Rise 360: Managing Hotel Inventory
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Tools: Articulate Rise 360; Snipping Tool; Google Documents; Google Cloud Platform
Time: Total Time- About 2 weeks; SME interview/project approval (about 3 days); Outlining Course/learning objective creation (about 2 days); Course Building (about 1 week); Course proofing/approval/testing (about 2 days).
Client: A local hotel manager
Collaborators: The local hotel manager, acting as both the SME and stakeholder; myself as designer/developer.
Challenge:
The challenge in this project was to help a hotel manager explain how hotel inventory management systems work to hotel staff. Specifically, the hotel was having trouble with hotel staff engaging in actions within the inventory management system that resulted in inaccurate reporting and sometimes in the booking of rooms that were not able to be sold. The hotel manager believed this was due to a lack of knowledge about how the hotel's inventory system communicates with the other booking systems hotel guests may encounter. He also believed that his employees didn't fully understand the problem. My role was to close this knowledge gap to prevent errors in the future.
Solutions:
First, I met with the hotel manager and completed a project plan. You can view this plan below. Within this plan, I worked with the hotel manager to identify the learners, the problem, create learning objectives, and understand the components within the course that the stakeholder wanted.
Then, I met with the hotel manager as my SME and conducted an interview. During this interview, I asked questions about the training and systems that later would serve as the content for the course. I compiled answers into a document that can also be found below. After the interview, I read through my notes, asked clarifying questions, and discussed with the hotel manager SME what visuals would be necessary for the training and how we would obtain those.
Next, I made an outline of the course to briefly show how I was going to chunk the information and to recommend types of activities to put into the Rise Course. Once that was approved, I moved on to storyboarding my course, and received final approval.
I then worked within Articulate Rise 360 to develop the course content. This involved technical and step by step writing as well as integrating visual and interaction features. This particular course utilizes flashcards, hotspot images, drop-down menus; a quiz, and a scenario.
Ultimately, my final course serves to close the employees' knowledge gap through visuals that explain features of the inventory system, clarification/teaching of relevant vocabulary, and scenario-based learning experiences. It was important to me to implement the scenario based learning opportunities into this course because the employees were going to have to execute actions based on this new knowledge within their daily job responsibilities, so I wanted the training to feel relevant and applicable to those daily work tasks. At the request of the manager, I also included a quiz for mastery. This was important because he had to record proof of employees taking and passing the training to meet compliance standards.
My final steps involved presenting the course to the stakeholder/SME, testing the course, and implementing feedback and fixing bugs. I then hosted the course to the web for sharing and access via the Google Cloud Platform.
Result:
The course has not yet been implemented, but ultimately success would look as follows:
The learners are able to explain what booking channels and inventory means in the context of hotel daily operations.
The learners are able to describe how inventory and booking channels are connected and in what time period.
The learners are engaged within the training and completing it at the expected rate with favorable opinions regarding its usefulness and ease of use.
The learners apply the knowledge gained within the training to make better on the job decisions regarding inventory and booking channels. This means that the manager would be able to report a 0% rate of errors on reporting (where there were previous errors). This same level of low-errors should carry across time. It would be best to check these rates at regular intervals like 1 month post training, 3 months post training, 6 months post training, and 1 year post training to gauge training effectiveness and fix any issues, gaps, etc. that would improve the training or its effectiveness for employees in the future.
