Case Closure

In my previous post, I promised I would follow up with a work project that in many ways failed, but then I used it in a project and painted it as a success for a school project. Well, I want to open up by sharing that I do not like the idea of insurance. I like having insurance on the things I can’t afford to lose (like my kids) but other than that I desperately hate insurance. So, how did I get experience working as an ID on my resume? Well, I temped for local investment firms that needed some hands and I got some solid gigs at a few local insurance companies.

Would you like some background music to enjoy while reading this?
I recommend some Golden Dust by A.L.I.S.O.N.

I would like to try not to make this a gripe session but rather flip this over and use it as a case study in itself. If you would be so kind as to reply and share how you would have approached this assignment differently I would appreciate it. When I went to find the original case study/ web post I created for school (referenced in the previous blog post on honesty) I was shocked to see it in disarray. On top of not doing well on the work assignment itself, it appears as though I did not do well on the web page glorifying it either. Instead of copying the content into a new web page that I owned, I did a facelift on the actual school project from green to light blue. You can see how well this all turned out in the evergreen timeline here: 
curriculum effectiveness enhancement

If you haven’t read my previous post on HONESTY (which you should!) you might be asking yourself: “Why is Improvement Dave sharing all these fails he had? Isn’t this web page supposed to be teaching me how to live an awesome life?” Well, I want to candidly illustrate mistakes I have made in my career as an instructional designer in an attempt to foster moments of learning.
My end goal is to ask you how you would have done things differently.

*The image looks better with red and blue 3D glasses.

So, back to why that web page, (linked above), looks so bad. I created this case study for school around a project I had at work. Then, I wanted to use it in my portfolio (also a school project originally). Instead of creating a new web page, I just threw a blue background up that hid the links to the other student’s pages and posted it on my portfolio. This was a lazy choice, and now I have a web page that has errors and I no longer have access to update them. Also, I wanted to make it all about me, granted it was for my portfolio, so again, I should have just created a new web page with the same content. (Which is what I plan to do nextSure, it would have taken more time to create a second version of the page, but it would have been free (with some ads) and I would now have access to edit it. When I was thinking about writing this post, I had the thought to recreate the web page now so I can use that for this case study, of a failed case study, presenting the ultimately failed project at work, but that didn’t seem honest. The whole point of this is to create a moment of learning from my mistakes, so fixing just one part of this seemed to take away from that learning. I need to fail hard, and I need to own that as a moment of learning.
So, if you take anything away from this post, it should be:

“Don’t be lazy, like Improvement Dave was before he was awesome as FCUK.”

So, since that web page has a dreadful dark green background behind black text, making it nearly illegible, I can recap the project here:

I would like to start by saying this was a project for an insurance company in the claims department, but I am very ashamed to say that I have worked at multiple insurance companies and yes, supporting training for their claims department. Let that be your second lesson. Don’t work for a claims department at an insurance company (I am kidding! If you like that then more power to you, you sick and demented person.) So, my point in this paragraph is, I will try to leave the company anonymous.

Excuse #1

The previous person in my role quit right before I started. I was asked to train the higher-level claims analysts, who traditionally were promoted into this higher-level role. A decision was made to hire for this analyst role off the street as long as applicants had claims processing experience. I am using this as an excuse, but I want to illuminate the fact that the learners traditionally would have had 5 to 10 years of knowledge about how this company processed claims for all the different health plans they supported.

Excuse #2

I attended a condensed version of “how to process claims at this company training” that was led by the previous claims trainer to the one who had just quit. I had missed the first week or two of that course. I then attended a 2-week training that was led by a SME. I politely asked if I could record the training so I could use it for content design and development purposes and the SME declined. The training was broken up by type of claim. The SME processed a claim on the projector and then we were given claims on our laptops in class to process. In this second class, I was seated next to claim processors who had excelled at processing claims and had then been promoted to this higher level. At this point, it was clear to me that I did not know what was going on and that I was walking down a treacherous path. When this training concluded the SME who was training the course promptly quit his job, and in retrospect, I probably should have done the same thing.

ADDIE Time

I did not quit. I proceeded to leverage the ADDIE model to develop PDF Learner Guides and Facilitator Guides for ILT, based off of the Analysis I created from the SME training I attended. My first cohort arrived to me when I was about halfway through developing my curriculum. At this point, a second claims trainer was hired who attended the basic claims training and started building Learner Guides and Facilitator Guides for the ILT sessions they started leading. 

Escuse #3

There were still two claims auditors on staff who had a 2-pronged job. When they were not auditing claims, they were working on updates on the “claims manuals”. These Microsoft Word documents were linear written descriptions of the process to complete common claim types that were stored on SharePoint. The Claims Manuals had minimal images only where necessary and contained multiple contradictions. It was difficult to search for them and nearly impossible to search them for content matches. If you got a claim you had to know what manual you needed and you had to know the title of that document.

After completing the Learner Guides and Facilitator guides and peer-reviewing the content through identified SMEs we both started getting questions about why we didn’t just train from the hundreds of Claims Manuals. We explained that the Learner Guides contained visual learning tools that explained the concepts around how the claims were to be processed not only the steps and that the Learner Guides always contained links to the relevant Claims Manuals. When I wasn’t updating my training guides I was leading back-to-back training cohorts. In retrospect, I should have made more time for actually processing claims. However, that time was cut into by having to train new hires.

Since the training really wasn’t going as well as I had hoped and the learners were not getting as much hands-on experience with processing claims as I would have liked. I started to ask high performers if I could record their screens while processing common claim types using the claims manuals and then use those videos as learning resources. Many of the new hires liked the videos because they could be replayed, which helped them encode stronger mental models to build from. However, the auditors and other members of operations did not approve of the videos. I also invited high-performing processors into the classroom to provide live demos. These demos were helpful but took high performers from the floor, and resulted in me developing a case of imposter syndrome. I would go home feeling drained and expendable.

It was at this point, that I started applying for jobs outside of the company full-time. I could see that my training was not delivering the results that I desired. There was tension within the department around how certain claims should be processed and new hires were often surprised by how claims were being processed for so many health plans with such few resources. 

After that, I accepted an offer outside of the company and put in my two weeks’ notice. My team had a very nice going away party for me. However, when I invited members from the claims department to a happy hour at a local restaurant, only two people attended and one of them was from my department. This is not how my going away happy hours usually pan out.

This post has become a cathartic rant about a job that I feel bad about. It feels good to write it but I think I might have lost the point of this, which was to present it as a moment of learning. I am still curious to hear how you would have approached this assignment differently. What tools would you have implemented? What choices would you have made? What would you have demanded?

In my next post, I will dig into the takeaways I gained from this less-than-ideal experience.