What is putting your budget at risk
Answer the questions and anything worth watching will appear here, in plain words, with the fix.
Nothing flagged yet.
What you could take off the price
These are the answers you control. Nothing here is about buying less programme. It is about making the work easier to do.
- Nothing to show yet.
Where these numbers come from
Nothing here is invented for effect. The starting point is the most widely cited research in this market, run by Bryan Chapman across 249 organisations and nearly 4,000 learning professionals. It measured how many hours of work go into one hour of finished learning.
| Type of course | Hours of work per finished hour | Compared to the simplest |
|---|---|---|
| Basic. Pages, images and a quiz | 79 | 1.0 |
| Interactive. Exercises, video, activities | 184 | 2.3 |
| Advanced. Simulation and scenario | 490 | 6.2 |
That research was collected in September 2010. It is old, and production work has got a great deal faster since. We have kept it anyway, because it is published, dated and checkable, and replacing it would mean substituting a number of our own that you could not verify. Treat it as the shape of the difference between simple and complex, not as a precise figure.
The same research found that design changes made without a controlled process add around 40 per cent to development time. Separate published work puts the cost of changing a script at roughly ten times more once a module has been built and recorded than at the script stage. Those two findings are why the questions about review and sign off carry the weight they do.
The limits on the readiness and process questions are set to the spread Chapman found inside a single type of course, where the same basic eLearning ran from 49 hours to 125 hours depending on how the work was run. Everything not drawn from those sources is our own estimate from delivered projects, and is marked on each question. Where we are not confident, we have deliberately set the number high rather than low, so this tool is more likely to overstate a cost than to leave you short.
The thinking behind all of this is set out in how much it costs to build a training programme.