By Craig Maurer, Director of Client Services, Expertus
In Part I of this blog series, we discussed how to start your business case for securing a modern LMS. Now we’ll address…
What Questions to Ask
Your number one goal should be demonstrating how a modern LMS can make every stakeholder and business group’s work easier. Develop supporting metrics that you can measure, and do your due diligence by asking these critical questions:
- Why do you need a new LMS? Have any previous implementations failed? Why?
- Why is your learning strategy not working? Will new a new LMS fix this? Or, is technology not the issue?
- What problems, pains and inefficiencies do you want to fix?
- Who will get the most benefit from more contextualised, meaningful training? (i.e. HR, senior leadership, sales, customer service/support, etc.) How?
- How will your LMS investment support your company’s strategic business plan?
- What impact will it make on organisational goals, processes, metrics, etc.?
- Does your company have a process or require an RFP for purchasing software? Should you get IT involved?
- How can you prove ROI, and do you need to present your findings to executives?
A key subset of your due diligence is identifying how your learning investment will affect important stakeholders. Use these questions to better understand their business goals and training challenges, and how the LMS will address them:
- What are their quarterly/yearly strategic goals?
- What metrics do they use? How else would they like to use analytics?
- Are there any department synergies you can strengthen? (These will help support your business case and produce more meaningful back-end results.)
After you’ve gathered your data, use it to pinpoint how a modern learning management system will directly impact business challenges, growth, direction and opportunities. Then, you’re ready to make your business case.
Read Part III of this series for a step-by-step plan…
