How to Work with Subject Matter Experts – Keep Your Schedule

Your subject matter expert knows the content thoroughly, but they're also running a department, sitting in back-to-back meetings and answering your emails at 9 p.m., when they answer at all. The course can't move without them, and the schedule assumed they'd have time. Working with SMEs is often the hardest part of an eLearning project, and almost never because they don't care. So how do you work with subject matter experts without losing your schedule?

Keep your schedule when working with SMEs by agreeing on their time commitment before the project starts, asking for their knowledge in short, focused sessions, making every review quick and specific, and having a clear plan for what happens when they go quiet. Most SME delays come from unclear expectations rather than bad intentions, because experts agree to "review the course" without knowing that means three rounds and ten hours. Put the hours, dates and decision rights in writing, protect their time like it's yours, and escalate early and politely when a deadline slips.

Why SME Time Is the Real Constraint

On most eLearning projects, the team can build faster than the subject matter expert (SME) can review. Developers, designers and narrators are planned resources, while the SME is a borrowed one. Their manager agreed to lend them, but nobody removed anything from their workload.

That makes SME hours the bottleneck, and a bottleneck sets the pace for everything. If your SME can give four hours a week and the project needs forty hours of their input, the schedule is at least ten weeks, no matter how fast your team works. Plan around that number instead of hoping it disappears.

It helps to remember the SME's perspective, too, since they didn't volunteer to be instructional designers. They're being asked to explain things they do by instinct, review documents in a format they've never seen and approve content they'll be held responsible for. A little empathy goes a long way toward a productive working relationship.

Set Up the Agreement Before Kickoff

Set up the SME agreement before kickoff by meeting with the SME and their manager together and putting the commitment in writing. This single conversation prevents most of the delays that would otherwise come later.

Make sure the agreement covers these points:

• Total hours expected, broken down by phase (interviews, storyboard review, alpha review, beta review).
• Specific dates for each review window.
• Turnaround time for each review, such as five business days.
• Who the backup SME is if the main one is unavailable.
• Who makes the final call when SMEs disagree.
• What happens to the schedule if a review is late.

Ask the manager to confirm the agreement. When reviews compete with the SME's daily responsibilities later on, a manager who already agreed to protect that time can make it happen. Without that commitment, the course loses every time.

How Do You Run an SME Interview That Stays on Track?

Run SME interviews that stay on track by preparing specific questions in advance, focusing on what learners need to do rather than everything the SME knows, and keeping sessions to about an hour. SMEs tend to share everything, because everything matters to them. Your job is to steer the conversation toward what the learner actually needs.

A useful approach is to start from behavior. Cathy Moore's action mapping method asks what people need to do on the job and why they aren't doing it, before deciding what information to include. That framing helps SMEs separate "need to know" from "nice to know."

These questions work consistently well:

1. What do new people get wrong most often?
2. What mistake would cost the most if someone made it?
3. Walk me through how you do this task, step by step.
4. What do experienced people know that new people don't?
5. What can a learner look up instead of memorizing?

Record the session (with permission) so you're listening instead of typing. Send a short summary the same day with any open questions, since that summary also becomes a record of what was agreed.

Make Reviews Easy to Do

Make reviews easy by sending small, focused pieces with specific questions instead of an entire course with "please review." A 60-page storyboard dropped in an inbox gets postponed, while a ten-page section with three questions gets completed over lunch.

Several habits consistently accelerate reviews:

• Break big reviews into chunks with their own due dates.
• Highlight what the SME needs to check, like numbers, steps and warnings.
• Tell them what not to review, like visual design or grammar, which your team will handle.
• Offer a 30-minute review call where you walk through it together. Many SMEs prefer talking to typing.
• Send a reminder two days before the due date, not after it.

Thank them specifically and frequently. "Your catch on the pressure limit saved us a re-record" means more than a generic thank-you, and it makes the next review faster.

What Shouldn't You Ask an SME to Do?

Don't ask an SME to do work your team is better at. Every hour they spend on the wrong task is an hour they can't spend on accuracy, which is the one thing only they can provide.

Here are common examples of misplaced SME effort:

• Writing the course. Ask them to explain and review, then let an instructional designer write.
• Proofreading. Grammar and typos belong to your editor or quality assurance (QA) tester.
• Judging visual design. Their opinion is welcome, but the style guide and the designer decide.
• Testing the build for bugs. A broken button is your team's job to find.
• Formatting their source material. Take the slide decks, manuals and notes as they are.

Saying this explicitly at kickoff is a relief for most SMEs, because many assume they'll be judged on the course's polish. When they learn their responsibility is to "make sure it's right," reviews become faster and more focused.

What Should You Do When an SME Goes Quiet?

When an SME goes quiet, act early and escalate in steps, starting with the gentlest option. Waiting and hoping costs you a week every time, so here's an escalation ladder that remains polite:

Keep it factual when you escalate. "The storyboard review is a week late, which moves launch from the 12th to the 19th" is information, not a complaint. Sponsors respond to dates, and they tend to remove obstacles quickly once they see the cost.

Handling Disagreements Between SMEs

When two SMEs disagree, don't pick a side and don't try to blend both answers. Bring the disagreement to the named decision-maker with both positions written out clearly, and ask for a decision by a specific date.

Disagreements often reveal something useful. Two experts may perform the same task differently because the procedure is unclear or varies between sites, and that's worth pointing out. The course might need to teach the official procedure and note a local variation, or the organization might need to fix the procedure first. Either way, it's a decision for the business, not for the instructional designer.

Protect Their Time When the Deadline Gets Tight

When the deadline gets tight, the instinct is to ask SMEs for more, faster, but that usually backfires. Instead, reduce what you ask of them by limiting review scope to content accuracy and combining rounds where possible. Pre-check everything internally so the SME never sees a typo or a broken screen.

This is a big part of rapid eLearning development: the team absorbs the extra work so the scarce expert time goes only where it's truly needed.

Working with SMEs Is a Partnership You Plan For

Working with SMEs goes well when you treat their time as the scarce resource it is. Agree on hours and dates before kickoff, interview for what learners need to do, send small focused reviews, escalate early and politely, and let the decision-maker settle disagreements.

If you're mid-project right now, start with one step: send your SME a short note listing the remaining reviews, their dates and roughly how long each will take. You'll likely find they appreciate the clarity, and you'll learn quickly whether the schedule is realistic.

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