The Data, Integrations, Content, and Governance Playbook A Foundation of LMS Success

We’ve outlined our approach to delivering ‘frictionless’ learning through our Kallidus Readiness Model. We’ve done the research and learned that it is hardly ever (translated to “never) one person who makes decisions or influences the learning strategy of the organization. These decisions are influenced by leaders in Finance, IT, Operations, even Legal, and are ultimately made by Learning & Development, Talent, and Human Resources. We’ve taken all this into consideration and designed a model that you can use and share with leaders throughout your organization so that you have a framework within which to make the best decisions for your learners and your business as you contemplate the learning management system that works best for you.

The following document provides an outline of the process and tools to support this approach. There’s lots here, but nothing worth having is easy – right?

In fact, we wrote this playbook for people who find their current learning environment — to use the words from our L&D practitioner survey — “a little clunky”. Well, don’t worry! The friction that you feel now is what sparked you to look for something better. The good news is that we’ve done the heavy lifting for you, so now let’s get you moving toward frictionless learning experiences for all!

Whether you work with productivity tools or even basic Microsoft applications, your LMS should seamless appear everywhere your learners are. The only way to make this possible is with a plan for integrations, data, and accessibility. We’ll go into each of those areas inside of this playbook. But that’s not all, above each of these considerations is your overall learning governance stance. You want to have agreement around who gets to learn and why, what gets learned, what is a must and what is a nice to have, what information you are willing to share between systems and people. Yes, there is a lot to consider, and we have.

As the role of learning and development plays a larger and larger part of strategic business planning, it is critical for the L&D function to contribute to greater business goals. A learning governance model can ensure your approach to L&D stays in sync with corporate plans and expand with successes. Remember, you are looking to deliver more frictionless learning experiences because every positive learning moment will invite another. Staying in sync with your business goals will create organizational growth that can fund more learning.

What is learning governance?

Learning governance encompasses policies, processes and structures that oversee and guide learning activities to ensure their effectiveness, alignment with organizational goals and compliance with regulations.

One of the reasons we suggest “Safe and Legal” as a foundational use case is because it inherently puts a spotlight on governance. Consider the following as inclusions in your learning governance plan:

• Employee and extended enterprise (contractors, partners) eligibility requirements for learning benefits
• Learning accessibility requirements and frequency of evaluation
• Timelines for sunsetting or renewing learning technologies, content, and other programs
• Success metrics for employee learning and development. Review our playbook on Learning Outcomes for more on this.

Learning governance policies should extend to all types of L&D initiatives and should therefore be reviewed by your key stakeholder group.

The objective of learning governance is to irrefutable make learning the way you conduct your business. Effective learning governance practices promote alignment between key organizational stakeholders and ensure that all learning initiatives directly tie back to business outcomes. Your governance plan unites your initiatives with your stakeholders, and to your learning outcomes together. The best governance plan should answer all the C-suite questions from a strategic perspective and should roll up to a statement that easily answers: “Why do we invest in L&D?”

With a learning governance model in place you should not fear times of disruption because your plan will give you the guidance required to navigate through those hurdles and get back on course. The plan is not an instruction guide, however. Because we know that we live in a complex, fast-paced world, we need to be agile and our governance model should be agile too.

What does learning governance look like in practice?

In our Stakeholder Engagement playbook, we tough on the roles of each stakeholder group. If you followed those prompts, you should be in a good position to bring your governance plan together. The plan itself should include LMS documentation (your provider, IT and your L&D admin should lead this), overseeing the budget, monitoring performance, and change management.

Next, your needs assessment will serve as backbone to your governance plan. You may want to take a look at our Needs Assessment playbook to refresh yourself and borrow some of the tools there. Your needs assessment should include the different learning priorities for different business areas, how learning is happening (current state), and what is expected of learning (future state). Your goal is to create a company-wide understanding for the L&D function while still allowing for flexibility to meet arising and changing needs.

Here are some next steps for you to consider your learning governance plan:

• Take inventory. Your needs assessment likely exposed some gaps in your current learning program. That doesn’t mean you have to start over. Review all tools and programs. Define what is working well and what is underperforming and determine how to integrate those findings into your governance framework. Remember, integration is a key part of a frictionless learning environment. Know what you have so you know what you need to connect with.
• Review your learning outcomes. If you haven’t already, now is the time to visit our Learning Outcomes playbook. It is critical for you to outline your objectives so that you can craft the outcomes that would define your success. Remember, these outcomes will be multi-dimensional as they need to address individual, departmental, functional, and business stakeholders. Once these are in place, you will be able to create a strategy to govern your progress against these objectives and outcomes.
• Putting your plan into action. With governance in place, you will find that decision making is easier. You will be able to make choices to benefit specific initiatives and outcomes can then be attributed to how you made such decisions. In short, imagine the governance plan as the like your Google Home app. If you have properly aligned everything, then you should be able to turn off your oven while out for a stroll and alert your neighbor that the cookies are ready all within a few taps!

How to assess whether your People data is accurate

So how do you know if your people data is ‘good data’? One approach to consider is get an export of your HR data, review by filtering by column headers, and check for the following:

• Select a column of data (i.e., department).
• Copy the column into a new sheet.
• Remove duplicates (data tab > remove duplicates).
• Check for typos (i.e., an additional ‘s’ or a space).
• Highlight these inaccuracies for areas to be tidied.
• Repeat for other key items of data that will be fed into your LMS.

Key things to check for:

• Are there any duplicate job titles – i.e., spelling variations etc.?
• Are people included multiple times?
• Are all departments listed – i.e., any obsolete names included?
• Are there unexpected spaces or returns in any of the values?
• Do people have the wrong line manager? This may involve reaching out to department heads.
• Sense check – does the data represent the truth as you know it, or does it look to be inaccurate? It can help to engage key stakeholders to help as you sense check the data.
• Duplicate detail in your source data, can ultimately mean duplicate detail created in your LMS, and that can create work for your team.

This task might seem daunting, but don’t panic! It can be quicker than you think to rectify and will save a huge amount of time in the future. Existing inaccuracies may have been hidden up to this point, but can easily be exposed when you’re using the data on a more granular level – as you will do to get the most efficiencies from an LMS.

How do we make it right?

Inaccurate data may also be impacting other business areas too so it may be possible to involve the wider business in a clean-up. Can IT or other stakeholders help? Can your HR provider help? Reach out to your IT team – they will be able to advise some nifty tips and shortcuts to update spreadsheets.

Once inaccuracies are identified, reach out to stakeholder groups to discuss what needs to be updated, and importantly to assess how this might impact other systems if the data is changed. Ultimately the whole business will benefit from more accurate people data, so get people on board – it will make a huge difference to the potential of your LMS and your business.

Your LMS will need to be populated with content before you can import history, assign learning and before you can go live. Further, you need to consider accessibility at this stage. Here is a link to an article for you to review to understand the foundations of accessibility in learning.

Here are some questions will you want to ask about your LMS to prepare the right content for your implementation:

What digital content does the LMS support?

You want to be sure that you can import files you create to your LMS. Further, you want to be sure you know the file types that can be uploaded into your LMS.

For the sake of comparison, Kallidus Learn LMS allows you to create outside of the LMS and import and share those files in the LMS. Kallidus Learn LMS supports eLearning types such as SCORM and AICC, mp4 video, PPT, PDF and XLS.

We’ve purchased off-the-shelf (OTS) content – what happens with that?

If you have purchased a complete library or a selection of courses, you’ll need to identify which courses you want uploaded to your LMS. It is important to know what you are starting with so that you can fill any gaps. Consider your needs assessment plan to identify all you will need.

For an example of off-the-shelf content that you may consider using, visit the Kallidus off-the-shelf course catalog.

We’ve purchased content from another vendor. How does this get added to our LMS?

Before starting your project, we recommend reaching out to your vendor to ask for them to supply you with the eLearning files so you have it project ready.

Where possible we also recommend getting a demo version of content from external vendors so you can upload that content and make sure you are happy with how it displays and operates. If you have numerous courses to upload, your LMS vendor may offer a for fee service to do it for you.

We’d like to move content from our existing LMS into our new one. How do we do that?

Do you have access to the source files? If so, the files could be imported in to your LMS.. If the learning ONLY exists in your outgoing LMS, then speak to your current LMS provider to explore how the learning can be extracted.

We have some other learning we’d like to add. How should we do that?

As above, the key here is having access to the source files. For any eLearning, MP4, PDF, PPT or XLS files you’d like to share, you’ll need the source files.

We’re authoring some eLearning ourselves. Can we get started with that?

Absolutely! It can take time to create the content you need, so allow time for this in your project plan. it’s never too soon to get started.

Many companies have licenses to a content authoring tool. Some companies have an authoring tool built-in with their LMS. Kallidus as a partnership with Articulate, a leading content authoring tool, which is available for its customer to use.

What about Instructor-led training? Can we do anything to get started with that?

Definitely. It’s quite likely that as you explore the learning your people need and want, you’ll find some learning that will be Instructor-led – either online, or face-to-face. View the article ‘Identify the learning your company requires, and your people want’ for more information.

What non-digital learning might we add to our LMS?

Observed competency checks are a great way to ensure learning has hit the spot. For example, take a look at ‘Build and curate learning’ in The Academy to see all the different Lesson types available in Learn LMS, and how they might be used.