Decide whether to buy off-the-shelf training or build custom
Compares off-the-shelf courses, a vendor-customized option, and in-house development on fit, cost, speed, and maintenance.
The prompt
Help me decide whether to buy off-the-shelf training, customize vendor content, or build it in-house.
Learning need and objectives: [DETAILS]
Learners: [NUMBER, ROLES, LOCATIONS, LANGUAGES]
How specific to our company is the content? [e.g. "generic time management" vs. "our proprietary sales process"]
Options I am considering: [VENDOR NAMES, LIBRARIES, OR INTERNAL TEAM]
Budget and deadline: [DETAILS]
Internal capacity: [designers, developers, SMEs, authoring tools]
How often the content will change: [DETAILS]
Evaluate each option on:
- Fit to our objectives, context, terminology, and examples
- Total cost over 3 years (licenses per seat, development hours, SME time, maintenance, translation)
- Time to launch
- Quality of instructional design (practice and application, not just video and quiz)
- LMS compatibility (SCORM/xAPI), accessibility, data and reporting
- Ownership and the ability to edit content
- Vendor risk: contract terms, lock-in, renewal pricing
Return:
1. A weighted decision matrix with my criteria (suggest weights, which I can change).
2. A recommendation with the reasoning and the conditions under which it would change.
3. Questions to ask each vendor in a demo.
4. Red flags to look for in vendor content samples.
Use only prices and facts I provide; mark unknowns [GET QUOTE] or [CONFIRM].
Highlighted [brackets] are blanks to replace with your own details.
Fill in the blanks and use this promptMore Thinking & Decisions prompts
What to fill in
- DETAILS
- NUMBER, ROLES, LOCATIONS, LANGUAGES
- VENDOR NAMES, LIBRARIES, OR INTERNAL TEAM
- designers, developers, SMEs, authoring tools
- GET QUOTE
- CONFIRM
How this prompt is built
This prompt follows the RTF structure (Role, Task, Format). RTF tells the model who to be, what to do and what shape the answer should take. It is the quickest structure that still gives noticeably better results than a bare request.
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