Planning Second Life Program

From Virtual Worlds

Best Practices in Planning Second Life Program

• Do not mix business and pleasure; create a separate business account for all employees even if they already have a Second Life account. Create a custom last name recognizable as your brand, for example the name of your company or your major product, and register it with Linden Lab for exclusive use by your employees. Custom last names for the avatars of company employees provide an additional layer of security.
• Build semiformal and informal networks both inside and outside your organization. Self-help and peer-to-peer training is often the most effective type of learning, especially in Second Life.
• Employees with prior experience in Second Life may be a great source of ideas. Consider all possible resources for developing your Second Life location, including employees and contractors. Take into account the skills and experience necessary for building, programming, and day-to-day management. While employee will better understand the company culture, a contractor will better handle specialized tasks, like programming or managing large events.
• Start with a well-defined project with:
  1. a discernable start and finish
  2. key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success; use real KPIs for training in a virtual world
  3. a manageable number of participants at any given moment in the virtual space (perhaps 15 to 20 simultaneous users, and a 100 to 120 users altogether). Prior to enterprise-wide deployment, test it with a small group of employees, particularly those who may be able to compare the old training / recruiting / marketing process with the new approach. Identify and correct problems.
  4. project team members who are passionate about what they are doing
  5. classroom sessions to mitigate the risk of using a new technology
  6. a review of the hardware, bandwidth, and security issues before starting
  7. a great vendor who can develop and maintain the virtual environment and the tools you will need inside the environment, and offer technical support to your users
• Overly ambitious initiatives often fail.
• If your project targets outside developers, users, or customers, do not be afraid to form joint "employee-plus-outsiders" groups or councils that will reach out to your target audience and help you manage the project.
• Because delivery mechanisms for virtual worlds and Web-based training address different aspects of the learning cycle, they work best together in producing a coherent training program. Use virtual worlds for experiential training and the Web for descriptive training, as well as for accessing and handling results of virtual world modules. Making detailed reports on specific tasks and overall progress reports available to both trainee and instructor expedites learning and increases the ROI of the training program.