I facilitated a Breakfast Byte session at the eLearing Guild Annual Gathering and wanted to capture the points I shared and those of the participants. It’s a long list so be prepared and is not in any particular order. These are many of the questions I’ve had to answer as I’ve gone along trying to get my system up.
- Get your hands on a demo or sandbox version. Make sure you get to play with the LMS before purchasing.
- Don’t be in a rush to find something and just get it implemented.
- If possible check to see what system others in your industry are using.
- Make sure your team of stakeholders knows what they are looking for and need prior to viewing the demo. Make sure they are as informed as you.
- Set weekly progress meetings with your vendor.
- Ensure each side of the implementation knows exactly what tasks are being accomplished by each side (you and your vendor)
- Make sure your HR database of employees has all the data you really need to track and report on your staff. Older HR systems may not have everything you need.
- Make sure your HR system can communicated with the LMS system.
- Consider whether you need an LMS that can be accessed from home or is inside the company “walls” enough. Can the LMS handle external access?
- Training, training, training. Make sure you as the Administrator get training from a Learner level, then an Instructor level, and finally the Administrator level. Know what each person will see and be able to access.
- Don’t get pressured by the vendor to launch before you are comfortable with the system and know it is up to your personal/dept standards of excellence. Credibility will be lost by you if you launch to early and have too many bugs.
- Ensure the reporting is extremely robust, customizable, exportable.
- Roles – most LMS seem to offer training broken into learning roles. Is this a method you can use to group training for staff? Is this something that fits with your corp’s learning models.
- How robust is the testing/quizzing of the system? Is it even built in? Does the LMS mark a pass/fail or can it track down to the question level?
- Can you import courses that have been created elsewhere and track the results from participation?
- How well does the vendor understand SCORM compliance? Can they explain it to you?
- Can you import courses or does the vendor have to do this for you? Each course could cost more money.
- How user friendly and easily navigational is the system for learners, instructors and administrators?
- Can students be easily updated, added, maintained?
- Can the system be changed easily to match your organization’s needs/branding? Can you do this or does the vendor have to make these changes?
- Can you group your courses into categories that make sense to your learners?
- Do you have a checklist of all the components that you want to see in an LMS to match your vendor against?
- Can the system create courses (some can and still call themselves an LMS and not an LCMS)? More importantly, if so how robust are they or do you need to think about looking into a 3rd party course creation tool.
- What types of content can be imported? video, audio, ppt, doc, xls, pdf, swf, anything else?
- Do you and your vendor have the same idea of how the system will initially roll out? 1 course or several, only registration or online courses as well? Make sure you are both clear on what “go live” means.
- Do you have the most current version of the system or are updates being created as you are trying to implement your system?
- How often will you get updates?
- Do you offer classroom courses as well as online courses? If so how well does the system manage the classroom courses for you based on your current training methods.
- Research lots of LMSs before even going to the RFP stage. You’ll be able to eliminate those that don’t meet your requirements before going to stakeholders for input.
- Name your LMS – give it a name that will mean something to your employees and keep them coming back to the system to learn.
- Take advice from the vendor on how to role out the pilot of the system, but stick to what you also know will work best for your organization. They may have the methodology, but you may know the sample size that works best for you.
- Find an IT buddy. Someone that can help you out and translate the computer language talk that goes along with implementing a system and getting it to talk to your internal system.
- Find an LMS mentor, someone that has implemented a system before. Even if they implemented a different product they’ll be able to advise.
- Not everything is going to work 100% from the very start, so take it easy on yourself. Don’t expect it all to fall into place right away.
- Figure out what LMS elements are most important to you and get them up and running for the pilot, then work from there on making it more and more robust.
- Do you have a backup plan should another dept start thinking and shopping for their own LMS?
- How responsive is the vendor to your inquiries, troubleshooting, etc
- Is there a yearly licence or one time fee, or per user fee
- How often are upgrades issued? Are they part of the fee?
- How long does the pilot take? How long do they think it will be up and running based on past customers?
- Does the system track external learning events?
- Do other users have comments they can share from learners of the system? Learner feedback?
- Can you send email notification to learners?
- Can it be integrated with your particular online calendar system?
- Can you assign course dates to learners or do they have to assign themselves?
- Is there space on the dashboard for news, updates, info text, on homepage?****
- Is it searchable? By course title or right into a course? Do you have to use it’s elearning building tool to make it searchable?
- Can you administer hands-on practical tests?
- Are evaluations for courses available?
- Does it have discussion boards, wikis, etc? Are these important to you? Do you even need them?
- Does it have other social networking tools?
- What is built in and what has to be an add-in?
- How robust is the support documentation for the user and for the learner?
- Can you set up courses that online some staff can access and not others? – assigned to a role?
- Go to the top if you have to? Maybe weekly conversation with your project lead, but monthly meeting with owner of company or sales rep to keep project on track.
- Try to list all the steps you will need to cover to get the system going.
- What for vendors/sales reps that bully and are they showing you the “real” system? Can you see a demo from an actual user with out the vendor present?
- How secure is the data by the vendor – if hosted?
- Be prepared to go over budget.
- Find out one key contact (from the provider) for your implementation project so that you can maintain constant communication.
- Can you get ROI reporting from the system?
- Can you produce performance appraisals, career paths, development paths? Is this something you need as an organization?
- You can “turn off” the elements of the LMS you don’t need or won’t use.
You have to be careful with some of these recommendations.
First, remember that often times that the worst thing that you can do is NOTHING. Your recommendations really point to “keep a low profile so you don’t get fired” approach.
Look at a “getting your feet” wet solution. Roll out to a controlled user group. Make sure your content is exportable and that records are exportable. That way, you can always move to another LMS system.
Don’t worry so much! Remember that at the end of the day this is training not surgery. The worst thing that can happen is that you have a couple of upset end-users. This is not ideal, but doing NOTHING is far worse. Remember, delaying your implementation by 3 months is an example of DOING NOTHING.
If you have weekly meetings with your vendor, you have other problems. You need a CONSULTANT that knows training, not a software vendor. Just “following the leader” as you point out in # 3 will never give you a competitive advantage. Your vendor should have you up and running in a week. Quarterly or bi-annual meetings should be enough. If you are wasting more time than that with a vendor; you have a solution that is too complicated to be effective (or a bad vendor).
Point 6 is very important. Setting expectations is the true key to a successful implementation.
To take # 7 to the next level, training should consider external opportunities as well as internal. The fact is that 90% of businesses have no opportunity or need to provide internal training. That is why you hear from all the Fortune 500 types. They do not understand the practical needs of a small or medium business (less than 10,000 employees). At the same time most organizations with 1,000-10,000 people TRY to do what the big companies are doing because they heard about something at a seminar. UNDERSTAND YOUR ENVIROMENT. THINK ACTIVELY.
Again, # 11 applies if you are spending a $ 1,000,000 on your system. At the same time, the value oriented systems are designed for ease of use. Don’t be afraid to start with an ASP/SaaS model and make a mistake in the first year. The cost of renting these systems is not the great (usually under $ 50K) in the grand scheme. Paralysis will kill you. The vendor is probably “pressuring” you because you are wasting their time with hours of being anal rententive and it is not profitable for them to serve you. Like dating, if you are going to screw around, don’t think that you will end up going home with the best girl. THIS will lead to your failure. This relationship needs to be strong for both sides. Most vendors will be very straight forward with you if they cannot meet your needs. If a vendor says that they can serve you — and asks for your business — you should be well off.
Let your vendors know who you are looking at. Let them know what you like/dislike. A good vendor will be able to give you a frank comparison of systems. Not all systems are as similiar as they may appear to be on the surface