The stakeholders — the managers who are sponsoring this course — must have a chance to agree to the audience, outcomes, scenarios, exercises, and measurements of success. You should be able to present these five items to management in a short report.

The most important reason for getting buy-in from managerial-level stakeholders can be summed up in one word: authority. To compile your training material, you will need the cooperation of subject matter experts. To schedule and physically set up for the course, you will need cooperation from administrators. And to fill the course, you will need cooperation from the students and their managers. As you can see, taking a training course from conception to evaluation requires a lot of cooperation and negotiation. It’s much easier getting cooperation when upper-level sponsors have explicitly expressed support for the items in your plan.