New Product Design

As Enable moves towards its final phase we are making some great progress with the work we have been doing for the FLAG project and for supporting the work around developing unified course development theory!
We have created a number of business layer models of CDD for faculties capturing the here and now, we have noted a few interesting factors:

• What is believed to happen by managers often isn't the case for those on the ground
• Processes that are believed to be sequential are often running in tandem to ensure speed in development (can cause problems)
• Responsibility of the process of new product development can sit with different individuals without any joining up.

Although the models have been useful for my own purposes, and for discussions with faculty it has been noted that they were hard to follow to create links between different stages and the support resources available to the university. The first attempt at creating a work-flow from idea to validation is shown below - all information in black is considered part of the core/ parent process, the text in red is information that sits within child processes (Completing documentation, Understanding Employer Engagement, Assessment etc). 

This helped clarify my thoughts before moving on to using Word as a standard tool to create the flows, at first each point in the core work-flow became a new stage in the process, however we soon changed that to match the stages from modelling. Idea & Initial Approval -> Award Approval Documentation -> Preparing for Validation & finally Validation itself. An example work-flow at this point, including questions to ask at each preparation point:

 

 These models have since been distributed to the project team to help create the child processes, as they are more familiar with that area. This was one of the reasons I chose to use Word to create the flows, so that they could copy the standardisations easily. Even so it has required a short demo document so that the flow fits the set up of Pineapple, including a two page document where on one side was the actual flow in Pineapple using screen shots and on the other was the actual flow created. As I am very close to this work it has been invaluable to hand it over to the project team for review and also over to faculties already interviewed. It has also been vital that I keep impartial to the work so that I can view all aspects of the suggestions made. I also believe it has helped that I am not a process owner in creating these flows. It has been demonstrated by some of the work already gone on that process owners have a very narrow view of curriculum design and development!