Business Relationships
The Brief
A 14,000-word script. A mandatory course. A client calling it dry.
Deloitte’s professionals need to recognise which kind of business relationship they’re in and act accordingly. In a Big Four firm, getting that wrong is a regulatory problem before it’s a commercial one. But the mandatory course ran to 14,000 words, and feedback on earlier versions was blunt. People were enduring it, not learning from it.
The Solution
Put a bee in charge. Put the learner in the story.
We built the whole experience around the BR Bee, a pun-loving guide who turns a dense script into a journey with a voice. Learners play Diego, a delivery manager in Deloitte’s internal IT team, facing the situations the policy was written for. Bold illustration, short animations and a soundtrack keep the script moving from the first word to the last.
There’s a story behind the story
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When the subject is business relationships, a bored learner is a liability.
Deloitte’s people work inside many different kinds of business relationship, each with its own rules. For a firm whose reputation rests on independence, knowing which kind you’re in isn’t a nicety. It’s the job.
The course that taught this was mandatory and dense. Feedback on earlier versions had Deloitte asking for a full refresh, not a polish. Low satisfaction on mandatory training isn’t a vanity metric. It means the policy isn’t landing.
There was a second cost. Courses from other providers were slow to clear Deloitte’s technical QA, and every week in review was another week on the old version.
The script ran to 14,000 words, and its substance had to survive intact. The deadline was fixed. And everything had to stay on brand.
Our Approach
Keep every word of the script. Change everything around it.
The script couldn’t shrink. All 14,000 words had been written for a reason, and the final assessment depended on them. So we stopped treating length as the problem and started treating pace as the answer.
Enter the BR Bee: an expressive, pun-loving guide who carries the learner through the content and reinforces it along the way. Our designers gave the Bee real character and a colourful world to live in, all inside Deloitte’s brand guidelines. Humour kept subtle.
Then we gave the learner a job. As Diego, a delivery manager in Deloitte’s internal IT team, they faced knowledge checks at key intervals, applying the policy before the assessment tested it.
Short animations and a soundtrack set the rhythm. Building in Articulate let us publish, review and revise with the client in tight loops. That’s how a fixed deadline got met.
Key Project Assets
The BR Bee
An expressive, pun-loving animated guide who carries learners through 14,000 words of policy, turning a mandatory read into a journey with a personality and a point of view.
The Diego Scenario
A role for the learner to step into: a delivery manager in Deloitte’s internal IT team, facing knowledge checks at key intervals so the policy gets applied before the final assessment tests it.
Illustration and Motion
Bold, on-brand illustration and short animations with an overarching soundtrack, designed to break a dense script into beats the learner can keep pace with rather than endure.
The Articulate Build
The full experience built in Articulate, so publishing, client review and revision ran as one fast loop, holding a fixed deadline without compromising a word of the content.
Impact
The refresh did exactly what the feedback asked for. Satisfaction jumped by a quarter, Deloitte’s technical QA cleared it faster than any other provider’s work, and a course the client had called dry came back described as fun.
Business Relationships — The Diego Scenario
Project Insights
From dry to alive
Nobody asked us to cut the script, and we didn’t. What we changed was everything around it: who was telling the story, who the learner got to be, and how fast the whole thing moved. The policy stayed exactly as dense as it needed to be. It just stopped feeling that way.
It’s a useful proof. Mandatory content is where most learning goes to be endured, and it’s exactly where a little craft earns the most. Deloitte put a second course, Scope of Services, through the same treatment. Dry, it turns out, is a choice.
Thank you again for your hard work, dedication, speed, flexibility, and amazing visuals/animations in both the Business Relationships and the Scope of Services courses. You helped to bring these dry courses to life! We look forward to working with you again in the future.
Trisha Brink, Lead Learning and Development Specialist — Deloitte
