Velocity Made Good » Leveraging Learning

Ode to SaaS Training

Beth Chmielowski — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:31:31 +0000

As the summer sun starts to fade, blogs give way to iambic pentameter, and serious themes bow to whimsy... (With sincere apologies to The Bard.)

Shall I compare thee to a new release?
Thou art more fickle and more volatile
Rough launch doth shake the chances to increase
Renewals and subscriptions for a while.

Sometime too fast the features do update
And oft’ its relevance too soon doth stale
And obsolescence looms as training’s fate
Lest tips and updates users do regale;

But thy eternal function shall not fade
Nor lose possession of discrete design
Nor shall whole new courseware need be made
When business model and training do align.

So long as learning portals are available
So long can user learning be attainable.

The 4 Cs of Extended Enterprise Learning and Performance

John Hathaway — Tue, 25 May 2010 22:15:58 +0000

At VMG we spend a lot of time thinking about what drives enterprise learning and performance. Although each of our clients and partners has unique problems to solve, each solution we create contains some mix of the following four elements:

Let’s look at each of these, starting at the bottom.

Control

Corporate training has long been about control: You must complete this course. You must pass this certification. No, you may not see that particular content. We will track your activities to document our compliance.

In the extended enterprise, since you do not control the paychecks of your audience, you also have inherently less control of their activities. While control is still important in extended enterprise learning, it plays a smaller role and involves a lot more carrots and a lot less sticks.

Content

Corporate training has also been long concerned with content, traditionally in the form of courses, but more and more incorporating a much wider set of content types: blogs, microblogs, wikis, videos, games, etc. But even as the types of content have expanded, the sources of content have remained largely internal employees, big publishers, or a small number of vetted experts.

In the extended enterprise the source of content widens considerably to include partners and customers who can often be more expert than your own employees, particularly around niche topics.

Also, where the corporate world has minimal tolerance of “content for content’s sake”, the extended enterprise has none at all. Content only has value in terms of what it lets me accomplish. Now.

Collaboration

Marketing folks may want to build communities so that people feel good about their products, but here we’re talking about tools that let people collaborate to solve real productivity problems.

Collaboration is certainly a hot topic throughout the corporate learning world, but in the extended enterprise (where you have employees, partners, and customers all talking with one another) the complexity around managing access and authority grows exponentially.

Context

Providing context for the learner has become the most important element in a growing majority of learning and performance initiatives. Unfortunately, it’s also the one at which learning professionals usually do the worst job. I see examples every day of companies with LMSs and portals overflowing with content and learners who have no idea where to start.

In the internal corporate training world we approach this problem by doing things like aligning content to job roles and competency models. Maybe this is a good place to start when we control those job roles and hire to those competencies, but this gets shaky in the partner world and totally breaks down when we’re talking about customers.

Taxonomies, user generated tags, ratings, reviews, personalized recommendations: all of these things help, but few of these features appear in the systems currently used to manage learning. (Or, if they appear, it’s often in a bolted-on, check-the-box kind of implementation rather than truly integrated throughout the system.)

Providing this element of context needs to be a major focus for innovation in the learning and performance improvement world. There are some early consumer-focused Web 3.0 products that are starting to point the way. I’m pretty excited by how we can take those ideas and apply them to learning.

Cloud/SaaS Knowledge Ecosystem: The Players

John Hathaway — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:02:08 +0000

I’ve spent the past couple of days with some of the VMG team brainstorming about the opportunities we see in the Cloud/SasS market and how we want to approach them. One of the first things we did was to map out what that ecosystem looks like and how the knowledge flows between the different types of entities. Here’s a simplified view of that map:

In this post I’ll just give an intro to the types of players (the circles). Note that these categories represent roles as opposed to company types. Some companies will only fit one of these roles, but in this fast-moving, emerging space many companies play multiple roles. (I’ll tackle the flow of knowledge (the arrows) in a later post.)

Cloud Infrastructure Providers

Furthest upstream are the infrastructure and platform providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google, Salesforce.com’s Force.com and upcoming VMforce platforms as well as several smaller Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) companies.

IaaS companies provide raw computing power, storage, and network bandwidth available in the shared public cloud or as a “private cloud”. PaaS companies build on that to provide software development platforms (e.g. Force.com) and ready-to-go building blocks of functionality (e.g. Amazon Payments) that make it easy to build SaaS applications.

SaaS Application Providers

Where IaaS and PaaS is all about the building blocks, Software as a Service (SaaS) providers deliver the complete applications that let corporate and consumer customers do real work (or play in some cases).

There are some big players that everyone knows, like Salesforce.com in CRM or Google Apps (and now Microsoft) providing office productivity tools. But there are also hundreds of smaller providers creating more focused applications for a particular niche. For example, our client Spigit provides collaboration tools to help companies manage innovation and our client Convio helps non-profits to manage their fundraising efforts.

Sales and Implementation Partners

The Cloud/SaaS world is VERY big on partnering. These are companies that are founded on the concept of focusing on a small set of core competencies and getting others to fill in the gaps.

At the top end, Google Apps is selling implementations of 50,000 users, but providing no implementation services. That’s right: none. They stay focused on their core competency of building the Google Apps to be the best it can be and rely 100% on partners to provide the services around that platform.

At the low end, even small $10 million per year SaaS companies rely heavily on partners, both for capacity and competency. On the capacity side many of these companies are growing very rapidly (and often irregularly) and partners can help increase capacity and even out the bumps.

Training is a great example on the competency-driven side. SaaS companies know that they need to train their customers, but realize that they don’t have much expertise in how to do so. They don’t have a training department and explicitly don’t want one. (Our partner Appirio regularly talks about never owning a server. Why would they want to own a training department??) They’re thrilled to partner with us and leverage our core competency.
They’re thrilled to partner with us and just have the problem go away.

End Customers

Finally there are the end customers using the SaaS applications. (Actually that’s not always final, since in some cases the application facilitates interaction between the customer and their customers.)

I’ll save diving into the needs of these folks for another post, but as a preview will just point out that there’s a lot of arrows coming into that circle.

The Secrets of SaaS Training: Monetization

Beth Chmielowski — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:07:15 +0000

This is the third entry in a three part series on The Secrets of SaaS Training. The first two parts addressed designing SaaS training, and delivering SaaS training.

Monetizing SaaS training

Many SaaS companies don’t even think in terms of monetizing customer training. They are product companies that typically have little to no interest in being in the services business, beyond what is minimally required to get customers up and running. Training then, even more than at traditional software companies, is an afterthought, often seen as a cost of doing business: customers buying products need to know how to use them, so training, in some form, must be delivered. This often equates to a high-end implementation consultant spending an extra day or two onsite “training” users or doing an informal train-the-trainer session (typically with a client administrator), and then leaving the customer to sink or swim on their own. This is sub-optimal not just for customers, but for the SaaS company as well. SaaS companies don’t like tying up their product experts in this way when they could instead have them off implementing at other customer sites. However, most young, high-growth SaaS companies don’t have dedicated training personnel, so options are limited. Yet, in an industry where clients vote with their dollars on a monthly basis, this kind of scattershot approach to training can put product revenue at risk. No product company can afford for their software to be shelf-ware, and SaaS companies essentially have one-twelfth of the time to drive adoption as traditional software vendors.

So the first key to monetizing SaaS training is simply realizing that, done well, customer training is in actuality a unique opportunity to drive adoption, customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, subscription renewals. This is a good start, but not enough. Moving training from being a cost of doing business to being an important cost of doing business offers a reason for a more thoughtful approach, but not the means. What’s really needed is a way to move beyond cost of business and into line of business – and the SaaS market and business model is perfect for doing exactly that.

Defining the revenue model

When training is sold, it is most often sold as a cost per class, either on a participant basis or at a group rate. This is booked as services revenue, which typically isn’t recognized until the services are complete. That is, until after the total number of people who have been contracted to be trained, have been trained. Instead, SaaS training should be sold as a subscription, at an incremental cost per user added to the product licensing costs. In this way, it becomes a ratable, annuity based revenue stream. Let’s take a look at how this would work.

Structuring a subscription training offering

When selling training as a subscription offering, you first need to identify what is included in the subscription. If following best practices for SaaS training design and delivery outlined in my earlier posts, this would be a blended offering that would likely include:

Instructor led training (ILT): Specify the number of ILT hours to be provided by user type (end user, admin, etc.) This could be delivered as either in person training or webinars. Alternately, specify the exact classes that would be included.
Portal access: Describe what this includes. Access to a baseline portal should be included in all subscriptions. There may be upsell opportunities for additional content, aligned to the way product functionality is sold and delivered. (That is, if the product offers a snap-in module with extra capabilities that is sold separately, the portal should also be designed and priced to snap in relevant content when implemented.)
“Office hours”: Define how many scheduled but agenda-less webinars will be provide on a per month or per quarter basis where people can drop in and ask any questions they want of an expert resource. This can be structured as dedicated to the client, or as “open enrollment” where multiple clients can participate, if interested.
Update training: Specify both how often additional content will be delivered and how it will be delivered. You might just roll it into the portal by assuring content is kept fresh and relevant, or you may offer monthly or quarterly webinars on functionality deltas. The latter can also be offered as either dedicated or “open enrollment.”

As you think through what all to include in a training subscription, realize that you can structure and price this as a tiered offering as well:

Baseline: All content provided will be built using a generic configuration and implementation of the application.
Mid-tier: Baseline, generic materials will be redone using the client configuration and implementation. (The training design and content remains the same, but the materials are recreated using the client’s build. If following SaaS design best practices, this would primarily impact the “how to” demos.)
Premium: Includes everything offered at the mid tier, plus additional custom built materials, defined as needed.

Finally, graduated, volume discounts should apply, just as it would for product subscription rates. Anything different or extra (such as completely changing the design or approach to training) should be sold as custom work for hire, scoped as you would any other training development and delivery offering.

Optimizing operations for cost savings

Once you know how to offer and sell training as a line of business, you need to think about how you want to staff for it. As discussed above, most SaaS companies want to excel in the product world, not in the services space. To do that, avoid building out a whole infrastructure in an area that is tangential to your core focus. Instead, find a training partner that earns your confidence, and structure a managed services relationship around shared risk and rewards. Leverage their expertise as a snap-on service that is virtually plug and play with your SaaS business model so that your investment in training becomes essentially the cost of sales. Then stay focused on continuing to provide the best SaaS application in your field, confident that you can take it to market with highly effective and constantly relevant training that will help drive user adoption and subscription renewals.

The Secrets of SaaS Training: Delivery

Beth Chmielowski — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:54:46 +0000

The other day I wrote about designing SaaS training, and how it differs from traditional models. Today let’s explore best practices for delivering SaaS training.

Delivering SaaS Training

In most cases, when learning folks talk about training delivery, they speak in terms of modality. That is, is it a live, in-person instructor led event (ILT)? A live, virtual event or webinar (V-ILT)? A self-paced web-based training event (WBT)? A self-study course (independent work done through a workbook)? Or perhaps a “performance support” tool or Electronic Performance Support System (EPSS), which is an elaborate way of saying tool-that-guides-you-through-a-process. Other popular terms and modalities that have come in and out of vogue include just-in-time training, informal learning, mentorships, apprenticeships, action learning, workflow learning, social learning, and Learning 2.0. The truth is, there isn’t a particular modality that is better in all cases, but that different modalities are appropriate in different situations. “Blended learning” is especially popular (as it should be) and simply means offering a combination of two or more modalities. The idea is to determine the best modality for a given audience and a given purpose. Blended learning delivery is popular, because often training involves multiple audiences and multiple purposes, which lends itself readily to more than one approach. And even when it doesn’t, it almost assuredly involves multiple people, who will likely have different preferences and proclivities in terms of learning styles. Because of this, I have found it more useful to think of training delivery more broadly, and from a consumption perspective rather than a modality perspective. That is, as a person who needs to know or do something, what might help me be most successful? In general, there are three broad-stroke approaches I might want to take to learning, depending on how much time I have, and how deep that learning needs to go:

Formal learning: This is what we typically think of when we think of learning – a classroom course or an online module. It is anything where we specifically set aside time to learn, with the sole intent of focusing on the topic and learning about it, most likely (though not always) for near-term application.
Agile learning: This is learning facilitated by accessing focused, discrete, easily consumable pieces of content at various levels of depth, to support a specific goal. By nature self-paced and done in the moment of need, agile learning is finding, consuming and (hopefully) applying the information needed to accomplish whatever task prompted us to seek out the information in the first place. Agile content, then, can be anything from a list of steps, to the “how to” demos described in my prior post on SaaS training design, to whitepapers, to templates. A Google search is the least structured example of this. The challenge, of course, is finding the right content at the right level of detail for our needs. When Google searches are insufficient, it is typically not because they don’t produce enough results, but because the produce too many. A more formal agile learning platform, then, would provide additional guidance, filtering capabilities, or support in getting people quickly to the insight they need in as least a disruptive way as possible. The idea being, get me what I need, and let me get on with what I am doing.
Social learning: This is emergent learning that takes place as people are interacting with each other and with technology (typically social media). It flips the traditional approach of training as something that is defined and delivered by “experts” to something that is created or co-created by “users.” (Though in my experience, the two are rarely mutually exclusive.) It acknowledges and respects the skills, experiences, insights, and value that learners, or more accurately, colleagues, have to offer one another. Note that social learning actually takes place all the time, with or without technology as an intermediary. Mentorship and apprenticeship programs are examples of social learning. Brainstorming sessions, or even hallway conversations can be as well. When you bring technology into the mix, however, you can capture and extend these instances of knowledge creation and sharing beyond the individuals interacting in the moment, and convert pockets of information to pools of information.

Again, there is not anything particularly new or disruptive about any of these three broad classifications of learning. You can find excellent examples of each (as well as plenty of poor examples) all over the web. Where they become most powerful, however, and how they lend themselves especially well to SaaS training, is when they are aggregated and delivered together via a learning portal or “knowledge center” that is a one-stop-shop structured around key topics or themes. For example, if I want to know about a new piece of technology being implemented in my organization, I would like to be able to find out about available courses, job aids, discussion forums, and even access to experts within my organization all form the same location, and preferably from the same screen. This kind of portal would offer a truly blended experience, getting me to what I need to be most successful, when I need it. To be effective, a learning portal (like any other well-constructed web site) requires thoughtful design. Nearly anyone who has used a wiki will attest that the downfall of the technology is how quickly and easily content can get lost. The more content there is, the harder it can be to find it. To avoid this, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of working with an Information Architect and/or a User Experience designer to create a portal that will be intuitive, navigable, and extensible. Here are some guiding principles to employ when designing a learning portal:

“Web 2.0” capabilities are table-stakes: the number of consumer sites offering comments, ratings, and user-generated content these days abound. Virtually anyone who uses a computer has come to use, and expect these capabilities. They are a minimum requirement for any kind of learning portal.
Consistent navigation is key, preferably topical, or thematic: structure the information around the content that I need, not around the modality it is being delivered in. As mentioned above, I want to find the formal, agile, and social content for any given topic in the same location, rather than having to access one page for formal, and a separate for agile, etc.
If designed around a process, track progress: People love TurboTax for a reason. It’s simple, it shows me where I am in the process and how much further I have to go, and it lets me dig in deeper when it is relevant to me, without forcing me to read every word. Feel free to leverage this agile learning/performance support model, and extended it to incorporate formal and social learning, where appropriate.
People are resources, too: help me easily find and connect with colleagues and experts, whether internal to my organization, or if appropriate, from within the extended enterprise.
Federated search is a must: content itself may end up being housed in any number of locations, depending on existing infrastructure and/or administrative and management needs. This can include SharePoint sites or other Content Management Systems (CMS), Learning Management Systems (LMS), or intranet or extranet sites, among other sources. When picking a platform for the portal, a critical requirement is its ability to pull content in from your existing or “to be” sources, and more importantly to perform a search across these sources. Equally important is that this search needs to be a full text search (that is, searching the body of a document or file itself) rather than just the metadata associated with a document or file.

Sidebar: An LMS makes a better integration point than it does a platform. An LMS is an administrative tool, rather than a learning tool, designed for those running training far more than those consuming it. It serves an important function, but is rarely the tool people launch when they start their work day. Take advantage of its APIs, and don’t force people into its UI any more than is needed.

Single sign on (SSO) must be seamless: related to the above, if a link passes me through to another system, as a user, I shouldn’t need to know about that. And I definitely should not be prompted to provide a log in when I click a link.
Security should be granular: allowing different permissions to be set and/or cascaded down to the object level.
Customer-facing portals should be multitenant: Like SaaS applications themselves, you need to be able to maintain and serve the super-set of content from one place, while allowing for each customer instance to have its own look and feel, and access only the sub-set of content relevant to the customer.
Constant beta is both the journey and the destination: “If you build it they will come” definitely does not apply. Be prepared to launch, promote, monitor, harvest, and improve in a cyclical fashion.

Finally, be sure to monitor consumption and ratings of content. The “modality” of a web-based learning portal offers a ton of insight into what people are finding, using, and valuing vs. what is left unconsumed. This enables you to treat your training spend like an investment portfolio, informing areas in which to invest more, less, or differently. This becomes even more powerful if you are able to correlate training consumption metrics with performance and see what high performers are consuming and/or contributing as well as how much low performers may or may not be tapping into these resources. Now that is actionable data.

The Secrets of SaaS Training: Design

Beth Chmielowski — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:40:44 +0000

SaaS applications are different in the way they are purchased, consumed and supported, but at the end of the day, they are just tools people use to get things done. There is nothing fundamentally radical or even new about the purchase, consumption, or support models, but taken together, they offer a paradigm shift that is already upending the traditional software marketplace. Similarly, training for SaaS is different in the way it is designed, delivered, and sold, but at the end of the day, it is just a tool people use to learn. And again, each individual element has been in play for some time, but bringing them together offers a whole new take on enterprise learning that is upending old school practices. Having partnered with a number of top shelf SaaS companies to define, design, and staff their training initiatives, we’ve zeroed in on a number of critical themes for maximizing the effectiveness of SaaS training. Over the next few posts, I’ll take a look at each of the three key elements:

Today, let’s start with how to approach training design to keep pace with the fast-changing world of SaaS applications.

Designing SaaS Training

The biggest challenge of designing training for SaaS applications is maintenance. SaaS apps can change so frequently, that traditional long-form training buckles under its own weight trying to stay relevant. No sooner do you finish a comprehensive course then it is obsolete. If ever there were a place and a need for agility, it is in the cloud. Here are some basic design tactics for developing compelling, effective, and nimble SaaS training:

Use a blended model: As with any training, identify your audiences and their needs and determine the best modality or blend of modalities for each.
- Determine if there are any critical audiences that will need focused instruction, feedback, and support. These often include operations teams, admin users, or evangelists who will be the “go to” people for the rest of the organization. Focus time and resources on ensuring their acceptance, expertise, and advocacy. These are the prime audiences for instructor-led training, preferably in person, if possible.
- For enterprise applications with a broad user base (such as 20,000+ users), minimize the amount of instructor-led training (ILT) for end users as much as possible. Even an hour-long course presents a scalability issue with that many users. Designed right, self-paced learning (whether online eLearning, or “off-line” self-study) can be just as effective, and tends to be both faster, and lower-cost from a training deployment total cost of ownership perspective. If you introduce self-paced training from initial implementation, it is easier to maintain that approach with each new release.
- Be sure that minimizing ILT does not equate to minimizing interactivity. Whatever the modality, including hands-on, discovery based activities is critical to learning, acceptance, and adoption.
- Augment self-paced end-user training with regularly scheduled opt-in webinars, or online “office hours” for those who have questions, or would like additional hand holding.
Keep the documentation out of the training materials: Do not include screen shots or step/action/results tables in the training materials.
- Push “how to” content to a set of short, discrete, self-paced demos at the task level such as, “How to add a user,” or “How to create an opportunity.” These should be short, 1-3 minute demos that people can consume in the moment of need. Keeping these granular and task-focused is key to staying current with SaaS releases. With each release, there should be only a sub-set of demos that will need to change (unless the whole app is re-skinned).
- Make these demos available online, and ensure there are no barriers to access. That is, don’t make users provide an additional login, force them to go to a training environment, or make them complete anything as a pre-req for access. These should be available to all users regardless of whether they have gone through training. Ideally, host these demos and make them available from within the app itself, if possible.
- Point to and leverage these materials during the live or self-paced training so users know they exist and are available for access and self-help when back on the job. Ideally, whenever a “how to” question comes up in class, point people to the library of demos first to see if they can find the answers themselves.
- Note that the focus of these demos is different from online help. The latter is meant to focus on features and functions, or what a button or field should do. Instead, these demos should focus on tasks, or what the user should do, which can span multiple buttons, fields, features, or screens.
Design discovery based, scenario driven training: Keep the materials focused on the processes that the SaaS application supports.
- People need to learn how their processes will be changing given the introduction of this new tool. The “as is” processes will vary from client to client, and the “to be” processes may also differ, given the flexibility and configurability of SaaS apps. However, the super-set set of processes that the application supports will be consistent across clients.
- Design the training scenarios around those processes, creating discrete modules for each. You can then aggregate the appropriate sub-set of modules for each client, based on the functionality they have enabled for their configuration.
- The scenarios themselves should be generic, yet prescriptive. For instance, if training on a CRM tool, you may have a scenario built around creating a new account. Provide generic instructions to “Create a new account” and supply parameters to use for the data entry: Account name, contact name, contact title, etc.
- Build the scenarios around a fictitious company for continuity between modules, but make sure each module functions on its own. That is, do not introduce dependencies between modules, as not all customers will use all modules. For example, do not have a scenario of creating an account in one module and a scenario for adding a sales opportunity for that account in another module. The “create a sales opportunity” scenario needs to be based on a dataset that exists regardless of whether or not the “create an account” module has been completed earlier.
- Tightly define the training dataset required to support each scenario. Having a training environment with a baseline dataset is critical to successful discovery-based learning.
- Design training to move from basic to more complex tasks, building skills as participants’ progress through the materials. Ideas for doing this include:
  - Start with a UI “treasure hunt” to orient users to the interface
  - Introduce simpler scenarios with more prescribed data early, and more complex scenarios (or less prescribed data) later.
  - Provide “challenge” exercises on advanced functionality for power users or for those moving more quickly through the materials.
  - For group training sessions, have people work in teams. “Jigsaw” the modules so each team works through different scenarios, and then have the teams present what they learned back to the larger group, highlighting important steps, and calling out any “gotchas” they may have encountered, along with how to avoid them.
Note that keeping the documentation out of the training, and keeping the scenarios generic and process focused makes maintenance much simpler. With each new release, updates are focused on identifying any new or changed tasks, modifying a subset of the “how to” demos, and perhaps building a few more. The scenario-based training materials should have little to no changes release to release. Because the scenarios are generic to the point of simply telling users to do something, changes to how that thing is done will likely have little impact to the scenario. Updates to the training materials themselves will typically only consist of adding additional scenarios when a release introduces new processes that the SaaS application supports. And in those cases, this results in creating an additional module or modules that can be snapped in and delivered to those customers who end up implementing that new functionality.

Seven Tips for Bringing the Rapid Back to Rapid eLearning

Beth Chmielowski — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:43:03 +0000

My colleague Jon continues to tally up the hits for his tell-it-like-it-is blog post There’s Nothing Rapid About Rapid eLearning. While he does a great job laying out the realities and timelines of “rapid” eLearning development, I thought a follow-up offering some tips and tricks for rediscovering the rapid might be in order. So here’s a starter list. Got some favorite tips and tricks of your own? Would love it if you’d add them to the comments.

The Tips

Provide pre-defined not blank-slate solutions: Drive-throughs have value-meals for a reason. Lose the drawing board and offer your sponsor a few simple options to choose between. If possible, show examples. They get to chose the option they like most, know what to expect, and you’re less likely to be surprised downstream by requests for more functionality than you had proposed. (Nothing like a late-breaking request for branching, or audio, or interactive simulation to completely blow the budget and timeline…)
Triage: Identify and prioritize the must-have topics and then build and deliver using a rolling-hand-off approach.
Think short and discrete: Forget the all-or-nothing hour-long recordings – give me a bunch of small, targeted “lessons” that I can find and use in the moment of need. Please. Please. Please.
Skip the storyboard: Save the polish for the final product not the interim deliverables. SMEs already know the tool, so you really don’t need fancy screen shots with callouts. A simple script or step/action table should do it. Put your energy into getting the core content right, rather than providing exhaustive documentation.
Use templates: This should be a no-brainer, but it’s amazing how often we re-invent the wheel, and how much time we waste in the process. Instead, for each of your pre-defined solutions (see tip #1) have a simple set of templates that at minimum serve as a baseline you can tailor to meet customer needs. (Strive to get as close to plug-and-play as you can.) Though the templates will surely vary depending on whether you’re building technical how-to demos, sales webinars, or educational marketing value-prop recordings, you should have a set associated with each solution type: start with consistently laid out scripts, slides, and style guides, and add in pre-defined wire-frames and a library of interactive eLearning assets as you develop them. Think and design for reuse even for those things originally “sold” as a one-off.
The first one’s the prototype: If you’re following tip #3, then it is just as easy to build the first “lesson” as it is to build a generic prototype. And, once it’s reviewed, revised, and approved, you’ve not only got the look and feel locked down, you’ve also got your first deliverable ready for handoff.
Streamline the process: Keep it simple and front-load the check-points in order to minimize post-production rework. Try this:
What have you found that works well?

Why are Talent, Performance & Learning dominating the cloud??

John Hathaway — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:09:08 +0000

Kevin Dobbs at Montclair Advisors recently posted some interesting data on how much investment it takes to build a Software-as-a-Service company.

http://montclairadvisors.com/blog/2010/01/how-much-investment-does-it-take-to-start-a-saas-co/

While the data is interesting, there was something else here that really caught my attention: 7 of these 15 companies are in Talent Management, Performance Management, Human Capital Management, and/or Learning Management. (Not that I could actually draw clear borders between any of those categories, but those are the words I see on the various companies' websites.)

I expected to see CRM and ERP stuff here, but was pretty surprised to find 47% focused on people, what they know, and how they perform. As to the 7, I'm counting: Blackboard, Kenexa, RightNow, Salary.com, SuccessFactors, Taleo, and Ultimate Software.

I'm wondering: why such a focus here for successful SaaS companies?
Is it that these are newer application areas with less of a legacy to overcome?
Is it that corporate IT doesn't want to be bothered with "fluffy HR stuff" so others have filled the demand?
What do you think?

Chatter Will Change the Way We Work & the Way We Train

Beth Chmielowski — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:59:41 +0000

Just watched the webcast of Benioff’s Dreamforce keynote announcing Chatter, and think it will be a game changer: the barriers to entry for Enterprise 2.0 have just been blown away.

What is Chatter

Simply put, Chatter is “Facebook” for the enterprise, offering real-time feeds, integration, and collaboration between content, apps, and people. It provides all of the baseline features of social networking tools like Twitter and Faceboook, such as status updates and profiles. It allows you to follow people and to easily create, join, and follow groups. Far beyond connecting people, it also tracks and streams updates to apps and Salesforce objects. For instance, a change to the status of an opportunity would make it to the global feed, be clickable, and take you to a filtered feed specific to that opportunity. Similarly, you can bring in updates from non-Salesforce applications such as back-end finance or HR systems (easy and contextualized access to SAP data appeal to anyone?), as well as external public feeds from sources like Twitter. Finally, it enables you to link and access content inline, and makes all of this available (including access to all your content and data) via mobile devices. You can read about Chatter features on Salesforce’s site, here and view a helpful YouTube video about it here. Also, Appirio has put out a thoughtful blog post on the enterprise implications of Chatter here.

Update: And check out how Appirio will be leveraging Chatter in their Professional Service Enterprise product built on Force.com here - a great example of how the cloud exponentially speeds up innovation and time to market.

How Chatter lowers the barriers to Enterprise 2.0

I was following the Twitter back-channel during Benioff’s announcement (check out #df09, and filter on “chatter”), and initial reactions ran the gamut from awed to underwhelmed to irritated – calling out similar technologies that have been around for some time (such as Yammer), and wondering how status updates could be hyped as a “breakthrough.” And at first blush, this doesn’t look particularly new. What I believe is truly disruptive about Chatter, though, is the ease of entry that it offers, and the way it overcomes three of the major barriers to implementing “Enterprise 2.0”: access, context, and security.

Access: Choosing, configuring, and rolling out a technology (or technologies) can be daunting and costly, even if you have stellar IT support. In contrast, once released, Chatter will be included free in all versions of Salesforce (both the Sales Cloud and Services Cloud) as part of the CRM license, and Salesforce will also introduce a low-cost Chatter Edition for non-Salesforce users.
Context: Enterprise social networking and social media are next to useless and potentially even a counter-productive time-suck without a business context. Embedding it in CRM, making it easy to access and filter updates and content within the context of real-time sales and services needs provides authentic utility and instant value to organizations that may be struggling with where, when, and how to introduce these types of tools.
Security: Fear of losing control and the ability to lock down who sees what is a common concern when it comes to introducing social media in the enterprise. Regardless of whether this concern is legitimate or misguided, it has been a barrier to entry. Salesforce overcomes this with its robust and proven security model which extends to Chatter down to the object level, as desired. Presumably, you will be able to define and implement the level of security you need, with little extra effort.

How Chatter will change our work and productivity

If they deliver on the hype, Chatter will enable:

Real-time integrated access to expert advice, data, and content (internal and external to the org)
Ease of collaboration for teams and ad hoc groups
Quick aggregation and filtering of content in the context of critical business processes

And likely much more. Still pondering the depth of the implications of these in terms of making it easier for us to do our jobs well. But essentially, Chatter is a promise to help people get to what they need when they need it, which, at the end of the day, can have a massive impact on productivity.

Implications for enterprise learning

The immediate impact on T&D will be the need to help facilitate adoption, since Chatter brings with it some fundamental changes in how organizations and people can interact and do business. But there are also broader implications. I believe enterprise learning has been undergoing a metamorphosis for some time, and Chatter both underscores the necessity of it, and is likely to speed up the process. If we haven’t already, we will need to move away from being content creators and disseminators and move instead towards being productivity analysts and enablers. Content is out there. Our job will shift to helping people find it and share it, to looking for emergent trends, identifying what should be formalized and disintermediating what should not. It will be about identifying issues that impact performance and helping to facilitating their resolution. And most importantly, it will be much more focused on helping people perform well together than on “improving” the individual. That’s a pretty massive cultural shift. Are we up for it?

Day 2/Take 2: Key Takeaways from the Rest of Learning 2009 Conference AND More Twitter Newbie Revelations

Beth Chmielowski — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:22:31 +0000

For me, day 1 of Learning 2009 primarily focused on great ideas, and day 2 focused on great examples of real training solutions. Day 2 kicked off with an inspiring interview with Captain Chelsey B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, he of successfully-made-emergency-landing-on-the-Hudson-river fame; and moved from there into sessions on case studies: Julie Clow from Google presented an excellent example of a light-weight, agile learning program for internal audiences leveraging Google tools, discrete, right-sized content pieces, and a mobile delivery platform. Christian Finn of Microsoft presented a high-fidelity YouTube style social learning solution, also for internal employees. And Don Strimbu of Autodesk described converting a 5-day conference-based training session with over 1,700 channel partners into a virtual event. Then on Wednesday morning (final half-day of conference) I made it to Wayne Hodgin’s mind-blowing session on the “Snowflake Effect” and the concept of mass personalization.

Finally, at the bottom of this far-too-lengthy missive, I have captured a few more Twitter “revelations” that emerged over the course of this conference. It seems this is the next installment in what is turning into an ongoing saga of how one not-so-early-adopter slowly figures out how to get the most value out of this tool.

Sully

Masie introduced Captain Sullenberger by playing this simulation of the infamous flight. It was chilling and almost visceral in conveying the gravity of the situation and the astonishing water landing. Sully then took the stage, described himself as an, “ordinary guy who found himself in extraordinary circumstances" and credited the team (co-pilot, crew, controller, and emergency responders) for the incredible outcome. Listening to the recording of his conversation with the control tower during the event, he sounds so cool and controlled, you’d think it could be any mundane flight communication, were it not for comments like “hit birds”, “lost thrust in both engines,” and “we may end up in the Hudson,” delivered as calmly as if he were saying “landing gear up, setting course to destination.” He clarified this on stage saying, “If you think I wasn’t startled, you misunderstand. But we did our job in spite of that.” And, “the cockpit was a crucible where we fought for our lives…what kicked in was the judgment that only comes from experience.”

I must admit that when I first read that Masie had booked Captain Sullenberger as one of the keynote speakers for Learning 2009, I didn’t get it. I didn’t see the connection between his astonishing feat and a learning conference. But you don’t have to be in the man’s presence for long before it is perfectly clear. His feat exemplifies the results of both deep experience and life-long learning. Though he (understandably) had never before practiced losing both engines or doing a water landing with a plane full of people, he describes it as assembling the learned building blocks to instantaneously adapt to what was needed in the moment. If this is not the ultimate goal for learning and development, I don’t know what is.

Sully talked about the role of training in providing the building blocks we put together to solve problems. He spoke of the importance of situational awareness. He described constantly flying the plane with his mind (regardless of level of automation) anticipating potential issues, and adapting as needed. He emphasized the importance of the human element, reframing the discussion form the role of the pilot in the automated cockpit to the role of automation in the piloted cockpit. He pointed out that technology doesn’t lower the requirements for training, but instead increases them, both in terms of using the technology correctly, and in that pilots must constantly synthesize what automation is doing. He noted that technology changes the nature of the errors that are made, pointing out how the connectedness of the technology can lend itself to cascading failures and that while technology can prevent many small errors from happening, it also allows huge errors to be made very precisely. And most importantly, he noted that not everything can be anticipated, programmed, and put into written guidelines; at no point does technology relieve us of our most critical role: that of rapidly assimilating never before encountered variables and adapting to the unknown.

Sully emphasized the importance of experience, and also the importance of passion, curiosity, and a willingness to learn. I haven’t explicitly called out any key learning takeaways from this keynote, though there are many. In this case, though, my prevailing takeaway was deep awe and respect for a truly heroic man.

Google and Microsoft Case Studies

In my last post I alluded to the whiplash affect I felt moving from the minimalist footprint approach of the Google case study to the high-production feel of the Microsoft case study. In a way, a very yin and yang set of learnings. Here’s a bit of detail on both sessions, followed by some thoughts on their unexpected overlaps.

Julie Clow of Google described a “gLearning” program on the foundations of leadership for early career Googlers across the globe. (For a short time, the slides for this presentation can be found here.) The program design leveraged self-paced learning components (videos, articles, books, movies), content that was largely already available, collaborative Google Apps communication tools, and virtual classroom “debrief” sessions. She emphasized authentic collaboration (vs. simulating human interactions via WBT), leveraging both tools and content that already exits (vs. developing all content from “scratch”) and this approach - Key takeaway #1: design small content pieces for self-paced consumption within the boundaries of an expected completion date. She also described their use of Moving Knowledge, a tool for delivering and tracking learning via mobile devices. (For a demo of this tool, either email demo@movingknowledge.com and type the word 'demo' into the body of the email and the subject line, or text the word ‘demo’ to 407-421-7408 to register your mobile device. If you have trouble contact support@movingknowledge.com )

Christian Finn of Microsoft described Academy Mobile, a YouTube style intranet site where all Microsoft employees can post podcast that they have created on any (presumably work-related) topic. You can find an early blog post (August 2007) describing it here and a YouTube video about it here. It’s based on the premise that what the learning organization can cover and teach nowhere near approaches what the organization knows. Therefore, it is the responsibility of learning orgs is to tap into this expertise, and to connect people to the knowledge and expertise of other people. Academy Mobile provides a social learning platform built on SharePoint with some custom code to layer in social media capabilities such as ratings and comments. I’m sure I can’t do justice to this highly-polisshed solution from a few hastily written notes and tweets, so I’ll jump to the list Finn provided on “Top 10” Takeaways for designing a social learning solution and how I understood them (a lot of overlap here with my earlier blog post on Top 10 Reasons Enterprise Learning Communities Fail):

Have a clear scope and purpose: think about what you’re trying to accomplish and build for that.
Design for ease of use and access: disintermediate as much as possible. (Miicrosoft does not require an approval process for podcasts to be added, but it does require the person’s name; thus relying on accountability vs. regulation)
Focus on low to no barriers to participation: Microsoft provided the video recorders for its initial push for content; provides multiple tools and avenues to encourage comments and ratings.
Stock the pond: seeding with initial content is important. People won’t return to a content site (user-generated or otherwise) if there’s no “there” there.
Enlist champions: get some early users and evangelists.
Provide incentives: users get points for various acts from adding podcasts, to rating or commenting on them. Those points can be converted to prizes. (My favorite: Microsoft lets people convert their points to dollars to give to charity, and then provides matching funds as well. LOVE that.)
Iterate rapidly: don’t wait for perfection. Get something out there, see what’ working, and where people are stumbling, continuously make incremental improvements. (Pleasantly surprised to hear this coming from Microsoft.)
Provide great search: absolutely critical with user-generated content. It’s no good if people can’t find it. Academy Mobile provides for both taxonomy and folksonomy. It also lets you filter on highest rated, and most downloaded.
Promote the solution: don’t just put it up there and expect people to find it and use it. Have a plan to get the word out.
Have a network mentality: you may start small with one content area or one functional org, but have a long-tail mentality and plan for expanding into other areas over time.
Provide users unlimited data plans: this one should be pretty obvious if you’re providing mobile access, but good call-out to start here rather than to get a costly wake-up call post-deployment.

In both of these examples, Google and Microsoft showed their willingness to push the envelope to design effective learning solutions. Google used a quick-hit, leverage content and tools already out there approach, and Microsoft used a build the infrastructure to tap into the collective knowledge approach. Takeaway #13: some cool design things they both did:

Stepped away from the “I am the keeper and/or creator of all wisdom” position that learning teams can so easily fall into
Provided content in small, discrete pieces
Built in authentic exchange between people (Google: collaboration and debriefs; Microsoft access to UGC, ratings and comments)
Reached them where they were at (online and mobile) vs. pulled people into a classroom
Used a launch and iterate approach
Built on their own tools

Autodesk Virtual Event Case Study

Full disclosure: my company supported Don Strimbu and his team with this endeavor, so I may be overly-enthusiastic about its merits.

To end my day two, and in keeping with the break-me-out-of-the-classroom theme, I sat in on Don Strimbu’s presentation on converting a large conference-based even to virtual. Most fascinating about this was the breadth of its scope and the incredible high-stakes underlying this move.

A bit about the breadth and stakes. Strimbu described how Autodesk’s channel partners are the intermediary between the customer and Autodesk and that 85% of Autodesk revenue comes from its channel. That means partner training is a high-stakes proposition for Autodesk, and one they are very invested in. For the past 20+ years, Autodesk has been hosting annual events that coincide with product releases, to bring over 1700 partners together and get them trained on the deltas. This year, they converted a 5-day event into a blended, virtual event, consisting of some eLearning pre-work and a series of webinars organized by track. The scope of the event spanned multiple company divisions, multiple product tracks for each division, differentiated learner roles for each track, multiple requirements for each role, and multiple sessions for each learning path component. All of this added up to hundreds of sessions that needed to be set up, delivered, and supported.

One of the ways Autodesk made this happen (and a recurring theme for the day, I am just realizing) was to use technologies that were already available to them and in use. This minimized risks associated with new or unfamiliar tools. In Autodesk’s case, they used SumTotal as a hosted LMS, and Adobe Connect. The LMS was used for registration, eCommerce, deployment of learning paths, and course completion and tracking. Adobe Connect was integrated with the LMS, and used to deliver the sessions themselves.

For the most part, execution was smooth and most of the challenges that arose came from the unreliability of the internet itself, in terms of connectivity and more important, latency. In terms of things Autodesk could control, Strimbu offered the following – Takeaway #14: Recommendations for pulling off a large-scale virtual event:

Need to thoroughly work through the technology requirements, constraints, and logistics
Need to make course registration, requirements, and access to materials as easy as possible
Content design must be adapted for virtual interactivity
The delivery team should include:
- A dedicated moderator/host
- A technical producer
- Multiple trainers when possible
Trainers should be trained on how to deliver effectively via webinars

In terms of impact, Strimbu said that though feedback was mixed, the top resellers (responsible for 80% of the revenue) resoundingly agreed that the virtual event was both valuable and effective. They supported this transition, and hoped it would continue to be the approach used from now on. In terms of cost savings, Strimbu didn’t use specific numbers, but indicated that it was significant. He said that production costs were the about the same, however, the savings came from eliminating the need for facilities and hospitality. (Presumably the channel also saved significantly on T&E and lowered opportunity costs.) Multiply this by however many similar events Autodesk holds in other geos, and their perpetual need for update training, and it is not at all hard to see why Strimbu concluded with this thought - Takeaway #15: even when the economy recovers virtual training will be more than good enough for most of what we need to deliver.

Wayne Hodgins, The Snowflake Effect, and Mass Personalization

Takeaway #16: it is very hard to distill Wayne to 140 characters. I’m not going to even pretend like I could do justice to Wayne’s session. It’s not just that he talks really fast, but that he thinks really, really fast. Or perhaps that he’s just been thinking about this stuff for a really long time, so it rolls off his tongue as easily as you or I might describe what we had for breakfast. Only he’s not talking about breakfast. He’s talking about complex concepts, and seems to be synthesizing them and coming up with new applications for his ideas as he speaks.

So I’m just going to sketch the basic premise and leave it at that: we’re all unique, each and every one of us. Even more, every situation is unique. Yet, if we agree that we are unique, why is it that we design for sameness? Instead, we should design for mass personalization, or the idea that we can deliver every person just the right content, in just the right amount, via just the right method, and at just the right time for what they need. Sound ambitious? Indeed. But after listening to Wayne for an hour, you start to believe that this might just be possible. In fact, he tells us - Takeaway # 17: much of what is needed to make mass personalization a reality already exists. And then he gives examples. Lots of ‘em. Really fast. Some examples are things you’ve heard of, but may not have thought about in this context. (Online dating engines and algorithms as a model for matching people with the type of training they need, for example.) Other things you may never have even heard of. (3D printing of complete assemblies? Really?) It’s a bit mind-boggling. And very inspirational.

Shameless plug: I’m breaking my own rule about keeping this kind of stuff out of my blog, but only because it comes from a true sense of awe in what Wayne has to offer in terms of vision and inspiration – so here it is. Contact VMG if you’d like to have Wayne speak to or consult with your org.

More Twitter Newbie Revelations

Finally, since I love nothing more than to display my ignorance, I’m going to outdo myself with this section. Here are a few more newbie Twitter “revelations” I had this week, driven by my concentrated and active use of Twitter tools (especially TweetDeck) during the conference:

I had already figured out that I can use TweetDeck to create custom groups of people to follow (friends, thought leaders, etc.) Suddenly, I realize I can do the same thing by – get this – topic. Who knew?
The little icons at the bottom of the TweetDeck groups do things. Really cool and useful things, in fact, to further aggregate and sort your already filtered streams of tweets:
1. Filter: search for tweets containing a specific word.
2. Tag cloud: click the little cloud icon to index all the content in that group and see a tag cloud of recurring words. This not only shows what’s trending in the tweet slice indexed, but provides hyperlinks to the subset of tweets to the word clicked.