Evaluations Are In

I received the evaluations for the training class I delivered last week. I am still satisfied with how the class went, even in light of the evaluations. The scores on the evals were very good and I'm pleased with that. I received a couple comments that indicated that there was too much up-down, up-down.

I can't disagree with that at all. I had an 8-hour day and 10 different group activities. In fact, I had already consolidated two activities into one. There would have been 11 activities. I just took another look at the PowerPoint looking for another group activity that I could consolidate or cut. I would be very reluctant to cut anything and I don't think I could consolidate any others. The reason I say this is because these activities start slowly but they build off of each other. I pull the string of a single project through the entire day. If I consolidated activities people wouldn't be focusing on the new concept I want them to try out as much if they had to divide their time among concepts.

The other thing about having the group activities was to eliminate the need for discrete breaks. I didn't want to lose time with restroom breaks. By structuring the activities like this I gave people lots of opportunities to have their breaks. I found that I was really behind schedule at about 10 or 10:30. But I made up time during the last part of the morning.

The other criticism, also a fair one, was whether it made sense to use a wedding as a project. Remember I'm from IT, so my comfort-level would have been to select an IT project. But if you aren't in IT that may not be relevant to you. In truth the content of the project was less important to me than the opportunity to witness the process in action. In the end I decided to choose a project that everyone could relate to. Are the 'stakeholders' of a wedding as discrete as the stakeholders for another type of project? No, but that was the one area in which I needed a little latitude. Each of the other knowledge areas adapted well to a wedding project. So if there is a different type of project that I could use, I would be happy to, but i can't think of other projects that everyone can relate to. The other aspect on the project, is that I kept it light. I picked a project that people could have fun with. The scope of a wedding is bound only by a person's imagination. So I would be happy to use another project and if I was delivering this content to a bunch of IT people, I would probably choose and IT project, or a project that is consistent with their baseline knowledge.

Anyway, I am please with the evaluations and happy that the participants took the time to give me something to think about.