Compliance Training – Team Management Process (Part 1)

Overview

In my last blog about Team Management (TM), I covered:

• Why the feature was developed.
  • To help manage compliance training according to Risk Level and Student Preferred Language using supervisor feedback.
• TM Data Structure.
  • How a Team Management Group (TMG) is a collection of Team Management Group Items (TMGIs), or topics.
• The four types of TMGIs.
  1. Required/English Only
  2. Manageable/English Only
  3. Required/Multi-Language
  4. Manageable/Multi-Language

I then promised to review the VTA process to add a complete TMG record… and I will… in four parts:

1. TM Configuration to Get Ready for the VTA TM Feature
2. TMG Record – Fields/Options
3. TMGI Record – Fields/Options/Teams
4. TMG Period Record – Fields/Options/Assignments

Let’s look at designing your TM feature for use across the organization.

TM Configuration

Regardless of the complexity of your organization (whether you are single-site, centralized training group or a multi-site, de-centralized training group), you will need to consider an approach to VTA TM that works for everyone to manage their compliance training.

Some aspects of the design must be determined to accommodate the entire organization, across the enterprise. These are settings, values or processes you set up to be used by everyone.

Other decisions can be determined at the Site level.

Configurations for the Enterprise

There are two major enterprise options to configure:

1. The Rating Scale to be used.
2. The messages that will appear in VTA Learner that become part of your TM process.

Rating Scale

Currently, TM in VTA allows for use of a single Rating Scale of your own design. You will need to define the following:

• Rating Scale Name – This is the text that will appear on the Rating Scale drop-down when adding an Item to a TMG in VTA Backoffice; it can be up to 60 characters.

The Rating Scale below was named “Hi-Md-Lo”, but you can name it whatever you want.

• • Rating Scale Levels:

• Number – Determine how many rating options you want to use on your scale.
• Sequence – The order that you want them displayed on a TMG grid in VTA Learner and on reports (first, second, last) when sorted by Risk Level.
• Short Name (12 characters) – This text will appear:
  • In VTA Backoffice on the Rating Scale drop-down when adding an Item to a TMG.
  • In VTA Learner on the Risk Level drop-down used by the supervisor.
• Long Name (30 characters) – This is the text that will appear on the Risk Level drop-down used by the supervisor.
• Required – Identify your “required” Rating Scale Level. You will not see this listed in Backoffice (because you don’t need to select it for required Items), but supervisors will see it displayed in VTA Learner for required Items that a Supervisor cannot manage.
• Not Applicable – Identify your “Not Applicable” Rating Scale Level. You will not see this listed in Backoffice (because you don’t associate Teams when an Item is not applicable), but supervisors will see it in VTA Learner. It is used to remove any existing Rating Scale selection. It will remove students from any Team for the Item.
• Rating Image – Identify the image you want displayed for the Rating Level.
  • You can use our standard images (see image below) or you can provide your own.
  • You can choose to have:
    • an image for some ratings and not others
    • an image for all ratings
    • no images at all

In the screen shot from VTA Learner below, you can see:

• How the Short and Long Names are displayed for each Rating Scale Level.
• How required items are displayed, but cannot be rated.
• Rating Images are only associated with the “High”, “Med” and “Low” ratings (and not on “Req”
  or “N/A”).

Localizations

Each label and message can be modified to meet your organizational process needs. There are dozens of them, so I won’t go over each one here.

Global organizations (with the need for using one tool in multiple languages) can also provide the feature labels and messages in the student’s local language according to their device’s regional settings.

In the example below, you can see the original ‘Send Draft for Review’ message on the left refers to “students” and the modified message on the right refers to “employee”. The modified message is also a bit more descriptive and mentions “N/A” rather than “Not Applicable” because of their Rating Scale.

Original	Modified

Configurations for the Site

There are three things to have in place for each Site to be prepared to use TM:

1. Primary Supervisor setup.
2. TMG Data.
3. VTA Learner configuration.

Primary Supervisor Setup

The VTA Primary Supervisor is the only person that can edit drafts or approve a TMG in VTA Learner.

Each student you want to participate in the TMG process must have a Primary Supervisor set up on their Student record.

TMG Setup

The specific data points to gather will be covered in parts 2, 3 and 4, but in general, each Site will need to know:

• Their TMG Name.
  • The TMG Items they want to add to their TMG, including identifying them as being “required” or “manageable”.
    • The Teams that will be associated to each Items’s Risk Level, for each language.
• The translations for each language you want to use.

VTA Learner Configuration

One major VTA Learner configuration for TM that can be determined Site by Site is…

What happens to the Draft ratings when a draft is approved in VTA Learner by the supervisor?

You can choose to have the Draft values cleared upon approval (put back to “Not Yet Assessed”) or retained.

Each has their pros and cons. It depends on what works best with your process.

• On one hand, it’s nice to see “Not Yet Assessed” again because you can see the approval went through.
• On the other hand, it saves a couple clicks later if the same ratings need to be used in the next review.

Summary

Once you have the following required tasks completed, you are ready to enter your first TMG and get it published for use in VTA Learner:

• Rating Scale initially added by RISC.
• Primary Supervisors associated to Student records.
• TMG data values ready to enter.
• VTA Learner configuration for Draft values after approval.

Additionaly, if you plan on using custom labels, messages or languages, you will want to provide the localizations to RISC.

Next time, I will review the fields and options on the General tab of a TMG record.

Marc Letendre

eLearning professional with over 20 years experience positively impacting corporate productivity through skillful management of staff development programs and implementation of RISC LMS solutions. Marc attained an M.S. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Springfield College in 2005 and is reputable for working with groups to identify issues and create tools, processes or training solutions to achieve and exceed measurable objectives.