As businesses grow, so does complexity. With more systems, more teams, and more priorities, time and resources can’t always keep up. The pursuit of efficiency—doing more with less—becomes an art in itself.
The key ingredient to efficient growth and exceptional customer experiences is unlocking the transformative potential of streamlined learning programs.
Of course, there are challenges. Including these six:
- Siloed teams
- Siloed content
- The ability to measure return on investment (ROI)
- The ability to measure impact
- Production costs
- The dynamics of your team(s)
But they can be overcome. Here’s how:
The key ingredient to learning success: Consolidation
The six main challenges all have something in common: Disconnection.
Seriously:
- Siloed teams and content (and silos in general!) are a direct result of teams being disconnected.
- The inability to measure ROI and impact comes from incompatible metrics and KPIs. If a sales team judges a learning program by improvements to quota attainment but the L&D team measures it by improved engagement or retention, there’s going to be disagreement about the performance and ROI of the program. Chalk another one up to disconnection!
- When teams are disconnected, they can often miss out on economies of scale and consolidation. Ever seen two different teams both paying for different tools that do the same thing? That’s an inefficiency caused by being disconnected.
- Finally, team dynamics and performance can be improved by fostering connections between different teams.
Let’s dive deeper into the power of consolidation in tackling each of these challenges.
It looks like snow, but she’s really diving deep into the vast ocean of consolidation strategies and benefits.
Break down team and content silos
Challenge? As organizations grow and evolve, different teams emerge, each with their own objectives and training programs.
However, this isolated approach can create significant challenges for learners who struggle to access the information they need. It hampers collaboration and knowledge-sharing between teams, resulting in fragmented content and disjointed learning experiences.
Consolidate! By consolidating learning programs, organizations can break down these silos and create a unified learning environment that promotes collaboration, knowledge sharing, and seamless access to relevant information.
Master measurement for impact and ROI
Challenge? Inconsistent tracking and measurement across various teams makes it difficult to assess the impact of learning programs on business outcomes. This lack of visibility can impede your organization’s ability to improve ROI, making it challenging to secure continued support and resources for learning initiatives.
Consolidate! Through consolidation, organizations can establish standardized measurement frameworks and integrated reporting systems, enabling them to track and evaluate the effectiveness of their learning programs consistently. This data-driven approach allows for informed decision-making, optimization of resources, and the ability to demonstrate the value of learning initiatives to key stakeholders.
Trade redundancy for efficiency and cut production costs
Challenge? When teams operate in isolation, redundancies in content creation and technology usage can arise: Different teams working on the same thing! This duplication not only consumes valuable resources but also leads to unnecessary production costs that could have been avoided by centralizing resources and working collaboratively from a unified platform.
Consolidate! By consolidating learning programs, organizations can eliminate inefficiencies, optimize resource allocation, and streamline content creation processes. This, in turn, reduces production costs, allowing for more efficient utilization of budgets and ultimately maximizing the organization’s return on investment.
Six best practices
In addition to consolidation, these six best practices will help build a solid foundation upon which to improve and scale your learning programs. But remember: they aren’t ‘one-and-done’ strategies—they’re ongoing and should be regularly revisited.
- Conduct assessments of need: This involves a detailed evaluation of the current state of learning programs, identifying pain points, and understanding the organization’s specific requirements and objectives.
- Develop business cases for continued streamlining: Focus on articulating the benefits of consolidation, aligning them with organizational goals, and securing buy-in from key stakeholders.
- Select the right technology platform: When choosing a technology platform, give special care to ensuring it aligns with your organization’s requirements, scalability, and integration capabilities. Reviewing your tech ecosystem regularly and ensuring a regular check in cadence with existing vendors will help you scale and grow over the long term—without scaling and growing complexity.
- (Safely) migrate your data: Efficient transfer of existing data and content to the consolidated platform is critical for a smooth transition and continuity of learning programs.
- Keep your data practices organized. According to research by Brandon Hall Group, the #1 challenge faced by L&D teams is measuring the effectiveness of learning. To do that, you need high-quality data, both from your LMS and other systems. For example, to measure learning’s impact on sales, you need learning and training data, but also data from your CRM so you can correlate the impact of learning to sales performance. Here, a solution like Learn Data can be incredibly valuable. It gives you access to all of your learning data (and there’s a lot!) in a clean, organized, secure, and ready-to-analyze format.
- Build and refine a change management strategy: By refining your change management strategy through the rollout of new features, courses, and programs, you’ll ensure smooth adoption and acceptance of the consolidated learning programs by all stakeholders.
- Encourage continuous improvement: Consolidation is an ongoing process, and organizations should continuously review and optimize their learning programs to adapt to changing needs and evolving technologies.
Final recommendations
LMS consolidation doesn’t just impact your tech stack; it impacts your teams. Use these recommendations to get the most out of learning consolidation—for everyone:
- Establish clear roles and amplify the voice of champions and sponsors: Use a RACI model to determine influence and drive decision-making while still getting a variety of perspectives. Identifying a champion and having an executive sponsor can break bottlenecks and help clarify needed features or functionality.
- Align processes and identify areas for improvement: Aligning processes and identifying areas that need improvement or elimination is necessary for success. Determining who has a seat at the table and who the decision-makers are ensures smooth collaboration and effective decision-making.
- Overcome ownership battles: Highlighting the collective benefits of working together and maximizing the overall impact can help overcome ownership battles that may arise during the consolidation process.
- Involve relevant stakeholders early on: Anticipating the full lifecycle of the consolidation program and involving all relevant stakeholders early on helps avoid last-minute surprises or requests, ensuring smoother implementation and higher stakeholder satisfaction.
- Plan a thorough discovery and RFP development phase: A thorough discovery phase that focuses on understanding people, processes, and technology is crucial. Developing a comprehensive Request for Proposal (RFP) document helps identify team-specific needs and select the right technology platform that aligns with the organization’s goals and requirements.
And remember: The pursuit of efficiency is an art in itself.
So, if you’re feeling artistic and want to unlock tons of efficiencies (and more effective, intuitive learning), then you’ll want to try a demo of the world’s most powerful learning platform: Docebo.
Docebo lets you browse thousands of world-class courses and license the content your learners need. Or just create beautiful, effective content yourself with our powerful generative AI tool.
You can connect your learners to their team and help empower the experts in your organization. And you can integrate learning into the flow of work and the systems you already use. But the real magic is this: A great LMS (like Docebo) uses data to prove the impact of learning. It can show you which courses have the biggest effect on ramp time and retention. It can show you the users and learners who produce the most useful content. And it can deliver personalized learning to every user, so they get a tailored learning experience built just for them—starting from their very first day.
