Aligning Training with the Business: A Simple Model

Greg Brisendine and I recently collaborated on a presentation for an eLearning Guild online forum. We synthesized his experience with training measurement and prevalent measurement models (including Six Sigma's DMAIC and Deming's PDCA) and my experience in training design, development, and management to create the model described below for aligning learning efforts with the business.

If you could only ask one question before designing training what would it be about? Budget? Target audience? Objectives? While all these clearly inform design, the most important thing you need to know is “what problem is this course meant to solve?” If you don’t know the answer to this, the rest is meaningless.

At the end of the day, training is an intervention designed to solve a business problem, so the design cannot and should not be separated from the business problem. Otherwise you could easily end up investing significant time and money into creating something lovely that doesn’t make a difference to the business.

Identifying the business driver and designing learning solutions in lock-step with the business need is actually a relatively simple process, but one that is often glossed over, or sometimes missed entirely. Here’s a simple model that can help clarify the purpose of your initiative, inform design choices, and improve the effectiveness of your learning interventions.

Let’s explore each of the four key questions in this model.

What needs to change?

What needs to change is not about learners scoring higher on tests, though hopefully at the end of the day, their scoring higher will be a predictor of the business change you’re looking for. What it is about is making an impact on the business which typically boils down to increasing something or decreasing something. Things businesses typically want to increase include:

• Profits
• Market share
• Productivity
• Adoption

Things businesses typically want to decrease include:

• Costs
• Error rates
• Time to competency

How does clarifying the business goal along these lines impact design choices? Let’s take an example where you’re tasked with “improving implementation training for a technical product.” (I don’t know about you, but requests for training are often presented to me in this kind of vague, “get me a rock” format.) In this case, though the domain is defined (technical implementation), the business goal is not. “Improving” training (and presumably the product implementations) could mean any number of things, including increasing customer adoption, or decreasing implementation error rates. Clearly, the training intervention you create would be very different, depending on which of these issues you were hoping to solve. If the goal is to drive adoption, the training might need to focus on improving consulting skills to better align product configuration with client goals, whereas decreasing error rates would indicate more technically focused content. Sidebar: When defining your business goal, be sure you’re asking the right people. The SMEs or target audience might have a very different idea about what’s needed than the business owner. In the example above, the “right” people to talk to might be the product owner, or the manager(s) of those performing the implementations.

By how much?

Once you know what needs to change, the next step is putting boundaries around it. What needs to change gets translated into “what do you wish was true that isn’t?” followed by “what’s currently true?” The descriptions are like drawing a map of two islands in the ocean. One island is the current state (baseline), and the other is the desired state (target). Good design is the bridge. Questions to ask include:

• How is success defined for this process?
• What’s the current performance?
• Can you get me the data?

For example, if you need to reduce time to competency, you’ll need to know how competency is defined, how long it currently takes before employees become competent, and how long you would prefer it to take (or you think it should take). In the case of new sales people, it might take:

• 9 months (current performance)
• Before new sales people consistently hit or exceed their quota (definition of success for the process)
• And we think they should be able to do this within 3 months (definition of success for the training intervention)

Sidebar: defining “by how much” both sets up your measurement strategy (watch how this comes back a few paragraphs from now in the “how will you know” section) AND creates your business case for training. In the sales example, you don’t need that many data points to define the potential impact to the business. You’d just need to know how many new sales people we’re talking about per year, what the average quota is, and how far off they are before they’re competent. Let’s say your company hires 20 new sales people a year, on average they each need to book $100,000 in sales per quarter, and they typically hit 75% of that target before they reach “competency”. You’re being asked to reduce time to competency by 6 months, the result of which would be an increase in revenue of $25,000 per quarter, for two quarters, for each new sales person, or:

2 X $25,000 X 20 = $1,000,000 increase in revenue

Looking at it that way, a $50,000 investment to train new sales people doesn’t seem so unreasonable.

How will it change?

If what we really care about is what needs to change, then rather than asking what people need to learn, we should ask what they need to do. Then determine how training can support that performance goal. Here are some examples:

Once you’re clear about what people need to do, the content and design should all align to that. With the sales example, they need to increase sales, and more specifically, hit their target sooner. So what is it about sales people that do hit their target that is different from the new sales people? If might in fact be deeper knowledge of product features. Or it might be ability to handle objections, better position against competitors, or any number of things. The important distinction here is that sales training does not necessarily mean product features 101. It means whatever it takes to close the gap between 75% of quota and 100% of quota. As training professionals, we’re pretty good at figuring this part out. Identifying the specific goal of helping new sales people achieve quota within their first quarter simply helps us define our scope with laser focus, maximize the “pure” training time we have (whether in person or online) and provide robust performance support resources well aligned with the needs and technological proclivities of the sales team.

How will you know?

Finally, before you even start design, determine how you will know the desired change has occurred. Though this can be a very complex process, it doesn’t really have to be. ROI is often over-engineered to the point of being a non-starter. As compelling as it might be to be able to isolate variables, determine statistical significance, and prove causal relationships, in most cases this amounts to grossly over-medicating: often costing significantly more in time and money, for little added value. And given the complexity of business environments, most of what we do will be correlative, not causal, and more often than not, it will be one contributory factor among many.

Ultimately, measurement is most useful when it is actionable. It should inform decisions about what to keep doing, what to stop doing, and what to do differently. For that reason, I’m a big fan of leading indicators, or predictors of success. Because if you wait for backwards-looking lagging indicators, or measurements of outcomes, there’s nothing you can do if you missed your target.

Note: You need to be careful to ensure that the leading indicators are well aligned with the ultimate goal, and that you give them enough time to be meaningful. (That is, that you don’t prematurely jump to conclusions.) But even before you have enough data to act, leading indicators can point you to where you might want to dig deeper to inform action.

Let’s go back to our sales example once again. In this case, the lagging indicator, or desired performance goal is clear: new sales people need to achieve quota by their first quarter on the job.

Sidebar: By this point, the lagging indicators should be pretty easy to identify. If you find that you cannot easily articulate the lagging indicators, then you haven’t done your due diligence in determining what needs to change. Go back to start.

Key leading indicators, then, would be progress to target at the end of month one, and the end of month two. (An even earlier leading indicator might be increased volume on outbound sales calls.) Clearly there is much more that goes into closing business than good sales training. But because we have the baseline data that sales people have historically only closed 75% of their target in their first two quarters, we can track if there are any noticeable improvements at month 1 or 2. And while I wouldn’t advise giving up on training if you do not see an improvement within the first month, you might consider revisiting the intervention if you are noticing poorer performance from those trained than what has typically been seen – especially if there is a non-trained group to compare to whose performance has not declined.

What if by month two you are seeing a 10% lift on average, but sales folks in one region are showing a 40% improvement? Would it make you curious about what might be going on in that region? Do they have a phenomenal trainer? Is there something about the region that makes your product particularly appealing? Do the sales people there have more experience than other new sales people? A different incentive program? An incredible management team? More face time with potential clients?

You can see how this can get nuanced pretty quickly. But if you haven’t at least defined the lagging indicators, and anticipated predictive leading indicators, you may not even notice this kind of regional difference or be prompted to ask these kinds of questions. More importantly, human performance success predictors (such as volume of outbound sales calls) are the behaviors that will enable success and the ones that should be included in your design. If you don’t identify them upfront, then what you end up with is “ready, fire, aim.” (More often, just “ready, fire.”) And how useful is that to anyone?

~ posted by Beth Chmielowski on 16 Dec 09
   tagged as: business alignment, business of learning, design

 

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