Summary
In this work the fundamental aspects and the advantages in terms of cost reduction and flexibility provided by using the prototyping strategy for the development of new products to support training actions are related, illustrating the feasibility of its application to through the analysis of a practical example.
introduction
In an increasingly competitive world like today, the environment that companies face is very changing (dynamic) and has a strong impact on them, as any type of imbalance that occurs in a region or country, it quickly becomes a global disturbance, due to the interdependence relations established as a consequence of the globalization process and the accelerated development of communications.
To this must be added the emergence of new forms of work such as virtual work (work activities that are not carried out in a specific place, but that the subject develops independently and periodically reports the results to the company), as well as systematic changes in the concept of marketing and commercialization, as is the case of electronic commerce, just to mention one.
The aforementioned aspects demonstrate the need for high organizational flexibility and high staff preparation, both professionally, and in the domain of organizational and methodological aspects that govern the company, thereby consolidating its presence in the market based on the clarity, speed and degree of certainty of the answers they provide to customers when they ask about products or services, payment methods and unusual destinations.
In this context, the implementation of training actions takes on special importance, which require, in all its manifestations, the development of the corresponding Material Study Base, which, taking into account the possibilities that information technologies provide today, at the level of the teaching staff, they place the first level of Management of the Training Centers of the Companies before the following dilemma: develop new products with own resources or hire them outside the organization ?.
As expected, both alternatives provide advantages and disadvantages, despite which it can be affirmed that if teachers are able to elaborate, even in a “pedestrian” way, these materials, the cost of development will be lower compared to their analogue contracted to third parties. and its final conception will be in greater correspondence with the pedagogical needs of its destination.
Taking into account the aforementioned aspects, the preparation of this work was undertaken, in which the fundamental aspects and the advantages in terms of cost reduction and flexibility that are achieved by using the prototyping strategy and the self-preparation modality are related for the development of new products to support training actions, illustrating their application through the analysis of a practical case.
II. Prototypes and training models
II.1. Training as a system
The modern approach to business analysis through the processes that take place in the organization includes, as indicated above, the aspect of training, which is not always seen accordingly: an increase in Human Capital, but is considered as an expense, taking into account its location in the organization's Income Statement, which reinforces the importance of reducing the financial impact of this activity, as far as possible.
To achieve this objective, valid for all activities, various alternatives can be used, among them, the reduction in the development time and the increase in the effectiveness of the products, as well as the flexibility of these to be used in various actions, that is, that are not exclusively associated with a specific training action, when feasible.
As a last aspect, and no less important, it is necessary to highlight that whatever strategy is selected, it is essential to measure the impact of its use, both in the qualitative and quantitative order, which forces the choice of a strategy that simultaneously satisfy the aforementioned requirements.
II.2. Selection of the strategy for the development of new products
If the characteristics of the teaching-educational process mentioned above are considered in their entirety, an attractive variant for the development of new products, knowing that it is difficult to have all the information requirements to ensure that a first version can be used for serial reproduction., is the development of prototypes by the teaching entity, which must be tested for a certain period of time or, failing that, until a certain number of training actions are reached that guarantee the quantity of sufficient data to evaluate the successes and unfavorable aspects or areas for improvement, which constitutes a full cycle work scheme: inputs, outputs and feedback, the advantages of which can be summarized as:
Speed in obtaining the product, as it is prepared in-house and does not require external coordination.
Low cost, since it is carried out with the available resources, that is, no additional material resources are required, since it basically requires the Human Resource available in the organization.
Facilities for the incorporation of the changes determined in the trial period.
To the aforementioned, it can be added as a complement to the selected strategy, the use of modular designs not limited to a specific training action, defined as "the smallest unit of the product that can be carried out with its own personality of the subject matter under study", It provides additional advantages by contributing to the reduction of costs, not only in the development stage, but also in serial reproduction, since it reduces the risk of obsolescence due to changes in the programs, something very frequent given the current dynamics of the business sector.
II.3. Prototype Features
Once the decision has been made to use the use of prototypes as a strategy for the development of new products, the next step is to determine the characteristics of this type of tool, with a view to using it efficiently.
As a first aspect, it must be defined that for the purposes of this work a prototype is considered "an entity that can be used in a certain activity, not an idea on paper, which is developed with the purpose of testing ideas and assumptions related to it".
From the above, it can be seen that, in practice, this strategy constitutes an iterative solution algorithm (not a process of trial and error), whose objective is for users to express directly and more easily the characteristics that they would like to have and the undesirable ones, to which it must be added that it is especially useful when: a new design is undertaken and therefore there is no experience in this regard; Only part of the essential characteristics are known and it is anticipated that new requirements will arise during use.
In correspondence with the above, it is a working application, developed quickly and at low cost, feasibility of coherently integrating various user requests, which evolve through an iterative process.
Therefore, a procedure for the development of prototypes can be summarized in the following five steps:
Identify the information requirements that the user knows.
Develop a usable prototype.
Put it into practice and determine the modifications.
Make the relevant changes.
Repeat the previous steps until the user's needs are met.
It is not idle to point out some misconceptions in relation to the development of prototypes, such as: it represents a trivial activity, they are only applicable for small applications of little complexity and that the participation of the user in obtaining it is symbolic.
II.4. Use of prototypes in system training
II.4.1. General features
Once the work strategy (prototype development) has been selected, the next step is to establish the essential work guidelines by the level of management empowered to do so, which covers, among others, the following aspects:
Types of products to be developed: Modalities (types) of products to be developed: videos, compact discs, presentations in electronic formats, files to download, in this case specifying their format: WEB (HTML) pages, executables (exe) etc.
Destination of the products they intend to develop: Methodological Materials aimed at the self-preparation of teachers, instructors, coaches and students, Base Material of Study to Support Courses, etc.
Required auxiliary supports: Need to develop some type of auxiliary material that facilitates its use, such as application notes, etc.
Identity aspects (image): For each of the types of products that are approved, the image aspects that must accompany them must be established, for which it is necessary to answer, among others, the following questions: Do the packaging and The logo of the Training Center (CC) and Head Office if it exists, as well as data from the CC? Will the authors' data be collected on the packaging and on the product? Which?; Will the date and version be included ?; Will copy protection be performed (copyright) and will the © symbol be included on the packaging and product?
Work objects: Topics of interest to the organization, as well as the scale of priorities for its development.
Duration of the prototype trial period: The different types of products must have a trial period depending on their modality, either in number of courses, time of use, number of students or teachers who evaluate it, etc.
Approval levels: A very important definition that must be made by the first level of management is who is empowered to authorize the testing of a new material, as well as the transition from a prototype to a serial product.
Other aspects: This is a section that is intended to include elements not previously contemplated and that are requested by the relevant management level.
II.4.2. Preparation of Courses
In the case of training, one of the components that requires permanent dynamism is the preparation and implementation of new courses, since it requires a certain amount of resources in the preparation stage, with special emphasis on the materials that are delivered to the participants, to which must be added those required for modification according to the results obtained in practice.
Based on this reason, one way to use the prototypes in the development of courses is to use the self-preparation modality, understood as a course in which the interested parties receive the classes and the corresponding training through electronic platforms (mail, intranet of the organization, Internet, etc.); carry out independently (not assisted by teachers) the study of materials and solve the proposed exercises, issue their criteria about the course, accrediting their knowledge through an evaluation carried out in the teaching center on a certain date, in which they can Include a doubt clarification session, but never to solve the proposed exercises.
For this purpose, the following procedure can be used, the first step of which is to determine the training needs of workers, through various tools such as diagnostics, performance evaluation, etc.
The second step is to develop a self-preparation course and submit it to practice, either by placing it on the organization's intranet or free of charge on some Internet portal, although in the latter case, although the criteria obtained do not have why coincide with those of the organization, constitute a valid thermometer.
On the other hand, the use of the Internet has a global social impact, since many people outside the company benefit, while from the point of view of the organization, it contributes to spreading its name and image on a planetary scale.
A third moment corresponds to the evaluation of the criteria that those enrolled voluntarily express, preferring for quantitative evaluations a scale that varies between one and ten.
As a fourth step, the course is modified in those aspects that were unfavorably evaluated by its recipients.
Finally, the previous four steps are repeated until agreement is reached between the objectives set forth in the design and those perceived by the users.
III. Presentation of an illustrative case
With a view to illustrating how much its publication in the self-preparation modality can help perfect a new course, the results obtained from the analysis of the opinions issued on a Basic Accounting course, made available to interested parties, are analyzed below. free of charge on an Internet portal in November 2004, which on the date of data acquisition (December 8, 2006) displayed the following indices:
Number of students enrolled (N, population): 23,392
Number of students enrolled who voluntarily issued their criteria and quantitative evaluation on a scale of one to ten (n, sample): 385.
Graphically, the results of the quantitative assessment correspond to those shown in Figures 1 and 2, where it can be seen that 10.9% of the total number of opinions issued (42 out of 385), evaluate the course between one and six points while 43.1% (166) give it the highest rating, ten.
The previous results confirm that:
The distribution of the data is not normal, and therefore it is not possible to directly make statistical inference.
The sample is highly polarized, since about half, 43.12%, gives it the highest rating (10). This means that those who were satisfied with the course were motivated to express their opinion.
About eleven percent (10.91%) of those who issued their criteria, disagreed with the course, in other words, they should have been better oriented in the summary so that they did not enroll and avoid creating expectations that would not be satisfied.
Considering the polarization of the sample, it was decided to analyze two subsamples of it, with the following characteristics:
Subsample # 1: Neglect the scores between one and three points, since they represent only five criteria and reduce the number of the maximum votes from 166 to 19, with which the frequency distribution corresponds to that shown in figure 3, where by simple inspection it is appreciated that these data exhibit normal behavior or very close to it.
Subsample # 2: It constitutes a refinement of the previous one, since in this case the four-point evaluations are removed from subsample # 1, as indicated in figure 4.
Under these conditions, the basic statistics of each sample correspond to those shown in Table 1, where it can be seen that:
In any variant, the average grade of the course is higher than 7.5, which indicates that it is accepted as valid, but in the case of the General Sample, which is polarized, this value (8.5) raises it to the category of good.
Subsample # 2 shows the most stable behavior, exhibiting the lowest relationship between the standard deviation and the mean. In correspondence with this result, it can be pointed out that the most "exact" grade of the course is 7.6, which classifies it in the acceptable category.
Once the qualification is obtained, which indicates acceptance of the course, it is necessary to carry out a qualitative evaluation of the unfavorable criteria issued, with a view to determining the modifications that must be made to the course.
The general sample (N = 385) should be used for this analysis, since most of the unfavorable criteria are found in it, since it includes the lowest scores.
The results of this evaluation are illustrated in figure 5, where the existence of two fundamental criticisms can be seen: very theoretical, without examples and very basic, as well as that more than half (51.06%) of the criteria expressed (47), agrees in pointing out its basic character as a deficiency.
The previous results lead to the following reflections.
First, the title, "Basic Accounting", and its Summary, where the contents are clearly established, but the recipients are not explicitly indicated and their (basic) scope is only outlined in the phrase "… fundamental aspects…", causing enroll people with expectations beyond the expected scope in the preparation of the course and feel disappointed afterwards.
The described above leads to the following two modifications:
Change the current title "Basic Accounting" to "Accounting for Beginners".
Modify the following text of the current summary "… through its chapters summarize the fundamental aspects addressed by Basic Accounting, and its contents can be grouped…", by the following "… through its chapters the concepts and Basic Accounting principles, which are illustrated through simple examples whose contents can be grouped… »,
Another aspect that should be highlighted is that the relationship between criticism of the basic content and low votes, 58.6% (14 of 24), seems to be an index that there is a certain group of people who have knowledge basic on the subject, but demand a course with greater scope in its contents, at the same time that more than 40% who evaluate it acceptable also thinks that it is very basic, even for beginners.
Likewise, it should be noted that there is no negative criterion regarding the topics covered, which indicates that their selection meets expectations.
As a last aspect, it is necessary to evaluate how representative the sample (n = 385) of the population is, which in this case is given by the number of people enrolled in the course (N = 23392).
For this purpose, the expression (1) that relates, the aforementioned magnitudes, with the error made in the estimation (e), the standard deviation, can be used.
If the error (e) is cleared in the previous equation, the working expression given by (2) is obtained, whose results for the General Sample and the two sub-samples are shown in table # 2, where it is appreciated that the maximum error made for the selected significance levels (90% and 95%) they vary from more than 8.0% to close to 13.0%, which can be considered relatively high.
Table 2. Error made in estimating the mean and standard deviation.
However, it is important to point out two aspects related to the sample size. Firstly, particularly in the example analyzed, the number of criteria available depends on the voluntariness of those enrolled to issue it and not on a specific action aimed at this purpose, which is a factor to take into account when using prototypes of courses. As a tool for measuring impact, with a view to ensuring that the information obtained is sufficiently representative of the opinions of the sample and thereby increase the speed, efficiency and effectiveness in the process of adopting corrective actions.
A second element to take into account, in the example analyzed, is that the number of criteria supported on the site is limited and was exhausted two months after its publication, where undoubtedly the population (number of students enrolled) was much lower than the used in this work to evaluate the error: N = 23392.
Under these conditions, it is appropriate to estimate the effect of this factor, for which the calculation of the daily average of enrollment between the date of acquisition of the data shown in figure 1 and those existing at the time of writing this section can be used as a reference., which is approximately eleven students per day, while the average daily rate, considering the total period (date of preparation of this work less date of publication of the course), is 27 enrollments.
Table 3 was prepared from the averages previously obtained, where the error made in the estimation according to expression 2 is related, where it is appreciated that this is in any case less than 10.0%, even when the number of students enrolled in the criteria issuance period is four times higher than the daily average of registrations in the entire period.
Table 3. Error considering different levels of enrollment at the time of closing the issuance of criteria by those enrolled.
These results show that, in the example analyzed, the error related in Table 2 is greater than that obtained if the analysis had been carried out considering the existing enrollment (population) at the time when the storage capacity for the issuance of criteria on the site. This situation constitutes an alert about the need for permanent monitoring during the trial period of the available space, if limits are established for it to guarantee maximum participation.
IV. Conclusions
As a conclusion of the present work it can be pointed out that the feasibility and advantages of the use of prototypes for the development of new training support products, as well as for the measurement of their impact, which was illustrated through the results of a case study, in which self-preparation is used as a training tool.
V. Bibliography
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Mesa, J.: «Training as a tool for the development of Human Resources in the company: basic considerations»; deGerencia.com, Mar / 2005.
Mesa, J.; Paz, V.: «Basic Accounting Course»; mailxmail.com; Nov / 2004.
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