Cases in custom content development - 2

For some background to these cases, see my initial post.

Case 2

You have been the manager of a project to develop a new e-learning component to your organisation's induction programme. The e-learning will be used by all new employees.

You have just conducted a project review with your team and the following issues were raised:

• The development phase was significantly delayed because you discovered that the output produced by your chosen authoring tool was incompatible with many of your organisation's PCs. You had to switch to a new tool and this involved considerable re-work.
• During the testing phase, your client saw the finished output for the first time. Unfortunately she disliked the style of illustrations used throughout the programme and asked for them to be changed. This resulted in a budget over-run and a delay of two weeks.
• Once the programme had been implemented, it became evident that many users were confused by aspects of the graphical interface. Until this point, the only people who had tested the programme were members of the project team. Revisions were swiftly made to the interface and this resolved the problem, although negative feedback had spread quite widely by this stage.

You want to avoid similar problems occurring in the future. What would you recommend?