest course
Microsoft Learning has ever shipped. The quality of
the instructor materials and the labs was outstanding.”
One persistent comment we’re getting from our
channel partners is how the portfolio delivery guides
have made it easier to plan training strategies with
clients. “I want to encourage you to create them for
each series,” one training center owner wrote us.
“We’re about to launch a major selling initiative and
the information is just awesome — excellent sales
training, marketing, and customer-facing collateral
material. This is exactly, and I mean exactly, what we
need. More, please — we will make money with this.
Bravo!”
This anecdotal feedback bodes well, but to meas-
ure the impact of our portfolio design model we will
spend the next year comparing our USD-driven prod-
ucts to earlier offerings in such areas as sales figures,
scores from surveys measuring the satisfaction of stu-
dents and trainers, feedback gleaned from online news-
groups, and errata submitted by customers.
Internally, we have worked with our own sales and
marketing teams to ensure that their materials and job
aids reference our portfolio design model as being a
competitive advantage.
The future of the Microsoft Learning
portfolio design model
So, what’s next for the Microsoft Learning portfolio
design model?
I mentioned early in this article that our portfolio
model was influencing organizational changes. In July,
I became the manager of a new Microsoft Learning
team, the Technical Community and Portfolio design
group. This 20-person team includes instructional
designers, technologists, and program managers. We
are responsible for expanding a portfolio-design mo-
del across Microsoft, and establishing a worldwide
community of subject matter experts with whom we
will partner on training Microsoft customers.
Key focus areas for my new team will include:
• Working more closely with the experts in the MS
product groups. They currently review our work,
but we plan to work with them much more closely
on portfolio design.
• Increasing the number of Microsoft stakeholders
in the design of our Longhorn portfolio. Several
other Microsoft groups will create content in sup-
LEARNING SOLUTIONS | September 18, 2006 7
Management Strategies
port of that product and our model would benefit The portfolio design mo-
from their participation. Would a USD framework
be valuable to a user assistance team? What if
del has made Microsoft
we worked with a Microsoft team responsible for Learning more efficient
training our salespeople on a USD focused on
the sales job role?
and has reduced the
• Creating a Channel Marketing and Sales Guide cost of product design.
for our courseware products to give guidance to
our channel partners on how to market our portfo-
We scope and envision
lio design model as a competitive advantage. a product in 70% less
• Getting more formal about the taxonomy we use
to refer to skills and objectives. We have made
time. We can complete a
some expedient decisions in this area to date; if USD for 50% of the cost
we are going to be truly effective in making our
content discoverable via search functionality we
of our old exam-only
will have to tighten up our vocabulary. job-task-analysis efforts,
• Deciding on the future of the intellectual property
represented by the USD and the other portfolio
and affect many more
design outputs. Does this effort continue to bene- products and customers.
fit primarily Microsoft Learning’s products, or should
we share it with other publishers and training
companies?
• Sharing best practices with the training industry.
All training groups wrestle with portfolio design
on some level, and my group is anxious to share
what we have learned with our colleagues across
the industry, and to learn from you in turn.
I hope that this article is one step in that direction.
I’d like to thank the e-Learning Guild for allowing me
to share the fundamental aspects of the portfolio-
design approach we’re using inside Microsoft. If you
would like to learn more about Microsoft Learning, or
would like to share some of your content-development
best practices with your peers in Redmond, Wash-
ington, please contact me.
Author Contact
Kim Field is the Manager of the
Technical Community and Portfolio Discuss this article in the “Talk
design group at Microsoft Corpo- Back to the Authors” Forum
ration. He has over twenty years of of Community Connections
experience in the publishing and (http://www.elearningguild.com/
training industries, the last ten of community_connections/forum/
which have been at Microsoft categories. cfm?catid=17&
Corporation. Prior to his present role, Kim served as entercat=y). You can address
the Director of Instructor-Led Training Development, your comments to the author(s)
and as editor-in-chief and director of e-Learning for of each week’s article, or you
Microsoft Press. Contact Kim by email at Kim.Field can make a general comment
@microsoft.com or phone him at 425.706.3634. to other readers.
Additional information on the
topics covered in this article
is also listed in the Guild
Resource Directory.
 LEARNING SOLUTIONS | September 18, 2006 8
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