by Brian Clark | learning management systems, LMS, on-boarding, Productivity, succession planning, talent retention
A step by step guide to choosing the best LMS for your needs
How many times have you walked into a store with something specific in mind only to get home and realize that you blew your budget and now are the proud owner of 10 items that you didnt need? Over the years, various LMS systems have tried to be all things to all people; the more bells and whistles the better. With all these added features, choosing your LMS can be overwhelming and confusing which can lead to the above example.
According to a survey conducted by The eLearning Guild, nearly one-third of respondents said they were not satisfied with the LMS product they were using. There could be a variety of reasons for this but one thing is for certain, in order for a successful outcome to happen, a company must know what is most important to them and make sure the LMS performs those requirements well.
This short guide will help clarify how to choose the best learning management system software and avoid the exhaustive and costly mistake of selecting an LMS that is poorly matched to your company needs.
The Wrong LMS Wastes Time and Money
The investment of time and money that organizations make in learning management systems is significant and lets face it, nobody likes to lose time or money.
With over 600+ LMSs on the market, it can be quite daunting to choose the right LMS let alone face the consequences that can set you back months or even years in missed learning opportunities.
Having a well thought out plan ahead of time when considering an LMS is a sure way to avoid buyers remorse. It also is a great way to position yourself for optimal success when choosing a learning management system software.
Choosing the Right LMS
In 2004, American psychologist Barry Schwartz published a book called The Paradox of Choice Why More is Less. It argued that by eliminating the amount of consumer choices will greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers. The following guidelines will set a path for success by eliminating the LMS playing field from 600 to 1. The LMS that best fits your needs and goals.
Preparation
One of the most important parts of the entire LMS selection process is in preparation. This is the time to really focus on the details.
- Choosing an LMS is not a one person job. Its important to create a team made up of a variety of departments in your company. These folks will be using the LMS in different ways and their feedback is critical. The features an information technology person deem important may be quite different then the HR perspective, right?
- Do you have a leader? This person needs to drive the team, an LMS champion. They should be well versed in your company s learning needs, has the backing of management and controls the budget. They should also be able to bridge the various needs of the LMS team and come to a consensus.
- Who will be using the LMS? Its important to define your customers and the ways in which theyll be utilizing the LMS. Come up with a variety of scenarios or initiatives with the customers in mind. Map out exactly what needs to be done and what tools are needed to implement the initiative. One example would be onboarding. If you know that in the next year that your company will be hiring a lot more staff and/or expect changes in user information, it will be particularly useful to have real-time integration features with your selected LMS.
- Make a priority list. Your team of decision makers will be a big help in narrowing down the list. Think about what your company goals are as well as some big projects coming up. Tough decisions will need to be made as needs will not be the same across the organization.
Requirements
Once a priority list has been drafted, it should be fairly easy to translate that into requirements. One of the biggest traps when shopping for an LMS is asking for every feature that is available that may or may not be needed. Follow your list of priorities to stay focused and on task. An easy way to do this is with the 80/20 rule take care of 80 percent of your needs then see how successfully you can fulfill the rest of the 20 percent. Make everything not on your list of priorities to nice to have.
Vet available Learning Management Systems
At this point, you have slowly narrowed your priority list down to only the most important features along with some nice to haves. Now, the next step is to narrow your choices of LMS providers. Your list of top 10 requirements will rule out non qualifying products. For instance, if you would like an LMS that will leverage your investment in SharePoint, then this would be a good vetting criterion. There are many different pricing ranges for products. Ballpark licensing costs are another good vetting criteria.
Product Evaluation
- Request for information. An RFI contains a list of all your requirements with a few questions per requirement for vendors to answer. Evaluate the vendor responses with a scorecard that allows scorers to rate how well the vendor meets each requirement on a 5-point scale. After scoring the responses to the RFI, you can rule out some of the lower-scoring vendors and continue evaluating the top contenders.
- In use demonstrations. Invite each of the top contenders to visit your organization for a half day to demonstrate their product. A good approach is to give them all the same use case ahead of time so you can compare them equally. Again, you can use a scorecard to evaluate the vendor demonstration and rule out those vendors whose products did not perform well.
- Trial version. As you continue to evaluate the finalists, you may ask for a trial version of the LMS software where you can explore the finalist products. Hands-on exploration will give you a better sense of the user-interface design, features and capabilities of the product.
LMS Selection 
The final step is to select an LMS. Send a Request for Proposal (RFP) to each of your finalists asking for pricing quotes, implementation timeframes and support options. If you followed the above guidelines, you should feel very confident in your choice of learning management system software.
Leverage the Benefits of Your LMS
You should take the opportunity during your LMS implementation project to review your current business workflows and amend them as desired. You want to gain productivity and automation with your LMS and not be messing around with your LMS to get it do the things you need. There are so many benefits you will gain with an LMS, among these are:
- More engaged workforce with self serve learning and development.
- Reduced training costs.
- Track and report easily to manage compliance and regulatory requirements.
- Engage with new hires and offer consistent high quality on-boarding.
- Use the LMS for resource planning, succession planning and skills gap analysis.
In today s business environment, an LMS is the backbone for training and development and continues to gain in popularity. One of the biggest advantages of an LMS is efficiency. In fact, many companies report a 50-70% cost savings just by switching from instructor-based training to eLearning. Your LMS should be able to manage online, instructor led and blended learning delivery to gain efficiencies in all learning modalities.
by Brian Clark | e-learning, learning management systems, LMS
We are very fortunate to welcome some great new clients to our community. As we commence these implementation projects we have been engaged in conversations about how best our new clients can develop a communications strategy to ensure a successful ‘go-live.’ I have captured a few of the tips in the following bullet points. You will notice the process is virtually identical to a branding initiative.
- Develop strong awareness and a reputation before the LMS reaches the ‘go-live’ stage.
- Build loyalty in your organisation by establishing a great name for the LMS environment and focusing on the benefits that will flow to all persons in the organisation willing to use the LMS.
- Get to know your audience[s] for the LMS. You may be rolling out to only a pilot group or your entire enterprise. In either case you should research your audience demographic profile to help you understand their expectations and preferences. When you understand your audience you are better able to cater for diversity.
- Adapt and configure the LMS to suit your audiences. You might be able to segment the user population to cater for the diversity of users. Learning and other content can be designed to meet the needs of different audiences and avoid the bland one-size-fits all style that plagues many learning environments.
- If you don’t know then ask your people. Get out and meet with different types of people in different parts of your organisation. You can set up webinars or short face to face meetings to gain a better understanding of your audiences. You will also be doing a great job at establishing awareness and loyalty to the LMS project.
- Keep the messaging consistent in all of your communications. If the system will have only limited accessibility or content then make sure you communicate this. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is sending mixed messages. For example, some people will become very enthusiastic about online learning and other capabilities of the LMS. If the system is only going to be used to store competency profiles, there will be discontent.
- Make sure the user experience is consistent with the expectations of the audience. If there is going to be a staged roll-out of certain features make sure you communicate this up front. First impressions count. Consider using different learning environments for different audiences.
- Use the power of association to foster greater interest in the LMS. For example you may include content from the organisation’s leadership team. Engage thought leaders both inside and outside your organisation to contribute content.
- Use familiar domain names for your LMS. Using familiar domain names ensures the LMS is seen as part of your IT systems architecture and not simply a bit of software ‘we have for the fun of it.’
- Promote using your organisation’s social and collaboration tools and events. In these days of enterprise social platforms and knowledge portals, signs and posters around the workplace are still effective. Keeping a blog about the LMS roll-out is another great way to engage your audience. Use whatever you have and keep it updated and fresh to instil the importance of this project in all your people.
by Brian Clark | learning management systems, LMS, Performance, performance management, strategy
The process outlined here represents a project undertaken by a client to improve its management of development and performance. There are limited resources available outside the budget allocated to a learning and performance software platform and existing team members in human resources and learning & development. The organisation has approximately 2,500 employees.
The goals for this project were identified and quantified prior to being presented to the executive leadership team. Most of these goals had been on the radar for some time and were worked on but never completed as part of a formal project plan.
Goals-
- establish a centralised information source for performance and competency management.
- consolidate and standardise job titles across the organisation and map to remuneration packages.
- standardise competency frameworks mapped to job titles and business units.
- enable employees and managers to capture ideas and observations between reviews.
- provide the tools for employees to conduct self and 360 assessments.
This list of goals is ambitious. As you can see they are all integrated and interdependent. The core of the whole process outside of the software implementation has been the standardisation of competency frameworks. These competency frameworks are the hub for the performance management and job title consolidation.
The software solution comprises a learning management system that includes competency management, job titles, assessment tools and performance management. The LMS has been integrated with the payroll system and the HRIS. The HRIS has become the single point of truth for management reporting upstream. The LMS is the point of truth used by the learning and development team.
The change management program included a pilot launch of the software initially to a group of approximately 200 users. The pilot was run in parallel with the larger implementation of the job title consolidation, performance assessments and competency frameworks. The pilot program was 6 months and the system went live just after six months from commencement.
These are some of the benefits that were identified and measured one year after ‘go-live.’
- surveys indicate employees are more certain of their goals and how they align with the organisation’s big picture strategy.
- the HR and L&D teams are able to generate meaningful reports to assist senior leadership in planning.
- performance assessment meetings are occurring and followed up.
- productivity has been increased with automation of processes and notifications.
If you would like to learn more about this project and the processes that were used to achieve successful outcomes, please get in touch using the form on this website or contact our office directly.
by Brian Clark | capability, competency frameworks, DOTS LMS, learning and development, learning management systems
This is a guest post by Cindy Pascale, CEO of Vado Inc.
As a teenager, my first job was working at a Dairy Queen making ice cream cones, sundaes and shakes. On my first day, my manager showed me how to make the famous DQ swirl that sits on top of all DQ cones. First, he showed me how to make a cone identifying all the minor movements that need to be made to create the perfect ice cream cone. Then he handed the controls to me. The first few were sloppy and lopsided. He told me to keep practicing and practicing until I got it. And I did. Within a short while, I was able to create the signature swirl.
Without giving it a name, my manager had me develop my skills to create the perfect DQ swirl by practicing and developing my skills on the job.
Most learning and development professionals can quickly recite these statistics “70% of development happens on the job; 20% through coaching and mentoring; and the final 10% through formal learning.” So this leads to the question, what are companies doing to develop their employees on the job?
Job skills are pretty easy to develop on the job. For instance, managers, technical trainers and front line leaders show employees how to run a piece of equipment. They then have their employees practice until they can run the equipment at the required level of productivity and quality requirements. Yet, in a recent study from the Towards Maturity Benchmark Study 2012 – 2013, they found that while 94% of learning and development leaders seek to speed up the application of learning back into the workplace, only 23% believe they achieve this.”
It is much harder, though, to develop employees’ soft skills through on the job application. That is why training and development leaders turn to Vado. Vado is the only off the shelf e-learning courseware that provides a step by step Implementation Guide to help the learner apply skills on the job to develop their behavior based competencies. The Implementation Guide helps the learner make the transition from the formal learning environment (the e-learning course), to application, by walking the learner through each step of the process to develop on the job and leverage the natural way a person develops.
Companies win because instead of having employees sit in an e-learning course for long periods of time, over 95% of the development time of Vado’s courses is the application on the job. The results are accomplishing two goals at one time: development while doing work that needs to be done.
You can get more information on the large range of modules available here. Request a full catalog of modules and a 3 month pilot by contacting us here.
by Brian Clark | competency frameworks, DOTS LMS, Innovation, learning management systems, LMS
The LMS is not often thought of as a platform directly supporting or driving innovation but it should be. There may be differences in how your LMS may support innovation based on what features it has, however I will offer some generic ideas that should be applicable to most LMS software.
- Set up a course catalog specifically for innovation content. There is plenty of off-the-shelf courseware on innovation but I encourage you to consider creating some ‘home-grown’ modules that align with your business specifically.
- Create a competency framework for innovation. You may wish to start with specific user populations but this framework can be extended throughout your organisation. Remember you may have different tiers to the competencies to ensure they are relevant to the person’s position and strategy horizon.
- Include the innovation competency framework[s] in the performance management process. When your competency frameworks are integrated with courseware and development planning this becomes a powerful tool to encourage innovation in your culture.
- Set up groups of users that are ‘outside’ the normal organisational structure. This works very well to encourage communities of practice and thought leaders. Ideally the groups will have content authoring permissions as well as other collaborative tools such as a wiki, discussion forum and blog. These can be external tools accessible via links in the LMS interface.
- If you have established some innovation processes using other platforms that capture ideas and include polling and commentary, link the platform to the LMS. I have seen specific software as well as more common tools such as Microsoft SharePoint and Citrix Podio. Most of these are very easy to link to and if you add access via the LMS interface you will have a learning support system operating in real time.
- Select some reports to measure innovation focused learning and collaboration in your LMS. You should measure the enrolments in your innovation courses, assessment results [if you use assessments], identify users with high and low participation, competency gap analysis based on the innovation frameworks, and others depending upon your system and your innovation objectives.
Innovation occurs in all parts of an organisation and all tiers of positions and job titles. When you introduce learning support for innovation you will go a long way toward breaking through the misconception that innovation is some ‘activity’ undertaken only by senior positions or positions focused on product development, marketing and so forth.
Please get in touch if you would like some more information on innovation and learning. I am also interested in hearing from persons who have integrated an LMS or other platform to support innovation.
