For kickoff
Project vision video
A short animated story of the finished project, told through the people who will use it. Every stakeholder sees the same end result before the build starts.
Why it works →Show your stakeholders the finished project on day one.
Your project might not deliver for a year. At kickoff, I show everyone the finished result as a short animated story. At go-live, I turn the same story into e-learning your staff practise in.
Project work inside
- BP
- IBM
- Microsoft
- Sonic Healthcare
- Queensland Police
- Petro-Canada
What I make
Three ways to work with me
Same method each time: start with the end.
For go-live
Story-based e-learning
Articulate Rise 360 courses where your staff step into a realistic story and practise the decisions the new system or process asks of them.
How it's different →For small business
Business story video
For firms that need to explain what they do. A short story of the future you help your clients reach, told from their side.
More →Project vision video · The problem
Everyone nods. Nobody pictures the same thing.
A major project usually starts with a long PowerPoint and a specification few people finish. Everyone in the room nods. Then each of them leaves picturing a different result.
Nobody finds out until the project delivers, months later. By then the gap has become rework, scope creep and a steering committee asking why the finished system isn't what they expected.
The idea
Start with the end in mind.
Good projects agree what the finished result looks like before anyone builds it. That keeps scope in check, and it gives every stakeholder the same target. A project vision video does it in a few minutes, as a story people remember.
Amazon
Amazon starts new products by writing up the finished customer experience first, then working backwards to what needs to be built.
Colin Bryar & Bill Carr, Working Backwards, 2021
5 minutes
John Kotter's test for any change: if you can't communicate the vision “in five minutes or less” and see that it's understood, you're not done.
J. P. Kotter, Harvard Business Review, 1995
47%
Nearly half of unsuccessful projects miss their goals because of inaccurate requirements management.
PMI, Pulse of the Profession: Requirements Management, 2014
Vision videos
Software engineering researchers call this a vision video: a short film of the future system in use. Their studies find it helps stakeholders reach a shared understanding, where text alone falls short.
Karras, Schneider & Fricker, Journal of Systems and Software, 2020 · Nagel et al., Requirements Engineering, 2023 and 2024
37 studies
Across 37 studies and 33,078 people, stories were remembered and understood better than explanations of the same material.
Mar, Li, Nguyen & Ta, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2021
Results
A 40-page deck, or one short story.
A project manager on a multimillion-dollar healthcare project had a 40-page PowerPoint and a thick specification. Her stakeholders, hospital staff and doctors, were flying in from across Australia to be briefed.
She didn't hand me the slides. We talked. From that conversation I made a short animated story of one patient using the finished system, from start to finish. Everyone in the room understood it, and it changed how the project was delivered.
The briefing she had
- A 40-page PowerPoint
- A thick specification
- Stakeholders flown in from across Australia
What they saw
- One short animated story
- One patient, start to finish
- Everyone understood the outcome
The client isn't named and the video isn't shown here. It belongs to them.
How it works
No documents. Just conversations.
I don't need your documents to tell your project's story. I need time with your project manager, or anyone who understands the project. After almost 30 years building and documenting complex systems, I can talk to you the way you'd talk to your own team. Nothing needs translating into plain English first.
Neither side gets a complex project across in one sitting. You may need several conversations to take me through it, and I'll come back with questions and drafts. We keep going until we both agree the storyboard shows the outcome correctly, even if that outcome is a year away.
The story is about what your customers or staff will see when the project is finished. That's all we discuss. Your documents never go into an AI tool. The only thing that does is the script and scene descriptions I write and you approve.
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Stage 1
Conversations
As many as it takes. You take me through the project and I come back with questions.
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Stage 2
A storyboard we both sign off
Scene by scene, until it shows the finished result correctly.
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Stage 3
Production
AI-generated scenes, animation and a lifelike voiceover, built from the approved script.
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Stage 4
Kickoff
Every stakeholder sees the same finished result before the build starts.
Story-based e-learning
Your staff practise the job, not the Next button.
Most corporate e-learning is a stack of slides: some text, a picture, a multiple-choice quiz and a drag-and-drop word game, added because the tool makes them easy. People click through to 100% and move on.
I build courses where your people step into a realistic story and make the decisions the new system or process asks of them. They see what happens, get feedback and try again. On a project, it's the same story and the same characters as the kickoff video, now at work on go-live day.
Real decisions
Learners choose what to do in situations they will meet on the job, using the branching scenarios built into Rise 360.
Feedback on every choice
Each decision shows its consequence, so people learn from mistakes before they make them for real.
Nothing decorative
Every image, video and interaction carries the content. Extras added only because the tool can do them make learning worse.
Short and repeatable
Short scenario rounds people can come back to, built in Articulate Rise 360 so they run on desktop and mobile and load into your LMS.
Methods, not medium
A review of the research found that what makes e-learning work is the method: realistic decisions, feedback on them, and repetition spread over time.
Will Thalheimer, Does eLearning Work? What the Scientific Research Says, 2017
+14%
Across 65 studies and 6,476 trainees, simulation-based training gave 14% higher procedural knowledge and 9% better retention than comparison groups. Delivered passively, it did worse.
T. Sitzmann, Personnel Psychology, 2011
Keep it coherent
Interesting but irrelevant material, the “seductive details” of many courses, reduces what people learn.
Sundararajan & Adesope, Educational Psychology Review, 2020
Story is the work
A story wrapped around slide content doesn't help: in one study, a plain slideshow beat narrative games with the same content. The story has to be the job itself.
Adams, Mayer et al., Journal of Educational Psychology, 2012
For small business
Explain what you do, from your client's side.
Accountants, advisers and other professional firms sell something clients can't see. A short story of one client's future, and how you help them get there, shows it in a couple of minutes.
Same method as the big projects: start with the end, which here is your client's future.
About
Ken McHardie
PRINCE2 FoundationITIL v3 FoundationBrisbane, Australia
Most people see a handful of major projects in a career. I've been an IT contractor all my working life, so every job was a project, with a start, a deliverable and an end.
Ten years as a developer, building more than 30 commercial databases. Then almost 20 as a technical writer on major projects, inside organisations including BP, IBM, Microsoft, Sonic Healthcare, Queensland Police and Petro-Canada. I've seen what makes a project succeed, and I've watched projects fail.
I've built e-learning for corporate teams since 2005, ran my own cartoon-based e-learning company, LearnByCartoon, and still produce courses in Articulate Rise 360.
Storytelling consultants teach your leaders to tell stories. I make the story of your project.
Also available for six-month contracts as a technical writer or e-learning producer.
Contact
Start with a conversation.
Tell me what the project is and roughly when it kicks off. No documents needed.
Prefer LinkedIn? Message Ken McHardie on LinkedIn.