What is front-end analysis?

Front-end analysis, as the name implies, takes place right at the beginning of a project.  It involves a series of analyses:

1. Problem:  is there a problem?  What is it?

2. Needs:  is there a need for training or should some other solution be employed?

3. Audience:  what are the skills, knowledge, and attitudes (SKAs) of the target audience?

4. Job:  what tasks make up the job?  Which are most important? 

5. Task: what does each task entail?

6. Content: what information must I/should I impart?

In education, we’re lucky because some of the front-end analysis is already done for us, so we can simplify or eliminate several steps.  Specifically, unless you’re serving on a curriculum committee, someone somewhere has already decided there’s a problem, and that problem can best be solved by instruction, so there go analyses 1 & 2. 

Also, we sometimes may be able to reduce or eliminate the task analysis step, which leaves us with just three of the six front-end analyses:  Audience analysis, job analysis, and content analysis.