Estimating Training Dollars & Cents

Instructional designers often function as project managers for teams of designers, graphic artist, subject matter experts, facilitators, and other stakeholders.  In leading the band, budgeting can be a high stakes activity; It's is a matter of walking through the project tasks and determining what resources are needed, when they are needed, and for what duration.   This process may sound easy, but oversights can be costly.  Armed with good information, project managers can translate hours, services, and materials into hard costs.  Following are a few internet resources to help with cost estimates:  

Don Clark’s website, Big Dog & Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition has a wealth of information on estimating training costs including development time.   The site also provides guidelines for instructor preparation time and a very useful cost spreadsheet that allows adjustments for the expertise level of the project’s instructional designer(s) and the complexity of the project’s multimedia components (Clark, 2010).  

Defelice & Kapp (2009) provides average development time statistics for various types of instruction.   Karl Kapp, one of the authors, is a well known expert in the instructional design field, but most interesting thing about this article is that it’s based on the collective experience of 47 practicing instructional designers.   The survey was done in 2003, and then again in 2009 to get a feel for the impact of new authoring software on development time.  Surprisingly, some of the more complex training designs take longer to produce with new software.  You can read the article for an explanation on why this is so, but the development time table included in the article is very helpful.  I can see using it as a reference on an ongoing basis.   

Chapman Alliance is a learning consulting company (Chapman, 2010).  They’ve compiled data collected from 249 organizations, representing 3,947 learning professionals in industries from manufacturing and telecommunications to insurance and higher education.  The research is presented in a PowerPoint presentation.  I found slide number 14 especially useful because it lists common tasks for instructional design projects including average percentages of total project time spent on each task.  For novice project managers in instructional design, this information can be helpful as a guideline.  It’s important to talk to your own team members, but it would be interesting to compare feedback against the Chapman survey results because it reflects feedback from a broad spectrum of learning specialists.  

Resources

Clark, D.R. (2010). Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design [Blog Post]. Retrieved from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/costs.html

Chapman, B. (2010). How Long Does it Take to Create Learning? [Research Study]. Published by Chapman Alliance LLC. http://www.chapmanalliance.com/

Defelice, R. & Kapp, K. (2009) Time to Develop One Hour of Training. ASTD. Retrieved from http://www.astd.org/LC/2009/0809_kapp.htm