How to Have Success with Subject Matter Experts

By Rosendo Gonzalez & Thomas Edgerton

Introduction

When you develop training or user assistance (various forms of Help,) you can work with subject matter experts (SMEs) ranging from software programmers to machine operators. Over the course of our careers we have worked with doctors, scientists, physicists, attorneys, bankers, nuclear engineers, software engineers, semiconductor engineers, tank commanders, field medics, customer support representatives and hosts of various types of line workers and sales staff, all of whom have demonstrated expertise in their fields. The notion appears straightforward: identify the best performers and use them to develop content for everyone else’s benefit. Unfortunately, the result is often mediocre.

Why do instructional designers, technical writers, and content editors fail to achieve a successful transfer of the SME’s knowledge and abilities? As supposed professionals, we would prefer to blame the SMEs. But blaming SMEs only makes for good sport when complaining to colleagues.

To consistently have success with SMEs you have to avoid the blame game. You must move from a passive receiver of information to a proactive partner where you assume a co-equal relationship. This article will explore how to manage the relationship so you can produce effective training or Help while keeping the SME engaged and feeling positive about the collaboration.

Equal Partnership

The bigger the gap between a SME’s expertise and yours, the easier it is to be intimidated. Approaching a SME, who by definition knows way more about something than you do, can tempt you into assuming a submissive role. Don’t do it! While they know things you don’t, your job is to do more than just record information. You have your own expertise in training, documentation, or Help, and that’s why you are there.

When working with SMEs, you are not just asking them for favors, but rather you are asking them to engage in a partnership where you add value by making their knowledge and skills transferable to others. Look upon your relationship with the SME as an opportunity to expand their influence for the benefit of the organization. This may sound obvious, yet it is often not something a SME can do effectively by themselves. Remember, “Death by Bullet Point” presentations are the work of knowledge experts without the requisite skills. If you reflect on the critical difference between information dumping and performance-changing content, you will see the critical role you fulfill in working with a SME. One time when a skeptical engineer asked Rosendo what his role in the project was going to be, he replied “I’m here to be an advocate for the learner.” By the time they were finished, the engineer thanked him for his contribution.

If you abdicate your role, eventually a SME will see your role as secretarial. When this happens, they will start saying things like, “Just make it pretty,” or “You can wordsmith it later.” The result is usually just a slicker looking Death by Bullet Point content that has minimal influence on the organizational goal. To manage the relationship, you must assume the attitude of an equal. A SME is the knowledge leader and you are the training, documentation, or user assistance leader. For example, if you are working on training, you must think about effective and creative ways for people to learn, perform, and practice the learning objectives and then transfer their new skills to the job.

To succeed with SMEs you must also understand where you and the SME fit into the web of relationships in your organization. For consultants, your client is the person who manages your work for the organization, and pays your invoices. For employees, your client is your manager and your project’s stakeholders. Typically, the structure of the relationships will look something like the diagram below, where the content designer and developer report to a manager, while the SME reports to the organization’s stakeholder, the one who expects to benefit from their investment in you.

There can be variations on this relationship model. Sometimes you report directly to the stakeholder. Other times, the stakeholder is the SME; you often see this relationship with sales and leadership training. Regardless of variations, the critical point is you do not manage a SME’s priorities — that is someone else’s job — you manage their knowledge. This means, as illustrated in the diagram, there are normally three communication paths when resolving an issue with a SME: directly with the SME, or indirectly with either the client or stakeholder. We will discuss some of the considerations for choosing a channel later in this chapter, but the first point to understand is the structure of the relationships.

You will need to manage the SME partnership in order to keep on task and schedule. Very often, despite their stated intentions, their managers will send SMEs a mixed message, “Give them what they need, but don’t let your productivity suffer.” When a SME is in a time-crunch and not giving you the time you need, stakeholders and managers need to know this — don’t assume that they know that the SME is overtaxed. To send this message, speak with your manager and let them know the situation. Ask them to speak with the stakeholder or manager to negotiate a new schedule based on the SME’s availability. Now the ball is in the stakeholder’s court. More than likely, rather than delay their project, they will try to find a way for the SME to give you more time. Otherwise, you need more resources or the schedule must be extended.

Setting the Stage for Success

To clarify a SME’s role and set the stage for success, make sure you ask these questions at the beginning of a project:

Ask Your Manager, the SME’s Manager, and the Project’s Stakeholder

• How much time can I expect each week from a SME?
• What makes the SME an expert?
• Are there others I should contact whom the SME can delegate to?
• Aside from the SME, who will participate in reviews?
• Is the SME responsible for the creation of source material? If so, do their responsibilities allow them time to produce the material?

Ask the SME

• How much time do you have to dedicate each week to this project? Will that change?
• What do you see as your role?
• Have you ever been involved in content development before? What did you do? What was the result?
• Are there others I should contact? If so, who are they and what do they do?
• Will you be able to review and validate? (Ideally, you want more than one reviewer.)
• What source material already exists and how can I get it?
• What do you see as the best end result of this effort?
• What form of communication to you prefer?
• How can I make this less time consuming for you?

You may have noticed some questions are repeated for different people. Don’t be surprised if you get different answers to the same questions! When that happens, you have the opportunity to improve alignment within the organization. We can also almost guarantee that you will also get “That’s a good question,” followed by some head scratching. Managers will realize that they need to speak to their stakeholders; stakeholders will need to speak to their SMEs, and SMEs will need to speak with everyone. This is a sign of success, and will put everyone on notice that you mean business about adding value. In promoting dialog between managers, stakeholders, and subject matter experts prior to initiating development, you refine the project expectations, core deliverables, and organizational goals.

Starting Development

Ok, so you’ve asked the right questions, and established your intent to assume a co-equal role and add value. Now it is time to start working with your SME. At this point your job is to extract the precious SME knowledge as efficiently as possible. Other books go into great detail explaining content generation e.g. learning objectives, topic outlines, task analysis, and how they translate into content development. We won’t repeat that information here. We will begin this section with this — whoever your SME is, we guarantee you one thing — they have other things to do!

Therefore, before you start making demands on a SME’s time, do your homework. You must establish a baseline knowledge of the subject matter. “Wait a second”, you say, “Isn’t the SME supposed to help me with that?” Inevitably, yes, but if you show up at a content development session and demonstrate to the SME that you don’t even know the basics of a topic, you are already abdicating your equal partnership role and simultaneously losing credibility. Your preliminary research does two important things: it allows you to establish a preliminary information structure for the content, and it establishes more credibility with the SME. It also makes better use of a SME’s time because they do not expend it explaining things to you that are easily found elsewhere.

There are various ways to extract information from a SME, starting with a kickoff interview. Unfortunately, you can’t work very long in this profession until you run into the high-performing, low-explaining SME. You approach a SME expecting clear, concise, well-structured information; you leave with an overload of confusing, rambling, chaotic information. This kind of interaction is an occupational hazard; however, the more preparation you do, the more opportunity you have to establish a preliminary organizational structure for your content. Then, instead of being at the mercy of a convoluted information flow, you can redirect the SME with pertinent questions that focus the information and capture the content objectives. Examples of questions might include:

• You have given me a lot of useful information, but what does a beginner need to know?
• How often does the situation you just described come up?
• What would you say is the main point from what you’ve just explained?
• Are these steps I have here in the correct order? Does sequence matter?
• Why is this way better than that way?
• I don’t understand how you got from A to C, is there a B missing?
• Would you say this is a good way to phrase this?
• Does my explanation capture it well?

Most SMEs sincerely want to make a helpful contribution. They will appreciate your assistance in restructuring and rephrasing information so they can communicate their expertise to others.

In addition to interviews, you can also have SMEs review material and make corrections and comments. This can be done in group meetings, or separately. For new content, this can take the form of outlines or drafts, for existing content this can be existing materials. The same principle of preparation applies here as well. When you know material needs to be restructured, do it before the SME reviews it. Don’t be afraid to take an early shot at structuring the information, many SMEs will appreciate having something concrete to look at; it can help them organize their thoughts. Some SMEs are gifted communicators, and that may have contributed to their selection. However, most SMEs need help structuring and articulating their knowledge, and the more preparation you do, the better position you will be in to help them. Perhaps you will start the process with an outline, then move to more detailed information after the SME validates the outline.

Whenever you have a SME review material, make it as easy as possible for them to review and make changes. If the material is in PowerPoint or eLearning format, you may want to either export the content to a word processing document, or provide the SME with a form where they can easily organize their feedback. Cloud based sharing can also provide review tools, just make sure they are up to the task in maintaining versioning.

Whatever form your content gathering and review takes, you are very likely on deadline. This means that you must have clear turnaround agreements from SMEs. In the corporate world, these are called Service Level Agreements (SLAs). As we pointed out earlier, your job is to manage the knowledge, not the SME. Therefore it is essential that at the beginning of a project you establish SLAs with Stakeholders and SMEs. These SLAs then get converted into specific deadlines for SMEs to return their input to you. Ideally established at the stakeholder level, SLAs will be a contract that you can turn to if a SME is missing deadlines. If the stakeholder cannot honor an SLA, then you are in a much better position to renegotiate the deliverable schedule. If you simply rely on goodwill and good intentions, you have very little to fall back on. Although this model can appear to be legalistic, the fact is that many stakeholders will not recall what they committed to, or may have misunderstood the requirements. Ultimately, SLAs are about documenting communication for everyone’s benefit, as well as protecting your position.

Death SMEs

Sooner or later it will happen to you. You have an efficient, pleasant relationship with your SME who meets all your deadlines, you create clear content, and then you send it off for final sign-off. Then to your horror it comes back with major corrections and a painful amount of rework. What happened? You were done in by a Death SME.

What is a Death SME? A Death SME can take several forms, but the result is a seriously flawed deliverable that will likely set a project behind schedule while rework is done. A Death SME can be a well-intentioned person who has provided you with flawed information. Because the working relationship appeared to be going well, you did not see any red flags and were led too far down the path before discovering the problem. Alternately, a Death SME can be badly-intentioned and continually miss deadlines, be uncooperative, or even simply disappear for all intents and purposes. With some Death SMEs you will get plenty of red flags, with others, hardly any. We have already discussed several processes to foster a good SME relationship and prevent problems, but the threat of Death SMEs warrants a further discussion of processes to deal with this project killer — starting with Checks & Balances.

Checks & Balances

Checks & Balances are an important structural dynamic in American democracy and we recommend you follow that principle in content development as well. The fewer eyes that validate material, the more crucial those eyes become. We suggest that the more critical the project, the more you need to consider multiple sources of validation. The other consideration should be the amount of work invested in the material. If a small project only requires a day of rework, that is far different than a month of rework.

You will sometimes get hints that content needs secondary validation; for example, a SME may contradict themselves, or display some uncertainty on a topic. When you see these signs, either ask the SME to do further research, or run the information by someone else yourself. This is a continual judgment call, but the principle is to not be timid about establishing certainty if you see signs of uncertainty. Finally, make sure that the people who are responsible for ultimate sign-off are involved at the right stage of the process. You don’t want to bother them with every little question, but there are efficient ways to involve them along the way to prevent costly disconnects. For example, have them sign off on learning objectives or topic outlines, and then the content outline. In most cases, you should not wait until the content is completed to get their validation. If you do, you leave yourself at the mercy of a Death SME.

In most instances, if you follow our guidelines, you will not end up with a SME who is so unresponsive that they essentially disappear. But if your IMs, phone calls and emails go unanswered, then you have a Death SME of the AWOL (Absent without Official Leave) species. The AWOL SME is not engaged enough to fulfill their required role. If you are able to communicate with the SME, ask some questions to look for the cause of their poor contribution. Is it more work than they expected? Has their workload suddenly increased? Do they feel criticized when you ask direct questions? Do they find the work very boring or unpleasant? Depending on the answers you get, you will have to decide whether you need to approach your manager or stakeholder.

Sometimes with a few words of appreciation, a situation can be patched up. In addition, you may see opportunities to modify your work process to accommodate the SMEs needs. Perhaps they prefer interviews rather than solo document reviews, perhaps they prefer having deadlines on Monday instead of Friday — these are all tactics you can employ to accommodate a SME and corral them back into a project. In addition, you can encourage a SME to consult with their manager to see if they can formulate a solution — for example, reducing their workload or rearranging priorities.

If you find you need to go over a SME’s head, go to either your manager or stakeholder with the problem. Normally the recommended route is your manager, because they usually manage the relationship with the stakeholder. Remember those SLAs? If you can’t get a solution from the stakeholder, this is where you dust off that documentation and make the case that if the resource is lacking, adjustments to schedule, budget, or scope may need to be made. If you are in the unfortunate position where your manager gets outgunned by the stakeholder, at least your manager knows that you are operating under compromised circumstances.

When the Party’s Over

Unfortunately, we’ve seen situations where SMEs were not only unrecognized for their contributions, they were actually penalized for them. For example, one call center employee, who had been volunteered by their manager, was criticized by that same manager because his call metrics had fallen. Not surprisingly, that SME soon cut back his engagement with us. Look for opportunities to influence rewards and recognition for your SMEs, and everyone will be happier. Even a simple thank you email is better than nothing, but look for better opportunities. Some ideas are a thank you note where you cc: your manager, and more importantly, the stakeholder(s). Other possibilities include taking the SME out to lunch, giving the SME team gifts related to the project (like a mug or t-shirt), nomination for a recognition reward, etc. The important thing is to thank your SME, and if possible, utilize some form of public recognition. We think this is not only good form and the right thing to do, it also cultivates the relationship should you need to come knocking on the SME’s door again.

Conclusion

To achieve an effective SME relationship, you must demonstrate leadership and add value by making sure your SME’s knowledge is transferable to others. You must do more than regurgitate what a SME gives you. Establish credibility — not by pretending to know more than you do — but by showing that you take your role seriously, and do not intend to waste their time. By doing prep work, you establish a preliminary organizing structure to pour information into. This translates into higher efficiency, and the more a SME appreciates your efficient use of their time, the better the relationship will go. If despite your best efforts you encounter problems, be proactive by communicating with your training manager and stakeholders. Finally, when the party’s over, look for ways to influence rewards and recognition for your SMEs.