Decreasing costs and improving quality in educational content creation through quantification +...

CONFIDENTIAL: Coryell 1

RATIONALE………………………………………………………………………1

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN ………………………………………………………2

AUTHOR.………………………………………………………………………....3

CONTEXT: The Handicraft Industry ………………………………………4

EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING: The Need to Innovate…….………………..5

THE PROBLEMS…………………………………………………………………7 GOALS FOR CHANGE…………………………………………………………………9

SUGGESTED STEPS AND VALUE PROPOSITIONS……………….……….12

By Pat Coryell, February 2014

RATIONALE The education materials industry today is in the midst of a disruptive innovation cycle, with the ability to create learning solutions with greater intelligence using the capacities of technology, yet it continues to generate the learning content itself as a handicraft art. Consider the hierarchy of understanding (figure 1) in this context:

Education products today are moving from knowledgeable to intelligent yet are produced by an editorial process that straddles somewhere between data and information.

Consider figure 2 showing a generic process of discover, define, develop, and deliver for program content development regularly followed by education publishing


companies. Information, knowledge, and intelligence are built and used throughout discovery, definition, and delivery phases, yet the actual process of determining resource needed to develop education content is a best guess “3 editors, five months, 2 vendors, and a freelance budget of $40k.” Companies have great information and knowledge of the market, and even in flux they demand evidence; still, they lack rigor around an editorial process that can cost 50% or more of project time and operational expense.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN This paper is written for executive and departmental managers in companies that produce educational materials for K-12 and higher education. It focuses specifically on the challenge of unpacking, identifying, and quantifying the creation of editorial content for deployment in learning products in both print and digital forms. The quantified perspective and transparency gained from this approach affords a much more textured view into the development process, allowing superior resource assignment and management, and informed cost reductions as well as inherent efficiencies gained from seeing redundancies and anticipating bottlenecks and conflicts. Editorial directors, heads of project management, and finance officers will be helped to understand, plan, and execute transformational changes to staff capacity planning and management through workflow process analysis and quantification. Positive outcomes should include process verification & consistency with some degree of appropriate standardization; tools for improved, more granular capacity planning for


content development, scheduling, & budgeting; facilitation of metric goals for staff & program performance and outcomes; and new forms of reporting to track resource & budget use. AUTHOR Patricia Coryell has worked successfully in editorial management in higher education and K-12 and in a general manager-type role in global ELT. Her uniquely broad background also includes experience in medicine, nursing, allied health, and academic publishing. The bulk of Pat’s management career was spent primarily feeding the topline - leading Editorial through market evaluation, project ideation, talent acquisition, business case development, content & program development, and product launch and representation to customers and Sales. But when she joined a major university press as group director for a global publishing arm, and realized that brilliant, successful publishing was happening but profitability was zero, she became a bottom-line zealot. Process, workflow, program staffing, use of vendors & freelancers – all had to be analyzed, understood, and quantified. Profit has to be everyone’s concern and responsibility, and transparency with facts; clear, consistent communication; and behavior-change campaigns are necessary. Later as SVP, Publisher for K-12, Head of Editorial for one of the world’s largest educational publishing companies, Pat’s role was both traditional in providing strategic direction and leadership for the Education Group's Content and Product Development staff, and it was nontraditional in the extent of the operations focus, work, and responsibility. Tasked with providing measurement and reduction of the cost of developing their products, while ensuring product quality, reliability, and efficacy, she went on to quantify the curriculum development process across disciplines. In the process, she was able to standardize where appropriate and helpful the curriculum development process, and determine actual task times and use the data to measure performance, in order to fine-tune planning and accuracy of resource use and capacity, set metric goals, and support results and decisions through data-driven measures and processes. This provided what is possibly an industry-first data-driven process refinement and capacity-planning innovation.


CONTEXT: The Handicraft Industry Over 17 years in editorial management for some of the world’s largest education publishers, I’ve never seen staffing projections and plans for content development based on anything other than seat-of-the-pants estimating or following past patterns and decisions. No data is used in this process, although, I’ve heard: “I need 8 editors for 5 months.” “I need 7 grade-level teams of 5 editors each, through the end of June.” “I need one development editor and one editorial assistant full time through September, and I need to hire 2 freelancers for $40,000 each.” “We are adding more content to the program and I need 2 more editors and $2 million for outside development.” Thus, currently Editorial departments don’t have accurate means for quantifying resourcing needs or a tool for planning staff resourcing on future programs. This means they have no ability to predict, measure, and report on productivity – and surely no way of proving improvement. Program staffing projected by editorial managers is usually in month-long blocks – not weeks, days, or hours. Core throughput tasks (tasks with metrics, such as page counts or screens) such as creating content, writing storyboards, editing content, or proofing manuscript and/or HTML program builds, have no supporting data to differentiate task times. I’ve seen evidence showing that managers’ estimates for development of print-bound content are more consistent with real task times, whereas estimates for working on content for digital delivery can be wrong by 50%. Work that consumes an average 40-43% of total project time – which is on average equal to the amount of time for core throughput tasks on any project – such as vendor management, second-level edits and review, thumbnail development, and post-approval meetings, is often underestimated if not omitted altogether in project and staff planning and scheduling. Similarly, work on partner or other (e.g., free) content is often underestimated or not planned for. Other critical factors, such as content complexity (work on pick-up, revised, or new content) or market and discipline differences affecting work length and complexity, are never based on real data. And, there is lack of visibility about the effects of overlapping or multiple tasks being performed. And if the estimated volume of content for development is wrong (e.g., a blended learning course with 5 times the amount of content when brought to market, as opposed to originally scoped), staff, vendor, or freelancer time and costs become that much harder to plan and understand. What results is a profound lack of true measurement – any data - and control of one of publishing’s most expensive resources, the creative staff. Content development in educational publishing continues to be an expensive handicraft industry. During my


first week as head of a publishing group, an editorial director explained her staffing assignment roadmap, including “Mary is assigned to video development for one program through next May” (this was in August). Highly compensated senior editors like Mary working on a solitary task for 10-12 months (in this case, giveaway videos to support an adult ELT course), or performing iterative tasks like filing permissions forms, or entering component thumbnail sequences in legacy systems – these are common misuses of talent with multiple causes, but lack of clarity on time-on-task and value-of-task can be leading causes. Staff time may be capitalized to projects or not – my experience is that attribution of staff time as a company asset makes no difference in management’s understanding of the true value of an employee’s time, in their ability to make decisions about their work, and in their assessment of performance (because, again, there is no data). Editorial managers differ widely in their ability and interest in maximizing staff work time, and Glassdoor.com is still rife with comments from staff unable to accomplish workloads, or who have no work.

You may go for months with having absolutely NOTHING to do, to months/years of having EVERYTHING to do. There is no clear direction… Glassdoor anonymous review

Heads of editorial rarely have dashboards and data to maximize staff mobility. Millions of dollars are spent yearly on freelancers and vendors doing both specialized and routine work, without value differentiation. These are often ex-employees hired back to complete the teamwork and perform work across a spectrum from high-skill tasks to those requiring low-level skills. Benchmarks and improvement goals remain largely qualitative, based on market performance, favored process and procedures idiosyncratic to individual publishing managers and groups, and these lack statistical improvement goals – how can you improve something you can’t measure? EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING: The Need to Innovate & Change

The educational learning industry is under immense pressure to innovate and change in order to maintain business and remain relevant. Publishers of educational materials must invest deeply to provide a robust “connected system of learning services” (Pearson CEO John Fallon, February 2013), in the process shifting and/or reducing spending away from content development.

Two cost-reduction drivers can be found in

• Process improvements and consistent execution • Improved use of development resource.


Pressures facing publishers across the industry landscape include 1) migrating learning products historically delivered in print over to fully or partially digital solutions, 2) ensuring customers of learning outcomes as a result of use of their curriculum products & programs, 3) competitive threat from disrupters such as MOOCs, open educational content, and open educational courseware, and 4) competitive pricing from low-cost entrants, thus decreased revenues. These and other industry changes and pressures are forcing spending cuts and improved use of creative resource during program development. In this paper I will suggest practices for understanding current practices and making change for improved operations and spending.

Content costs less than 10% of margin, while expense and value has shifted to logistics (printing, distribution), away from content.

-- Deutsche Bank Markets Research

A recent study (August 2013) of the industry published by Deutsche Bank Markets Research detailed the product and services conundrum faced by educational publishers: The broad shift to digital in Education markets that are increasingly tech-enabled, the proliferation of cheap tablets and smartphones, and the demand to bundle services with curriculum materials, exposes the diminishing value of content. The costly, highly developed, very high-quality content provided by big publishers has strong competition from free content and content provided by low-cost entrants (sometimes licensed from the big publishers and re-packaged to compete with identical or very similar content offered by those publishers). Deutsche Bank estimates content costs at less than 10% of margin, while value has shifted to advantages in programming & delivering programs and services. Several significant pedagogical demands & innovation trends, such as differentiated learning and adaptive learning – the latter requiring as much as 5-times more program content – place pressure on the need to decrease content costs overall. For over a decade, publishers have been cutting content creation staff while increasing use of external developers (freelancers, vendors) and/or simply doing less content development overall. During 2011-2013, one big K-12 publisher spent overall 10% less for content development. While K-12 publishers spend up to 80% of budgets on external development resource, they retain several hundred staff across editorial and learning design (15%-20% of total annual development expense), while College publishers may retain 50-150 staff for content creation. Across companies, there is a push to maximize productivity and skill-mobility of on-staff workers in content development.


Consider, then, again, the content development process complexities of planning and staffing (shown previously in Figure 2) with the addition of strategies for disciplines and markets that call for scaling and re-use of content and the potential and need to use staff differently, and increase their mobility and flexibility. Figure 3 below, shows one possible view of development innovation.

THE PROBLEMS

Productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is.

- Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Content & program development managers are being asked to make spending cuts of 10%-20% in addition to rounds of staff reductions that began in earnest in the mid 1990s and have been ongoing. But consider that editorial managers responsible for content development across major market segments (K-12, higher education) are trained and experienced in business planning - market analysis & segmentation, product ideation, author/writer acquisition. These same managers, who oversee subsequent program and discipline content development performed by internal and external staff, have yet to be trained in operational skills & decision-making.


The graph below (Figure 4) summarizes major steps in program development regularly performed by Editorial managers and their staffs for all education markets.

Task areas with white backgrounds show activities that ED managers are well-trained and incentivized to do and lead, or collaborate with leaders from adjacent groups like Product Management, working according to directives from financial directors setting policies, round-figure benchmarks for gross margins and/or net profits, and past practices and decisions. Summarized, they are expected to

• effectively plan & propose competitive programs to sell well in markets 1 to 3 years from the present,

• manage and oversee development procedures that ensure product quality, reliability, and learning efficacy,

• understand and plan for content delivery across all appropriate platform and other deliveries, and,

• project growth and control spending to achieve 65-70% gross margin and /or 15%-20% net profit generally.


However, it is difficult to see how the following goals could be met with these managers:

• Implement true planning and spending change that will reduce the cost of developing industry-leading products.

• Standardize as possible the curriculum/course materials development process across disciplines to create content that can easily be repurposed and to support any/all content development strategies.

• Manage, monitor, & improve financial performance of all editorial operating expenses.

• Measure performances of all levels of staff with metrics-driven goals. • Support results/decisions through data-driven measures & processes.

Current managers in ED learning companies such as Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Cengage, Wiley, Macmillan, and others, have neither the deep understanding, nor the actual tools, nor the dominion to perform to these goals at a time when publishers have had to

• shorten and truncate content development schedules overall due to late, delayed state adoption calls in K-12 or changed market models in higher education,

• adapt planning and development execution to deliver content & products across multiple modalities, to new markets (e.g., international) and to consumers (e.g., parents, direct to students), in new service/product bundling configurations, and to OEMs and other digital partners

• decrease spend in regular operations (content development staff, internal & external) in order to shift investment (e.g., digital delivery) or simply to deliver drastic spending cuts overall.

Now look again at Figure 4, at the boxes with red backgrounds. These are the work-task segments of product and content development that should benefit from data-driven process refinement, increased standardization of work and workflow, and capacity-planning innovation.

GOALS FOR CHANGE

Ultimately, managers responsible for segment (primarily discipline) content creation should have access to data & tools to manage their business quantitatively across three key areas if they are to achieve budgetary and other improvement goals set for them:

• planning for program and content development • staff planning • work effectiveness


Only when process and work is understood in quantitative terms can actual metric goals be set and can managers and staff be clear about benchmarks and goals for work and improvement.

Within planning for program and content development, much gain could be expected from process standardization where rational. However, individual managers who have followed successful & idiosyncratic process steps & workflows in order to be successful cannot and should not be asked to evaluate and make changes across an organization. From my own close analysis of process, across the major phases of program development – Initiating, Planning, Executing, Closing, and Monitoring & Controlling – steps, actions, & decisions taken by publishing groups regularly diverge, and outputs critical to success vary - such as planning and monitoring documents, tagging of content, staffing plans, style and other guidelines, technical formats, etc. Opportunity for improved efficiencies via standardization measures & steps include the following task areas: standards analysis; definition of program architecture, learning model, and scope & sequence; staffing planning; content creation (writing core and assessment content); metadata tagging; proof reviewing; and quality control.

Staff assignments, estimated time on task, relative value of task work, internal versus external resource use, access to staff across groups (staff mobility) – all issues surrounding staff planning lack transparency in current organizations and retard possibilities for analyzing and improving. In truth, development staff is often “on the beach” without any work, and no tools exist to measure and ensure staff utilization. Visibility into content development work enabled by access to data would help to guide and check decisions on program staffing, to view the value (e.g., productivity) of staff roles, to assess performance, identify trouble spots, and guide improvements, and to set measurable goals (e.g., annual, program) for staff and/or specific content development.

Access to real information about in-progress work effectiveness is rare. Data or information on performance against budgets set for program development or specific-purpose content - such as for a market (e.g., international, custom, or consumer), or a purpose (e.g., assessment), or a delivery (e.g., tablet) – isn’t available real-time, and sometimes isn’t assessed or acted on until a project is closed. Time-reporting, which could be supported by enterprise systems like SAP or by simple Excel spreadsheets, would allow tabulation and reporting, and would yield data for overall evaluation and opportunity for improvement. Task-time targets could be established for program type, component type, editorial role, and in-house staff versus vendor for maximum


resource utilization and performance. Examination of individual performances overall and on programs, and evaluation of all work on any program or plan would be possible. Editorial managers could regularly (e.g., monthly, quarterly) view all time logged to program work and all staff time. A head of editorial, a finance manager, or operations director could change resource allocations based on facts.

Setting metric goals is made possible by having a quantified process, tools to project tasks with time, and actual time data to update the constants laid into tools. When as a manager I had completed a thorough process review across workflows, tools, and actions; when I had managed all editorial staff into a process of time reporting and into compliance; when I had real access to view work performance over time, over content types, over subject area, and over task type – only then did I have real information to manage our editorial work.

Examples of what I learned:

Pre-approval product ideation work takes an average of 14% of editorial time on a project.

Time in meetings takes an average of 20% of editorial time on approved projects.

Work on throughput tasks and work on all other tasks are approximately equal on approved projects (thus 43% each).

Editorial managers’ estimates of time required to write content for print components (pages of content per hour) was fairly accurate whereas estimates of development time for content for digital delivery (screens per hour) were off by 50% (low).

Examples of possible goal setting:

Achieve <5% variance in content development budget for program.

Reduce time spent in post-approval meetings from 20% average to 10%.

Ensure 90% staff utilization rates composed of 75% capitalization rate + 15% program planning.

Increase/decrease time on throughput tasks (writing, editing, reviewing, proofing) by 10%.

Reduce annual spend on freelancers by 10%.

Increase annual spend on approved vendors by 10%.


SUGGESTED STEPS + VALUE PROPOSITIONS • Analyze & chart current organization-wide product & content

development workflow, process, inputs/outputs. Value: Consistent workflow; common process ‘vocabulary’ & description; tagging of process & steps; identification of efficiencies & standardizations; elimination of redundancies; management of priorities (e.g., throughput tasks); facilitation of goals – metrics, behaviors – for use in management; clarifies and quantifies annual staff goals & ongoing work management

• Establish task-time reporting or estimating across Editorial and creative staff. Value: Quantify, differentiate, & establish value of work tasks; truly granular knowledge of work; develop/provide insight into task times and related value; differentiation - throughput work, complexity, market, content type; support descriptive needs & tools (e.g., rubrics); establish baseline, benchmark, & other metric goals; visibility of compliance/success/work improvement/degradation; assess/ensure/increase staff utilization; determine/direct use of internal versus external resource; identify bottlenecks & failures; overall educational & communicative purposes

• Build labor-forecasting tool using task times to plan labor weeks on program content development. Train managers on use to create more granular schedule/use of creative resource forecasting, base insource/outsource decisions. Value: Unprecedented labor time & budget planning, tracking, management, & monitoring improvements; fact-based forecasting; facilitates & supports staff & task mobility; supports complicated scheduling such as overlapping tasks & identification of baseline program staffing needs & JIT additional staff needs; supports labor metric goal-setting; identify & steer training needs; vendor engagement & management tool

• Establish reporting on data for program staff time, spent/remaining budget, and expected use of data. Value: Access to actual spending versus budget on program and content development; ability to adjust spending; trouble-spotting and in-time corrective action

Decreasing costs and improving quality in educational content creation through quantification +...

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