LMS – I don’t want to be Little Miss Should’ve

“Okay, okay, okay…it’s not all my fault Tony.” — I’d rather be Little Miss Splendid

Tony Karrer (eLearning Technology) posted today on his blog, 10 Gotcha’s when implementing an LMS into your organization. Apparently after sharing my frustration yesterday, Tony helpped to point out that I may be experiencing #1 – Starting With an Unrealistic Expectation of What You Need, #4 – Failing to Identify Key Differentiating Use Cases, and #6 – Not Testing a LMS.

We’ve (my org.) have been trying to step into the LMS world since….uggg, my calendar says….2003. I’ll start with Tony’s #6 Gotcha. Yes, I’ll admit to this one. No we didn’t get hands on testing of anything and I think the reason we never asked was, we just wanted something anything, just give us the darn thing. 2003-2004 we had an IT Director that was keen on the whole project, got all the stake holders together and looked at one demo after another after another. He left, the project went stale, the money got filtered elsewhere and we lost the momentum. 2005 the new IT Director gets more push about an intranet….no…sorry….no funding, figure something else out. So, our make shift intranet is born. It’s used. More and more department want a page/section on the site. Ah-ha, now he has some leverage to find funding and begin the ball rolling again. However, we are going to make sure we get an all in one package from someone that includes and intranet, doc management and LMS. After a billion more demos, some the same from the first round, we narrow it down to two vendors. I will share here as well that during one point of all this searching around there were issues with trying to make sure we were doing what other hospitals in the area/affiliates were doing. It would have helped with pricing, sharing, hosting, etc., but again we were sick of waiting and went and begun our own project. With the two vendors chosen, we invited every stakeholder we could think of (maybe too many) and armed with a series of must-haves we evaluated them again through demos (and referenced other hospitals using the products) and put it to a vote. Again, I’ll add here…. we finally had the funding approved, we just wanted one, any one, get it going. So….no there was no hands on testing. (FAIL – perhaps, time will tell regarding our product and our satisfaction, but this was definitely an oversight.)

Gotcha #1…Unrealistic Expectation….okay maybe, this is a definite we’ll see. I don’t think we are aiming too high here. We know it’s going to be a real challenge to get our staff to start using and embracing the system. I really would just love something that is going to track our staff education (outside the organization), something to help with booking the internal courses, and something to launch and better yet marked the annoying core curriculum (still marking the paper ones from June). (PASS – but barely, I think are expectations are okay, but listening and believing the implementation time line was very, very silly.)

Gotcha #4 – Failing to Identify Key Differentiating Use Cases…I’m going to admit here….I’m not sure what this one means. I’m going to need some help clarifying this mistake.

I will be very interested to see if any of the other Gotchas show up during this project. I’m keeping track now.