Quick answer: Rapid eLearning content development means building training fast enough to keep pace with product releases, without sacrificing quality. Agile methodology can meaningfully speed up the content development process — better collaboration, clearer ownership, faster reviews — but it doesn’t solve the core bottleneck: the time it takes to turn a subject matter expert’s knowledge into finished course content.
That bottleneck requires a different kind of solution, which this case study explores below.
Key takeaways
- Agile speeds up eLearning delivery, not eLearning creation. In this case study, Blue Prism’s learning team used Agile to reduce delivery time by working on courses concurrently — but Agile didn’t reduce the actual time it took to build any single course.
- Siloed teams and unclear ownership are common root causes of slow content development. Blue Prism’s instructional design and curriculum teams were working separately with no shared process for tracking who owned what.
- A phased rollout works better than an all-at-once shift. Blue Prism moved through Agile adoption in four phases rather than trying to change everything simultaneously.
- Tooling matters as much as methodology. Moving from spreadsheets to Jira gave the team visibility into actual time-to-complete data, not just elapsed time.
- The real bottleneck in most eLearning development is content creation itself — interviewing subject matter experts and translating their knowledge into finished material — which process changes alone don’t fix.
What is rapid eLearning content development?
Rapid eLearning content development is an approach to building training content fast enough to launch alongside product releases and other business-critical timelines, instead of trailing weeks or months behind. It’s a common challenge for training and education services teams supporting fast-moving software organizations, where new features and functionality regularly outpace the team’s ability to document and train on them.
Case study: How Blue Prism approached rapid eLearning development with Agile
At a CEdMA workshop, the learning team at Blue Prism shared how they moved from a traditional ADDIE model to an Agile approach for eLearning development, aiming to align training releases with the product’s general availability (GA) dates.
What wasn’t working
Before the shift, Blue Prism’s instructional design and curriculum development teams worked largely in silos, with no clear system for task ownership. Team members were often unsure whether they were duplicating someone else’s work or overstepping a role that wasn’t technically theirs. Evaluation was also inconsistent — reviews and feedback happened irregularly rather than as a built-in part of the process.
How they got started
Blue Prism secured sponsorship from their global leader of education services, then looked to other departments — including product engineering — to learn from existing Agile implementations already in use at the company. They brought in certified Scrum Masters, consulted organizations with agile curriculum development experience, and assembled an internal Agile project team to define their objectives before rolling anything out broadly.
The four-phase Agile roadmap
Rather than attempting a full transformation at once, Blue Prism moved through a phased roadmap:
| Phase | Focus |
|---|---|
| Phase 1 | Understand Agile tools and practices; identify where Agile applies to curriculum development; revise the existing process framework |
| Phase 2 | Move from project tracking to collaborative workflows; introduce Jira; develop initial time-and-output metrics |
| Phase 3 | Examine capacity, evaluation, and management metrics in more depth; expand Jira usage |
| Phase 4 | Target a 50% reduction in the time and cost of delivering projects using Agile |
At the time of the presentation, the team had just completed Phase 2.
What Agile actually fixed — and what it didn’t
Introducing a review process at every stage — rather than one large review at the end — let the team hand off information faster. Two specific changes made a measurable difference:
- Curriculum developers shared whatever information they had immediately, rather than waiting to scope an entire course before starting.
- The team modularized content development, not just the course structure — if a 10-module course only had finished source material for modules 3 and 5, they started building those modules right away instead of waiting for the rest.
What Agile didn’t fix: despite these process gains, the team found that working through pilot projects didn’t actually speed up the time it takes to build any individual piece of content. Agile helped them work on more courses concurrently — which reduced overall delivery time — but the underlying content-creation bottleneck remained.
How did Jira help with eLearning project tracking?
Jira replaced spreadsheet-based tracking and gave Blue Prism’s team a roadmap view of when projects started, ended, and overlapped. Setting up project types in Jira meant each new eLearning project auto-populated with the relevant stages and subtasks, from initial analysis through LMS launch — giving the team visibility into who was working on what, and how long each stage actually took, not just how much time had elapsed.
Reported benefits of using Jira included:
- Stronger cross-team collaboration
- Better visibility into current and future workloads
- Greater individual ownership of tasks
- Easier roadmap planning for product-aligned training
- Manager-level visibility into bottlenecks and where coaching was needed
What results did Blue Prism achieve?
Using Agile, Blue Prism’s team delivered 38 eLearning courses and 2 instructor-led training sessions, with another 13 eLearning projects in progress at the time of the case study. They also built six standardized project types in Jira, each pre-populated with time estimates based on historical data — creating a foundation for identifying future efficiencies.
What did Blue Prism learn from the transition?
The team offered the following advice for organizations considering a similar shift:
- Be mindful and patient with the pace of change
- Keep an open-door policy for questions and support
- Never stop educating the team on Agile concepts
- Use Agile language consistently across all communications
- Treat the process as continuous improvement, not a one-time fix
- Expect team members to adopt new ways of working at different speeds
- Recognize that shifting from a fixed to a growth mindset takes real time and effort
Why Agile alone doesn’t solve the rapid content development problem
Blue Prism’s results show what Agile is genuinely good at: process visibility, collaboration, and delivery scheduling. What it doesn’t touch is the actual production bottleneck most learning teams face — interviewing subject matter experts (which can take hours or days depending on their availability and depth of knowledge) and then manually translating that knowledge into finished course content using tools like Word or PowerPoint.
That gap is exactly what LearnExperts built LEAi to close.
How LEAi solves the content creation bottleneck Agile can’t
LEAi converts content your subject matter experts have already created — documents, decks, recordings — into instructor-led training, eLearning, knowledge base articles, virtual class content, presentations, webinars, and videos in minutes rather than days, weeks, or months.
Five core benefits:
- Use content that already exists. No need to start from a blank page — LEAi builds from assets you already have.
- Follow instructional design best practices automatically, so course quality doesn’t depend on how experienced the person building it is.
- Update courses fast, instead of spending months revising content every time a product changes.
- Repurpose content across multiple courses without rebuilding it from scratch each time.
- Deliver content in the format your audience needs, whether that’s eLearning, microlearning, ILT, or video.
Let LEAi speed up the time to convert SME knowledge into eLearning
FAQ
Is Agile a good fit for eLearning content development?
Agile can meaningfully improve how a learning team collaborates, tracks work, and delivers projects — Blue Prism saw real gains in visibility and concurrent delivery. It’s less effective at reducing the actual time required to build any single course, since that time is largely driven by subject matter expert availability and manual content translation, not process structure.
What's the biggest bottleneck in eLearning content development?
The most common bottleneck is the gap between a subject matter expert’s knowledge and finished course material — the time spent interviewing SMEs and manually converting their input into structured content using tools like Word or PowerPoint.
How long does it typically take to build an eLearning course?
It varies significantly by course complexity and organization, but traditional development — including SME interviews, content drafting, and review cycles — commonly takes weeks to months per course under manual processes. AI-assisted tools can compress the content-creation portion of that timeline to minutes for a given piece of source material, though review and refinement still take additional time.
Can Agile and AI-assisted content creation be used together?
Yes — they solve different parts of the problem. Agile improves how a team plans, tracks, and delivers projects; AI tools like LEAi reduce the time spent on the content creation step itself. Using both together addresses both the process and production bottlenecks that slow down rapid eLearning development.
