You have just finished your selection process and you finally have buy-in from all your key stakeholders on the right Learning Management System (LMS) for your company. The ink is drying on the contract and you are faced with the daunting question, “Now What?” Whether this is your company’s first LMS or you are seasoned pros converting from a legacy system, the implementation process for your new LMS should be an exciting time for your company. This article is intended to share several lessons that we have learned over the past decade to ensure your implementation is as smooth and successful as possible. By following these steps, you will position your company for a quick realization of the many benefits you can obtain from your LMS investment.
Beyond the Gantt Chart!
As Managers we know that with major initiatives someone on the team creates a project plan in the early days of the effort. Unfortunately, many companies treat the project plan like any other item on the to-do list. “Check, project plan is finished. Now it is time to move on to the next item.” This way of thinking will certainly lead to challenges in achieving the business objectives set forth when your company decided to invest in an LMS. To make sure you really benefit from your planning efforts, make sure the following are covered:
- Define SMART Business Objectives – In order to have a good plan, you need to understand what you are ultimately trying to accomplish. This needs to go beyond, “we need to have the LMS fully deployed by December 31st.” Ensure your organization defines the critical SMART (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely) goals in order to ensure your activities are focused to achieving those goals. As with any business objective, focus on the critical few. If you define 100 SMART goals, your team will get too distracted. Focus on the 5-8 that will make the biggest impact on your company. After the implementation is finished, you will be able to measure your ROI using your SMART goals (i.e., Did we reduce training cost per hour from $X to $Y as we had projected?).
- Buy-in to the plan – Before finalizing the plan, make sure you have covered all the team members who will be involved in the project. Did you have an open planning process where they could build schedule conflicts and resources constraints into the plan? Were your key team members given a chance to define the tasks they saw as necessary to complete the project or did you work with a generic IT project plan where they were coerced into agreeing to the steps and timeframe?
- Expect the unexpected – You have the best team ever assembled in the history of LMS implementations. You are implementing the best technology ever programmed by mankind. The stars are aligned and it is a leap year. Unfortunately, you will still have challenges. Define how you are going to track and escalate issues as they arise. Once the easy part of solving the issue is done, you have the real challenge, getting it documented in a way that everyone on the team understands the decision and you do not revisit the same issue five more times. There are thousands of methodologies for issue management. Use the one that is familiar to your organization rather than introducing something new from your LMS provider.
Communication is Key
We talk about how important communication is but very few people have an appreciation of how difficult it is to communicate well. With an LMS implementation, you likely will have 5-10 different stakeholder groups who will need to be informed of the project (executive sponsors, core project team, instructional designers, managers, employees, external service providers (LMS vendor), etc.). Each of these stakeholder groups will need to know different levels of information and on a different timeline. Your core project team will likely need daily updates at a detailed level where your end users may only need 2-3 updates closer to the end of the project. We advise all of our clients to build a simple communication plan. Define the following information in that plan:
1) Who are the stakeholder groups?
2) What information do they need?
3) How do they best receive information (the best medium for your executive sponsors is likely very different than with your external service providers)?
4) When should it be communicated (what is the best frequency and timing of messages)?
When you are crafting your communications, please remember the old adage that everyone’s favorite radio station is WIIFM (What’s in it for me). Understand your audience’s perspective and articulate a message that explains the benefit of this initiative to them personally.
How Scope Creep Doomed the Project
Nothing can get your project off track faster than unmanaged expectations. It will lead to scope creep, missed deadlines, and an over budget project. Your team needs to understand that your organization has purchased a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) application from a software vendor that is motivated to make their application appeal to as many different organizations/industries as possible. The advantage of COTS software is the lower price point and quicker implementation. The disadvantage is that it will not have every piece of functionality you are looking for and the lexicon of the software is likely going to be different than your organization’s lexicon. Resist the temptation to pay your LMS vendor to customize their software. It will not only hurt you in the short term with extra costs and delays, but it will dramatically impact you long term as you try to get support or want to upgrade to a new version of your software. The 80/20 rule applies to LMS applications like just about everything in life. Twenty percent of the functionality of an LMS is going to represent eighty percent of your use of the software. Focus on the twenty percent and when exceptions arise that lead you down the path of customization, remember they are exceptions and stay away from that slippery slope.
Begin Knowledge Transfer on Day One
We have seen many LMS implementations fail to fulfill the promised results because the company did not realize how to take advantage of what they have. If you are working with a software vendor whose approach is to do all of the setup behind the scenes and then train you on the application two days before you go live, you are working with the wrong software vendor. Make sure you get access to a sandbox or demo environment as early in the process as possible. Preferably, your team will also be able to get an orientation to that environment from the software vendor along with user guides and training documentation. This is not meant to be comprehensive training but just enough direction so that your team can be comfortable logging into the sandbox environment to be able to test configuration changes and see how they impact the end user experience. Starting the knowledge transfer in this fashion accomplishes two main objectives. First, it provides your team with the information they need to make sure they are setting up the environment to best meet your needs. Second, it de-mystifies the go-live date. Your team members will have had access to a test environment for weeks/months prior to launch and will be very comfortable with what the software can and cannot do. This eliminates any anxiety with the launch and helps your company realize accelerated benefits from the application. One final consideration for the knowledge transfer process. You need to ensure your project team includes the right team members from day one of the implementation. If you wait until late in the process to involve key resources because they are busy with other initiatives, be prepared to have all the decisions revisited as they come up to speed on the software and your configuration.
There is no “I” in LMS Team
Another common pitfall with LMS implementation like other technology initiatives is that they become owned by a single department. Whether HR, IT, Operations or another department initiated the project, the effort should be cross functional if it will be successful. IT will need to be involved early so that can assist with data conversion, interfaces, single sign-on, PC images, security, and any other area where IT support would be required. Marketing may need to be involved from a branding perspective especially if you will have clients or external parties accessing the application. Your training team may come from any number of departments depending on how you are structured and who owns the different training areas (sales, compliance, product, service, policies, etc.). The sooner that your departments are collaborating, the faster you will start to make meaningful progress on your implementation.
Closing
If you follow the guidance above, your project will be set up for success. There are a few other items which you can look at as the icing on the cake. These may or may not apply to your organization depending on your size and if you are replacing an existing LMS or implementing an LMS for the first time. Nonetheless, they are worth noting because they will impact many companies.
- Data Conversion (Less is More) – Saying that you need all history converted is an easy trap to fall into. When you are looking at historical data, be as selective as possible for what is needed and how far back you need to go. Investigate whether legacy systems can be retained at a nominal cost to allow for historic inquiry versus incurring a potential significant cost and effort to convert to your new system. Look for areas where a manual conversion is more efficient than a programmatic conversion. A few hundred admin user records will probably take less time to manually key than to engage IT and vendor resources to programmatically convert.
- How do we handle user questions – If your organization has a sizeable user base, it is very likely that you have a help desk/support center. Before you start the implementation process, you will need to make a decision on whether your support center will handle Level 1 type inquires from your end users (forgot password, how do I, course not playing correctly, etc.). If they will provide support, you need to consider how the transition from your core project team to the support center will happen. We usually recommend that the core project team take the lead on support for the first month or so of use. During this time the support center can be trained and FAQs can be developed based on the questions coming from the end users.
- Are all Browsers Created Equal? – The short answer is no. You will need to understand what the typical internet browser and PC configuration will be for your users. Some browsers do not support active scripting (which can be used by web applications) and others do not support Flash which is common in eLearning courses. Understand your user base and make sure you use a PC/Browser configuration which will represent the majority of your users for your testing.
Hopefully, this article will make your LMS implementation a more enjoyable experience and allow you to achieve all of the benefits an LMS application has to offer. If you would like more information on this topic or wish to discuss the benefits the eSSential LMS from eLogic has to offer, please give us a call.