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Running head: DESIGN PROJECT REPORT

Design Project Report: Brown Bag Training Session

Cassandra Humphrey, Deanne Dominguez, Maren Sibai, Terry Mincey

California State University, Monterey Bay

IST 626: Advanced Instructional Design

Dr. Farrington

August 6, 2018
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Design Project Report: Brown Bag Training Session

As long-term Monterey County employees approach retirement, needs for employee

promotions have risen. To aid this, Michael Rosales and colleagues have begun to develop new

procedures for evaluating and promoting current employees.

To help the institution reach its goals, this instructional design team has created a 40- to

45-minute training session aimed at introducing managers and supervisors to new evaluation

criteria and procedures. The first training will be delivered in person on the employees’ lunch

hour, but the eventual goal is to transfer the training to a fully online, synchronous webinar. The

developed training solution is a PowerPoint guided presentation with supporting documents.

Participants will be able to practice applying the information by responding to workplace

scenarios and real-world examples, and they will receive job aids to reference the new

information after the training session is over. To have a training be successful across platforms,

materials including facilitator guides, presentations, and employee handouts have been made

available both on and offline.

Project Description

Our products were designed with a support-centered focus and simplicity in mind. Our

main goal was to successfully develop a project that would best serve our client and carry out

their objective despite presentation time constraints. We carried out this approach by partnering

with our client and using resources provided by the county of Monterey to give to participants or

to aid in the development of what we created. Providing presentation materials, participant

materials, as well as a couple of additional helpful resources.

The presentation materials include a slideshow, a facilitator guide, and a GoToMeeting

guide. We decided a simple, yet engaging way to communicate the topic during a lunch hour was
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by creating a slideshow presentation. Because we are creating the materials to be presented by a

facilitator, we developed a facilitator guide as well as a GoToMeeting Guide to help the

presentation to run as smoothly as possible. To help support participant learning, we provided

participants with materials/handouts that would inform readers of Monterey County’s evaluation

expectations and relevant resources such as a document that lists common pitfalls and corrective

approaches. See a complete list of the materials below:

● Presentation Materials:

○ Presentation Slideshow

○ Facilitator Guide

○ GoToMeeting Guide

● Participant Materials/Handouts:

○ New Evaluation

○ Employee Self-Evaluation

○ Evaluation Checklist

○ Common Evaluation Pitfalls

○ In-Person Best Practices for Evaluations Feedback Survey

○ Online Best Practices for Evaluations Feedback Survey

● Other:

○ Editable Slideshow

○ Brown Bag Session Plan

Design Decisions

Initially, the presentation was dialogue heavy and included collaborative activities, but

speaking activities were reduced since participants will be eating during the session. Because a
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needs assessment and analysis were thoroughly carried out, there were no other major design

changes needed. However, one week before the final files were due, there were some small

adjustments we needed to make per the client’s request. First, we were presented with a new

logo, which was added to all project materials. The second request was regarding verbiage in the

presentation and documents. The word “training” needed to be removed and replaced with

specified terms. If training was being used as a verb, it needed to be replaced with the phrase

“employee development” and training as a noun with the word “session.”

Evaluation

The process of the developmental testing consisted of learners reviewing the PowerPoint

presentation, as other documents were organization-specific. Participants took about 30 to 45

minutes to review the employee development session as well as to provide feedback. Their

occupations ranged from educators, leaders, and managers to provide a range of viewpoints, and

full testing notes can be found in the appendix.

The first participant enjoyed the materials and stated that they hoped to implement a

similar program at the DLI. They stated that it was easy to follow due to aesthetically pleasing

fonts and layouts and suggested no changes to the current format.

The second participant found the materials to be helpful due to being able to draw

comparisons from his job, noting that he’s seen managers at work make similar mistakes when

completing their employee evaluations. The participant proposed changing “rate” to “score” in

the presentation. However, this wording was determined to be an organization-specific term and

was not changed.

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The third participant also showed a positive reaction to the brown bag project and stated,

“The most valuable area pointed out is avoiding using the words never or always and to use

factual evidence to highlight areas of praise and also areas for improvement.”

The final participant’s feedback stated that the content from the testing phase was easy to

follow and engage with, but suggested that slides number 4, 5 and 17, which include screenshots

of paperwork, could be overwhelming for certain participants. However, since these materials

will be mentioned only briefly during the presentation and will be shared with the participants as

a hard copy for the in-person session or a digital file for the webinar for more in-depth self-study,

the slides were not changed.

Teamwork

As with any large group project, teamwork is key to producing timely and quality

materials, and our project was successful due to a high level of cooperation. First, we broke up

the workload for each assignment. For papers, team members typically wrote at least one section.

For materials development, one person oversaw a different section of the project. Cassandra

developed the presentation, Maren created the facilitator guide, Deanne edited the supporting

documents and revised the group papers, and Terry laid the foundation for the evaluation

document and accompanying Google Form, with final polishing on the evaluations done by

Cassandra.

We tried to play to each other’s strengths with our division of duties as well. Because

most of our team has been working together since the beginning of the MIST program, it was

relatively easy to take advantage of everyone’s specific areas of interest and expertise. We

believe that this not only made development faster and better, but more enjoyable.
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Communication was also integral to our success. We made a point to remain in contact

within our team and with our client through consistent meetings and effective communication.

As a group, we communicated frequently through email and a group chat on Google Hangouts,

which allowed for quick clarification, support, and discussions throughout development. We had

a team meeting each week on either Monday or Tuesday evenings and presented iterations of our

materials to the client on a near-weekly basis. All meetings were scheduled at the beginning of

the project and were honored by both the team and the client. For each client meeting, we sent a

confirmation email and agenda in advance, which helped us stay within our one-hour time limit

and ensure we covered all topics.

Challenges

Being professionals and working in different jobs with different work schedules, the

challenge was to find a time where all team members were available to meet. Even though most

team meetings were prescheduled since the beginning of the project, not all team members were

able to attend due to their work commitments. The solution was to conduct all meetings using

Zoom, record all meeting sessions and share them with team members along with a quick

summary of the meeting and a to-do-list for the coming week. This way, team members who

couldn’t attend were able to catch up, stay in the loop and be aware of what was discussed and

agreed on.

Everyone was in different areas, and some of the team members were even in a different

time zone at times. To keep up communication outside of our weekly team meetings, we heavily

depended on Google Hangout for communications. As much as chatting applications can be

friendly and casual, they can also be very efficient when discussing tasks and coordinating
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assignments. Google Hangouts played an integral role in helping team members stay on top of

everything and keeping us on track.

Let’s be honest, with our work as well as our personal life schedules, along with the other

course we were taking, fulfilling the requirements of this project was not an easy mission,

especially when realizing that this was our first real-life project with a real client. There was a lot

to cover and everything needed to be conducted professionally. The solution was to break down

each week’s assignments into small tasks, then divide up the work among all team members.

Most importantly, stepping in to help struggling team members was a great demonstration of

team spirit and a needed action in some cases. We didn’t just wait for a team member to ask for

help, we often offered helping each other with our tasks whenever we thought we had some free

time to offer.

Advice for Future Students

Here are some of the things that we believed they positively contributed to the successful

execution of our project:

 Consider having one main contact with the client. As there will be a lot of back and

forth communication with the client, having one main contact point that represents

the team will eliminate any possible confusion during those communications. It is

also more professional to limit the source of correspondences to one person.

 Make sure you assign a team leader with strong project management skills if

available, as this will help keeping everything on track.

 Always follow the schedule and commit to deadlines, whether it was an assignment, a

meeting with the client or with the team, or any other kind of deliverable. Being late

on something means the whole team is late.

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 Follow the “How to Deal with a Client” document and other assignments’

instructions. Those are great guidelines that will help you understand what to do next.

 Schedule all meetings, including client meetings from the beginning so the dates are

set. This will ensure those dates and times are reserved. It’s much easier to cancel an

unneeded meeting than to schedule a new one and try to make sure everyone is

available to attend.

 Know the strengths and the weaknesses of your team members and assign tasks

accordingly. Knowing what every team member is good at is a key factor in getting

assignments executed adequately and professionally.

 Always deal with all team members with respect, be supportive and keep the

communications friendly but professional. You have no idea how positively that will

reflect on the overall project, process and final result.

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Appendix

Testing Phase Feedback

Maren
Tester’s Name: Clovis Azouri, Team Leader
Testing Date: 7/27/2018
Duration: 45 min

Feedback:
● Mr. Azouri “loved” the material so much! He was so impressed with the content and the
way it is presented to the extent that he said, “This training is so professional and useful it
should be conducted at DLI as well”.
● He said that the presentation is so good, the layout and fonts are comfortable to look at,
and the information structure and sequence is easy to follow.
● The tester liked the examples provided and he admired the solutions suggested. He also
pointed out that the Facilitator’s Guide is very informative and relative.
● He even checked the final evaluation questions and found them to be relevant and
adequate.
● When asked if there is anything that can be added, modified or deleted, he said “it’s
perfect the way it is.” Overall, the feedback received was very positive and encouraging.

Deanne
Tester’s Name: Phil Dominguez, Lead
Testing Date: 7/28/2018
Duration: 30 min

Feedback:
 He really enjoyed the training and its content.
 He said, “The most valuable area pointed out is avoiding using the words never or always
and to use factual evidence to highlight areas of praise and also areas for improvement.”
He also really liked the examples presented of a “good” and “poor” evaluations.
 He was also was impressed with the explanations for each of the scenarios.
 He said, “Overall I think the training was short, sweet, and to the point, which can be a
great tool for future management." Kudos on illustrating the improvement of the forms
right in the beginning. Great streamlining and process improvement there.”

Cassandra
Tester’s Name: Andrew Eccles, Manager
Testing Date: 7/29/2018
Duration: 30 min

Feedback:
 He thought it was effective.
 “I liked how the answers appeared in the next slide.”
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 Consider changing “rate” to “score.”

 “I think the pitfalls are the most helpful part of the presentation, because I see a lot of
managers making these mistakes at my work, too.”
 “I liked the how the example feedback showed us how to be specific.”

Terry
Tester’s Name: Trent Nunz, Manager
Testing Date: 8/3/2018
Duration: 30 min

Feedback:
 On slides #4, #5 and #17, including the sheets was challenging to follow, and he would
recommend breaking them into separate slides.
 Overall, he enjoyed the employee development and thought it was easy to follow.