Run Training Like a Business Operation
By Josh Bersin

To keep up with the pace of change, learning professionals at all levels must continually develop new skills. Operational business managers expect the training group to solve urgent and critical problems. Sales managers depend on you to train sales people on new products and approaches. IT and technology managers clamor for programs that can develop and transfer deep levels of technical skills and leverage subject matter experts. And then there is the steady demand for compliance programs, on-the-job support, onboarding programs, and management and leadership development.

How do you manage such constantly changing and seemingly unlimited requirements and expectations? The answer is not to take tactical approaches, such as expecting your teams to work even harder or the adoption e-learning to save time and money. The real answer is to establish a strategic planning process, coupled with a process for ongoing governance and management. The development of a learning strategy is one of the most important jobs of a learning and development manager.

In Bersin & Associates research on high-impact learning organizations, we asked training managers whether they had written, operational plans for their training organizations. Surprisingly, only 39% had such plans. We then asked them to rate the effectiveness and efficiency of their training operations. Those with written business plans rated themselves almost three times more effective than those which did not have such a plan. Clearly, these findings illustrate the business maxim: If you don’t have a roadmap, you will never know when you arrive at your destination.

STEP1
DEVELOPING A LEARNING STRATEGY:
BUSINESS UNIT LEARNING PLANS

The most important step in the development of a formal learning strategy is to become directly engaged with your line of business customers. In most organizations, there are many such business customers, such as sales, manufacturing, IT, customer service, and even HR. Each business leader must identify the learning needs of his or her unit. Your job is to help them do so by helping them determine the business, product, and customer goals for the next year; their staffing and organizational plans; the critical skills and information needs to accomplish their goals.

Business plans are produced in every manufacturing plant, sales organization, IT department, finance department – in fact, in nearly every operational group in your company. The HR organization has its own plan, too. Today, HR plans typically include goals for leadership development, onboarding, compliance, and competency development. Your company may use a balanced scorecard approach, which makes the planning process very rigorous, or it may use a home-grown approach. During the development of these plans, management must commit to budgets, revenue forecasts, headcount, and capital requirements. The plan may be in a standard template developed by the finance organization. Your job is to insert one more section into these business plans: the learning plan for the business unit. The strategy may be relatively simple.

For instance, it might be to train 30% of agents in product A, 20% in product B, and all your managers on initiatives D and E during 2008. You flesh out this section with information on how these objectives will be met, the estimated budget to accomplish the goals, and measures that will help you demonstrate success.

STEP2
A CONSOLIDATED LEARNING PLAN

The second step in the development of a learning strategy is to aggregate the business learning plans and consider what requirements they make for your team. This is an iterative process.

On first pass, the demands will seem enormous. You will likely not have nearly the resources to implement all plans as initially defined. But don’t despair. Document the collective needs in a single list or spreadsheet. Then analyze your available resources and determine what on this list you can and cannot do.

This step will force you and your customers to prioritize and clarify needs. In most cases, when you provide visibility into the combined corporate learning needs, business leaders will help you prioritize your investments. The goals of this step are to iterate, work with management, and develop an overall annual plan in a form that can be presented and shared with the rest of the organization.

This process will also give you an opportunity to identify projects important to you and the effectiveness of corporate learning but which may have no immediate meaning to business managers.

These could include:
>> Implementing or upgrading the LMS
>> Reorganizing the team
>> Implementing a competency model
>> Implementing a rapid e-learning tool and process
>> Creating a process to internationalize content
>> Implementing a content management system

These initiatives are often capital projects and require investment. You must plan for implementation, forecast costs, and gain executive approval. If you include such projects in your plan, you will educate others of the other responsibilities on your plate.

STEP3
DEVELOP OPERATIONAL GOALS

The third step is to establish monthly or quarterly goals to accomplish all business and learning projects identified in Step 2. These monthly or quarterly goals will help you determine staffing needs and workload requirements. And even more importantly, they identify the operational metrics to capture.
Following are examples of typical goals:

>> Program launch commitments
>> Program budgets
>> Target completion rates and student hour goals
>> Customer satisfaction measures and targets
>> Resource utilization targets (i.e., classrooms, systems)
>> Headcount plans and budgets
>> Target launch dates for strategic projects

If this is your first time developing a learning strategy, many of these goals will be based on guesses. Consequently, some will be achieved and others will not.

But if you hold yourself accountable and measure them regularly, your goal setting will improve and the rest of the organization will start to respect your ability to execute against the plan.

STEP4
ESTABLISH A GOVERNANCE PROCESS

The next step, and one of the most important of all, is to create a process for ongoing communication and governance.

The governance process has three purposes:

>> Establish stakeholders who can easily monitor ongoing projects.
>> Provide senior-level sponsorship.
>> Supply regular and ongoing feedback to help you adapt plan as business priorities change.

If you implement an effective governance structure, you will never again feel under-resourced or taken by surprise. Our research has indicated that a three-level governance model is ideal. At the highest level, you should have an executive steering committee. This group typically includes the VP of HR, business unit executives, and sometimes the CEO. Its mission is to review and fund your annual plan and to meet quarterly or semi-annually to review progress. They should understand your commitments and needs and be fully supportive of your strategy.

At the next level is one or more learning councils. Councils should include line-of-business representatives. The purpose of these councils is to look at program- related issues. Is a specific program on time? Is it no longer needed? Did the problem or audience needs change? These groups may meet monthly or quarterly and they must include decision-making representatives from your customer organizations. The regular meetings will keep your customers informed and up to date on program status, launches, delivery issues, and the ongoing effectiveness of learning programs.

The third component of an effective governance model is a mechanism for internal staff members to meet on a regular basis. The goal of these collaborative meetings is to review schedules, discuss technology and other issues, and share experiences and expertise. The meetings can also identify challenges or problems that should be brought up to the learning councils.

STEP5
DEVELOP A LEARNING ARCHITECTURE AND STANDARDS

The effectiveness of a learning strategy is directly related to a learning architecture and standards. Every training organization is faced with myriad decisions related to tools, program elements, delivery media, LMS usage, workflow — and much, much more.

Such decisions cannot be left to individual managers or business units. You must take the time to determine internal standards.

Such an architecture will help you address these and other questions in a consistent way for all of your customers. Will you use Webcasting for all short, on-demand information broadcasts? Will you use application simulations for all technical training? When will you use job aids, printed materials or Web-page support? Will you create workbooks for all instructor led materials? Will you use a standard end-of-course assessment for online and instructor-led programs?

By creating such internal standards, you will increase your training organization’s efficiency and your customers will have much clearer expectations. The more clearly you define standards for tools, methodologies, and approaches, the clearer your customers’ expectations. And the more focus you put on developing standards and standardized processes for all aspects of training, the easier it will be to plan and communicate your results.

MAKING THE TOUGH DECISIONS ON WHAT NOT TO DO

Finally, let us make one final point. In order for your strategy to succeed, you will often need to ruthlessly prioritize investments. Many times a favorite or special program cannot be funded because a more urgent need has arisen. How do you deal with and justify such decisions?

The training investment model can be of tremendous value (right).
This model forces you to place all training programs into four quadrants. By organizing training programs into these categories — strategic or operational, custom or off-the-shelf — you can quickly see where you’re spending learning budget. Ideally, you should be investing 40% of your total training resources into those programs that are in the upper right-hand quadrant – strategic and custom. If this is not the case, you may want to rethink priorities and investments.

Use of this model will help your customers and learning councils make better decisions about the use of learning investments and strengthen the prioritization process. The model is also valuable in determining what training could be delegated or outsourced and what can be composed of off-the-shelf courseware and other e-learning resources.

BOTTOM LINE: LEARNING STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION GO TOGETHER

In the end, no training organization ever has quite enough time, money, or staff to meet all demands. But if you plan well and stay aligned with business needs, you can focus your energy toward the few training programs that drive the highest levels of value. Once your plans are established, it is then far easier to monitor and measure your implementation success – because you have clear goals to achieve and your customers have equally clear expectations.

Reprinted from eLearning Magazine

Josh Bersin is principal of Bersin & Associates, a learning and performance development research consultancy. To secure research referenced in this article, please visit: www.bersin.com