Consequences of distributed training administration

Today many training organizations face the challenge of spending less money and providing more training than ever before, this obviously is to achieve increased training efficiency.

How do learning executives balance spending and results? In a recent study by Training Industry, Inc. and Expertus, half of training executives said that one of their top challenges when it comes to learning measurement is data accuracy and standardization. The effectiveness with which the training money is spent and the efficiency of the training organization is in doubt if this is not resolved.

Organizing the training operations and processes which results in a uniformity in data management is the solution to this.

The biggest enemy of data standardization is distributed training administration, which is notoriously inefficient and inaccurate. That’s because there are multiple people in multiple groups completing the same tasks, but doing it in multiple ways. Various groups within an organization have differences in their processes and procedures, such as registration requirements or course descriptions. Often these process differences are driven by structures or challenges within their skill sets or a lack of bandwidth. The issues that crop up as a result of this can be very costly, both in the short and long term.

For example the process of uploading courses into an LMS. If an organization has various people doing the task, they generally use their own course-naming schemes and their own course descriptions. The result is that it’s difficult for users to find the training they need and managers don’t know what courses to assign to their employees. This acts as a serious obstacle to auto-enrollment and competency management and training utilization stays at a low level.

By centralizing this service, an organization can protect each group or department’s unique needs, while standardizing the important aspects of each of these individual processes and improve resource utilization.

To learn more about this concept and to learn the other 8 ways to eliminate training waste, download the white paper.

If you need advice on how to increase the efficiency of your training organization, feel free to contact me.

Effective training administration

First of all, we can probably all agree that decentralized training administration is inefficient.

It becomes a problem when there are multiple administrators in multiple groups completing the same tasks or transactions, but doing it in multiple ways. Various groups within an organization have differences in their processes and procedures, such as registration needs or course description details. But often these variations are driven by lack of bandwidth or minimal training.

Take as an example the process of uploading courses to an LMS. If an organization has various people doing this, it’s common to see different administrators using different course-naming schemes and course descriptions.

So, centralization of learning support and learning operations management is critical, which goes without saying.

On the flipside, it’s not a good idea to develop inflexible processes that don’t adapt to the needs of your customers, the business units. Be careful about trying to eliminate customized support that they’ve grown accustomed to. Dissatisfaction quickly rises when executives feel their needs and interests are not heard, considered, and acted upon.

Establishing a decentralized approach to customer training support is that business units have enough control over employee learning and can tailor all aspects of learning to the specific needs of their employees.  Long term, you get ever closer to the elusive goal of aligning learning with business objectives.

To learn more about the concept of Centralized Services and Decentralized Processes, download the white paper.

For more information on this topic and the nine ways to trim operational expense, please download the recent webinar or read our white paper, Eliminate Waste and Reap the Rewards: Nine Ways to Trim Operational Expenses to Fund Strategic Learning, both available at http://www.trainingefficiency.com/.

If your organization wants to increase the training efficiency in terms of your learning technology or training processes, contact us.

For more information log on to www.expertus.com

www.trainingefficiency.com

Consolidate & Centralize Your Learning Technologies

When you consolidate and reduce the number of your company’s learning systems, a cumulative positive effect is spread across the entire training organization.

There will be fewer system support requirements, less maintenance, fewer patches, fewer resource requirements, fixes and upgrades. In addition, you’ll need fewer people with technology skill sets, which helps to reduce support costs. The bonus benefit is your reporting will become easier, which will lead to better learning measurements.

In our experience, there are two main challenges to the consolidation and centralization of learning technology:
1. Deciding what to do with legacy data
2. How to meet the functional requirements of varying business units

With regard to legacy data, there are several options. Assuming you have the ability to keep your legacy systems, you can migrate users to new systems and build data integration into your stable legacy systems. Users can still access the data, but you won’t have to go through a big data migration effort, which can be time consuming and expensive.

If you have to go through a data migration effort, which is usually accompanied by a significant amount of data clean up, it makes sense to conduct a data audit and do some systems analysis up front.

The second big challenge is how to meet the functional requirements of various groups across your organization. More and more training departments are leveraging newer technologies and approaches by building LMS functionality OUTSIDE of their LMS, in the form of portals and widgets. This approach allows you to customize to the needs of those diverse business units and significantly improve the user experience.
For more tips, check out our recent webinar recording or read our white paper, Eliminate Waste and Reap the Rewards: Nine Ways to Trim Operational Expenses to Fund Strategic Learning, both available at www.TrainingEfficiency.com.

If your organization is considering an LMS consolidation or if you’re interested in increasing the efficiency of your learning technology infrastructure, contact us.

For more information log on to www.expertus.com

www.trainingefficiency.com