When Your SME Has No Time, the Answer Is More of Your Time Together
One of the most common frustrations I hear from L&D practitioners is the SME who can’t be reached, not because they’re obstructive or uninterested, but because they’re already running at capacity; they’re the person who built the system, deployed the infrastructure, or owns the process, and they’re still maintaining it at full speed while you’re trying to document, train, or onboard around them.
The instinct in this situation is usually to reduce the ask: send shorter emails, use async tools, drop a review link and hope they find ten minutes before your deadline. I’ve tried all of these, and what I’ve found is that they tend to make the problem worse, because you’re asking a busy person to fit your work into the gaps between their actual work, and there rarely are any.
The more effective approach, and I appreciate it sounds counterintuitive, is to book more time, not less.
Why synchronous time works
When someone’s diary is already under pressure, asynchronous tasks are the first casualties. A document waiting for comments, a survey left half-finished, an email thread requiring a considered reply: all of these compete with everything else demanding attention in the moment, and they frequently lose. A blocked hour in the diary is protected from that competition; your SME knows that between 10am and 11am on Thursday, they’re working on this, and everything else waits.
The key then is making sure that protected time is used well, which means arriving with a clear purpose. Depending on where you are in the project, that might mean:
Answering scoping questions: What are we trying to achieve? What do we need people to be able to do? What are the blockers?
Reviewing content or drafts: Walk me through this section; tell me what’s missing, wrong, or unclear.
Structured design activities: Card sorting to sequence content, assumption mapping to surface what we think we know and what we need to verify.
Booking the review into the build
One approach I’ve found particularly useful is to schedule SME reviews directly into the project timeline at the point of planning, rather than arranging them reactively when something is ready. If you know you’ll need a technical review of your alpha e-learning build in week four, book the call in week one. On the day, have your SME work through the module while sharing their screen, commenting live, with you listening, noting, and probing anything that isn’t clear. Record the call.
At the end of an hour, you have your SME review. You haven’t chased anyone. You haven’t sent three reminder emails. And your SME spent one bounded, focused hour rather than five fragmented ones.
This approach may require you to be available at times that suit them rather than you, and that’s a reasonable trade. Processes should be designed around what produces the best outcome in the least time for everyone involved, not around what’s most convenient for the person organising them.
Synchronous time, used well, protects the collaboration that async time leaves to chance.