Lsg Handout

Handout
for
Learning
and
Skills
Group


What Would Andrew Do? How to sell senior management on the value of learning. (Cross)

Excerpts The
Metrics
Cycle


There’s no cookie-cutter formula for applying metrics, but there is an underlying process. Generally, you’ll follow these five steps to identify, agree upon, assess, and use metrics. This is not rocket science. It’s the same process you already use to accomplish a lot of things in life. Let’s briefly consider each step.

1. State Desired Outcome. Results do not exist inside the training department. In fact, results do not exist within the business. Results come from outside the business. Imagine a no-nonsense businessperson, say, Andrew Carnegie. If you can explain yourself to Andrew, you’ve mastered this step.

2. Agree How To Measure. The only valid metrics for corporate learning are business metrics. Examples are increased sales, shorter time-to-market, fewer rejects, and lower costs. How do you decide what measures to apply? You don’t: that’s the responsibility of your business sponsor, the person who signs the checks. Together you agree on what’s to be done and how you’ll 1

measure success or failure. Once you’ve settled on the project and its metrics, get it in writing.

3. Execute Project(s). The projects could be training and/or an incentive bonus plan and/or more advertising. Training programs are often part of a larger scheme, and it’s fruitless to try to isolate them. In fact, savvy training directors look for major corporate initiatives they can hitchhike a ride on. Go with the flow, don’t fight it.

4. Assess Results. You must evaluate the impact of your efforts with the measures you set up back in step 2. In other words, you are not allowed to mimic Charlie Brown, who would shoot an arrow and then paint the target around it. Why stick with the measures you came up with before? Because that’s how to maintain credibility with your sponsor. You can bring up unforeseen outcomes or anecdotal evidence, so long as you follow up on those original methods first.

5. Begin Anew. The only thing worse than learning from experience is not learning from experience. Your post-mortem on the completed project should include a section titled “What to do better next time.” This is where you start the cycle anew.

6. All my examples are drawn from business. That is the focus of this particular effort. Many of the same techniques work well in government and education as well, but those are not my areas of expertise.

What
Makes
an
Effective
Executive?
(Drucker)
 · · · · · · · ·

They They They They They They They They

asked, "What needs to be done?" asked, "What is right for the enterprise?" developed action plans. took responsibility for decisions. took responsibility for communicating. were focused on opportunities rather than problems. ran productive meetings. thought and said "we" rather than "I."

Talking
with
Your
Sponsor
 Executives focus on one thing: execution. You need to figure out what your sponsor hopes to execute. You get his or her take on the firm’s near term objectives, to suggest what you plan to do to meet them, and to agree on how success or failure will be measured. This step is not optional. Tell your sponsor you want to understand her business objectives. Be a performance consultant. Act like it’s a different game than the one you usually play. 2



Subtract ten points each time you say learner, learning object, instructional design, blended, program, instructor, content, or asynchronous.



Add ten points each time you say reduce time to market, improve productivity, speed up cycle time, streamline the way we do business, serve customers better, slash costs, improve partner relationships and knowledge, increase market share, etc.



Add ten more points each time you personalize what’s above: reduce our time to market, improve our productivity, speed up our cycle time, etc.

Got it? Your challenge is to find out how your sponsor sees her corporate and unit objectives. You need to know enough to make concrete recommendations.

What’s
in
it
for
me?
 (ASTD/IBM)

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The
players
and
their
needs
 (Cross)

Time
Matters
 While training directors may have different objectives from CEOs, everyone in today’s business world shares one need: they want it all now. Benefits you don’t see for two years are hardly benefits at all. Given enough time, a million monkeys at a million terminals could develop your entire curriculum, complete with Flash animations and a repository of SCORM-compliant objects. Nobody’s got time to wait. The appropriate time metric for most eLearning is time-to-proficiency. How long will it be until your people are performing competently? By competent, I mean able to meet or exceed the expectations of customers, be they internal or external to the organization. Time-to-proficiency depends on a multitude of factors. Before the first learner enters the system comes prep time:

· · · · · ·

Time Time Time Time Time Time

to to to to to to

assess needs and specify solutions hire or train development staff create new lessons or re-purpose existing ones implement technical infrastructure make sure all the parts work together publish, often a combination of print, CD, and web

Then there’s time spent learning.

·

Time to access the lessons 5

· · · ·

Time Time Time Time

in self study in practice for proficiency testing for reinforcement

Timing is perpetually traded off with breadth and cost. A Fortune 100 company can justify investing years to develop its in-house corporate university.

Push
and
Pull
 Organizational learning tends to be mostly push or mostly pull. Push is the sort of learning you encountered in school, where authorities selected the curriculum and lessons were imposed on you. Pull describes the way you learn from Google or discovered how to kiss a lover. With pull learning, you select what you want to learn and how you want to learn it. Pull learning is more cost-effective. It doesn’t require as much in the way of control mechanisms, structure, and outside assistance. Furthermore, lessons learned through pull are more likely to stick because they’re relevant to perceived need, delivered when required, and usually reinforced with immediate application. Pull learning delivers more bang for the buck.

Organizations that increase the ratio of pull to push can lower their overall investment in learning without sacrificing results. Given the greater payback of pull learning, the objective is to achieve greater results while spending less.

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Why am I advocating cutting the overall spend? Because it’s an easier concept to sell. Managers have been skeptical of the value of training for decades. One hopes that the lure of the Holy Grail of achieving more from less is an offer they can’t refuse.

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Evaluating
the
payback
of
Learnscapes


Return
on
Investment
in
Interaction
 (Cross & Husband) The focus in this new world of work is to do what’s important and involve those who know what’s important, why it’s important and what they know (or know how to find out) about a problem or issue. So, to begin measuring increases in productivity and value in a networked social computing environment, we propose the concept of Return on Investment in Interaction (ROII), which we have derived from the principles of Metcalfe’s Law of Networks. Let’s define some core assumptions about ROII : 1.Continuous flows of information are the raw material of an organization’s value creation and overall performance. 2.Information flows are carried by links, alerts, RSS feeds, search engines, aggregation and filtering of content, etc. 3.All leading vendors’ productivity platforms now feature collaborative social networking and computing, 4.These platforms’ architectures facilitate purposeful cross-silo communications and exchange. 8

Social networking pioneer Valdis Krebs has outlined four generic metrics that are becoming widely accepted as leading to observable, tangible, measurable outputs: (Footnote: Krebs, V., “Measuring the value of social computing in social networks”, The Network Weaver blog, June 29,2008) 1. 2. 3. 4.

Increase Increase Increase Increase

in in in in

size of network internal network connectivity connection to valuable 3rd parties number of projects

Dimensions
of
Today’s
Learning
Process
 (Cross, Learnscaping) Business context Core/context Object orientation Bottom-up Customer voice Unpredictable Incessant change Services/intangibles Worldview Emergence Illusion of control Holistic Perpetual beta Everything flows All is connected Process

Network effects Dense interconnections Accelerating cycle time Interdependence Volatility Long tail Ambient findability Signal:noise Knowledge Collective intelligence Socially-constructed Context-bound Breakdown of disciplines Group phenomenon Social intelligence Cognitive breakthroughs

Learning Informal Adaptation Becoming Know-who Drip feed Need-driven Performance support Internet values Connections Openness Transparency Authenticity Interactivity Loosely coupled Interoperability

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Profit
and
Loss
Example
 Imagine that my roadside stand sells $100 worth of lemonade and my total expenses were $20 I spend on lemons, sugar, and paint for my sign. Fill in the blanks: Lemonade Stand Results Profit = ________________ Margin = ________________ Revenue = ________________ Cost = ________________ Cash flow = ________________ Earnings = ________________ Price/earnings ratio = ________________ ROI = ________________

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Industrial-age problems Check any that apply to your organization

Substandard revenue  Sales are declining, customers are postponing decisions  Sales force cannot express benefits of new products  Sellers unaware of industry conditions and competition  Friction in relationships with distributors  Our partners are not well informed  Sales and marketing are on different planets  Arms-length relationships with customers Deficient service  Response time to customers is substandard  After-sales inquiries are bogging down our call centers  800 numbers and phone trees are driving customers away  Service is inconvenient for customers, not 24/7  We don’t learn from our customers  Not building customer loyalty  Customer and prospects are confused, frustrated Inefficiency and bureaucracy  Deluged by internal email  Can’t find the right person in a hurry  People don’t know who knows what  Can’t the right information when you need it  Project coordination is tedious and things fall through the cracks  Re-invent the same documents and processes over and over again  Departments squabble more often than they collaborate  Don’t learn from the people who join us from competitors  Execs can’t get a read of progress or lack thereof  Documentation is dated, versions confuse Unenthusiastic, sluggish staff  Recruiting is harder than ever  Some do the minimum to get by  People are not innovators and don’t keep up  Our know-how is walking out the door due to retirement and turnover  People are glum because of the economy, an industry slump, whatever  Turnover is too high  When good people leave, we never see or hear from them again  No time for experimentation or prototyping Underdeveloped organization  Difficult to collaborate inside the corporate firewall  Difficult to collaborate outside the corporate firewall  People prefer to work solo than on teams  Takes too long for new hires to become productive  Analysis paralysis  “Wait and see” attitude = missed opportunities 11

 Culture clash, as if we are two organizations with different priorities Suboptimal execution  Not everyone is on the same page  Our people don’t know our history, values, culture  Set in our ways, reluctant to change  Not moving fast enough to stay ahead of competitors  Functional silos thwart process improvement  Still acting like two separate organizations long after the merger  Hard to find out where we are as an organization  Teams don’t talk about the trends and force that drive our business  Don’t reflect on the lessons of our successes and failures  Don’t take advantage of our collective intelligence Not learning  We are falling behind  Not prepared for onslaught of digital natives  Training can’t keep pace with the business  Learning systems are outgrowth of classroom  Training administration, creation, and delivery cost too much  Managers hoard information  Not learning fast enough to keep up with the needs of our business

References
 ASTD/IBM Strategic Value of Learning Research Report. 2006. Sugrue, Brenda; O’Driscoll, Tony; and Vona, Mary Kay. Cross, Jay. 2009. What Would Andrew Do? How to sell senior management on the value of organizational learning. Internet Time Press. $19.99 from jaycross.com Cross, Jay. 2009. Working Smarter: Boosting Brainpower for Fun and Profit. $14 on Amazon. Cross, Jay. 2008. Learnscaping: Getting Things Done in Organizations. Internet Time Press. $25 from jaycross.com Cross, Jay and Husband, Jon. Return on Investment in Interaction, Not Your Father’s ROI. Chief Learning Officer magazine. To be pubished July 2009. Drucker, Peter. What Makes an Effective Executive, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 82, No. 6, June 2004.

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