Section 4: Human Performance Technology

Chapter 14 discusses the concept and evolution of human performance improvement. Several sections of chapter 14 present a variety of non-instructional solutions to performance problems. Identify a performance problem in your area of work and identify non-instructional solutions that may help solve the problem.

I work in a group that is split between Dallas Texas and Baguio, Philippines.  Our group is responsible for several systems and each of us are primarily responsible for one of them.   We have service requests that come to our group at all hours of the day and we are expected to work the basic requests for all of the systems.    We spent a week training each other on our respective systems and covered the basics, but recently the tickets that come in are being passed to the primary for the system and not handled by the other group.

A couple of non-instructional solutions would be for the team lead Baguio to coach his team members as tickets come in to capture the requests and to understand the problem or request stated in each ticket. Capturing the request would be the first step in Documentation as either they will find the answer in the knowledge base or they will have a suitable problem statement to seed a new document when the appropriate answer is provided by the primary system owner.

Chapter 15 presents performance support systems. Define performance support systems and explain how a performance support system might (or might not) help solve the problem you identified above.

Performance support systems are work tools provided to the performers in a just in time manner.  It can be in the form of software or systems, or it can be in the form of job aids or laminated materials.  The main idea is that it provides direction and guidance for the person to complete a task or know what steps to take to do their work.

In the above case, a performance support system will help as the requests are infrequent but critical to offer support of the customer in a timely manner.  It also has criticality for the counterparts to understand the systems and the requests that are made of the system in the event they need to take over support at a future date.

Chapter 16 explains knowledge management: the way we manage information, share that information, and use it to solve organization problems. Organizations, such as schools, accumulate a great deal information/data, which must be organized in a way that we can make sense of it in order to use for making decisions. What knowledge would help solve the problem you identified above and how would that knowledge need to be collected and managed to help facilitate problem solving?

We have documentation about our systems and we also have a ticketing system which contains actual requests in the customers own words.   Granted, the customer does not always articulate exactly what they need  but ironically, they typically ask for things very similar to each other, therefore, even their misstated request, captured, could be helpful.   I believe that a knowledge base that contains customer request statements and general informational tasks which could point to a brief procedure, or complex procedure stored on a file share or sharepoint site would be the way to solve the problem.   It could be collected as requests are reviewed and searched and if a pointer does not exist, it can be created in the workflow.   The provider of the answer can fill in the gaps of the knowledge document as part of their workflow.    It could very well be that the framed document is not needed because a different document provides the necessary information.  In that case, the problem statement could be transferred to the existing document and the new document discarded.     This method places knowledge management in the middle of the workflow and will provide an organic growth of useful information.

Chapter 17 describes types of informal learning. What informal learning experiences have you participated in at your organization? Could those informal learning experiences be shared with others? Could the knowledge gained in those settings be codified and managed? And should it be managed or should the informal experiences be replicated or broadened for others?

I work and breathe in an informal learning environment.  In fact, I once had a coworker, who was considering moving to a new job in another company, smaller company in fact, that was willing to listen to me a second time about the benefits of our environment.   The projects that are given to us along with the expectations to write them in sustainable, easy to use and manage interfaces, with technology and skills that were just above our current level are the opportunity of a lifetime.   He chose the extra money and left and ultimately lost out on a gold mine of knowledge and experiences.

We not only have the projects but we have the latitude and expectation to work with each other and share our knowledge.   We are expected to seek out solutions on the fabulous Web 2.0 and incorporate best practices in coding and usability that will work across multiple browsers.   We stumble across many web sites that are helpful and some that are not so helpful.   It is our collaboration that help us weed out the better solutions and our performance and skill continue to evolve.

Much of our knowledge is tacit.  However we could take snippets of code and write up a summarization of what we know to date such as setting up a web site for authentication or to use twitter bootstrap to make it a bit easier for our counterparts in Baguio.  It would depend on the information and the task.


Our boss currently asked our team in Baguio to seek out some .net training so they can develop a better understanding and skillset.  However I do believe that we could help replicate some of the informal training experiences for them and be available for some frequent discussions about programming and projects that we benefit from in our cubical roundtables.