Many times, when organizations set out to find a learning management system (LMS) or a learning experience system (LXP), the decision-makers start by trying to figure out what these systems can do for them. They read about the different features and look at top ten lists. They imagine how much easier it will be to offer training to their employees.
Sure, it’s nice to imagine the wonderful impact that this new system will have on the company. They take on this project feeling optimistic and then go deeper and deeper into learning about these companies – making appointments to see demos of these systems, listening to the salespeople explain why their product is the best in the market.
Soon it starts to become overwhelming and more difficult to differentiate amongst the product choices. So this system can do X? But would we prefer that it did Y like that demo we saw yesterday?
Then to add another layer of complexity to the decision process, costs are discussed and evaluated against the budget.
As the stakeholders come closer to making up their minds, they realize they need to include a few more people who will also be highly affected by this change and talk to them before they finalize anything. Those new stakeholders bring up features that are important based on their roles or they voice objections to the new system.
If this all sounds like a gigantic headache, that’s because it is. And these are just the problems that can occur while choosing a system. Now imagine what comes next – the process of implementing the new learning system while also preparing the organization leaders and employees for the change.
Although I’ve never seen a perfectly seamless decision-making process and implementation, there are ways to make the process a lot easier and mitigate many problems. And the time to do that is at the beginning before even looking at a learning management system or watching a demo.
You may be wondering how that’s even possible. Think of it this way. Before launching a product, a company goes through much research and planning. Who’s the target audience? Does it align with our company mission and goals? How much will it cost us? What will we charge? How will we measure results?
When you’re in the market for a new system, you need to go through a similar planning process. One of the first questions you need to ask isn’t “What can this LMS do?” It is “What are the company goals that we hope to be able to achieve with a new system?”
Assemble a team of stakeholders from different departments and start by having them each state their team goals and obstacles. As counter-intuitive as it might seem, you don’t want to start by asking them what they want to see from the technology. You want to start by getting the picture of what success looks like for that particular department because training should never be done in a vacuum. The training objectives should be aligned to the company’s objective. If they’re not, then it’s pretty safe to assume that even the most sophisticated learning software in the world isn’t going to help. Think of the new learning system as a tool to facilitate progress toward company goals.
Even though it might seem like more work to do it this way, it will save a lot of time, money, and headaches in the future.