Client wants .story (unpublished files) - do they need this?

Hi Stephanie,

I think you may be speaking about my company as your client - are the words "Artisanal" and "Cheese" related to this particular course?

Speaking from a client perspective in a company that is largely new and inexperienced when it comes to eLearning development work, I know that quite a few assumptions can be made by those who do not understand the jargon or specifics that go into development work. This gets compounded more when non-training/Instructional Design/Developer types are the only ones involved in the creation of the development agreement.

In past companies, and dealing with other contractors, I've seen agreements that specifically outline what is, and what is not, considered a "deliverable" at the end of the project. Anyone that isn't intimately familiar with how eLearning is developed, or the difference between a source file versus a published output, can easily assume that they are one in the same. Hence, confusion or misunderstandings like this may occur.

From a contracting developer perspective, I'd always be sure to negotiate what is/isn't on that final deliverable list, but that's just me.

Our team looks for the storyline source file to mitigate any future issues that Ashley mentioned in the case of a developer no longer being available for future updates (whether they fall off the map, or budgetary constraints affecting our options for outsourcing development). I know we've had quite a few project timelines balloon out exponentially thanks to having to rebuild things from scratch just to make an update on one page where the source file was lost in the shuffle. It gives us piece of mind to maintain the source files on our end.