Mapping all Processes, Identifying Areas of Waste and Overlaps

Pratima Krishnan, Chief Learning Officer at Techcombank

In late 2019, we had a serious outage in our LMS and we were scrambling to ensure that all employees completed their compliance training. We are a midsize bank with staff of more than 11,000 in Vietnam; hence, this outage provided us with an opportunity to prepare a business case for the Bank to invest in a new LMS. Over the next 2 years, our team of over 30 learning professionals designed one of the best learning systems, leveraging SAP Success Factors in Vietnam and received a Best Run award by SAP.

Here are five key lessons we learnt along the way.

1. Marie Kondo your processes. Start with mapping all processes, identifying areas of waste and overlaps. The challenge is when the response is “if I am not broke why fix it” or “there are too many inter-related processes and it’s tough to change them”. If you do not clean up before you implement, you will be building the system on inefficiencies. Clean your processes and clean your data.

2. Build a business case with the ‘why, what, when, where and how’. Visualizing the “as is” and “to be,” states clearly, along with global benchmarks helps senior leaders feel more comfortable with the project investments. Quantifying time and cost savings at a granular level helps showcase the ROI of the project. Anticipate resistance and work on a detailed WIIFM (what’s in it for me) for each stakeholder group. The role of the project sponsor is critical, and ensuring their continuous support is critical to project success. The project sponsor also plays a key role in ensuring that other senior leaders are supportive. Never underestimate the effort required in change, be it skillset change or mindset change.

“If you do not clean up before you implement, you will be building the system on inefficiencies. Clean your processes and clean your data.”

3. Don’t let the scope creep get to you. The common mistake made is to overpromise when it comes to what the LMS can do. Leaders sometimes expect miracles. We had a request come in from one of the leaders to record all learning that his team was accessing (both company and personal). Learning is a daily activity and imagine recording every single moment that you are learning. Create the boundaries of expectations.

4. Before you run, you first need to walk. There is a lot of talk about LXP (Learning Experience Platform). Do remember that its critical to have a strong foundation LMS before starting to add the bells and whistles. We learnt from painful experience that it’s critical for the Learning Platform to be connected to the HR core system. The last mile is the most important, the LMS platform must be integrated with the HR system and other online learning platforms that the organization has subscribed to (e.g. LinkedIn Learning) for a seamless user experience.

5. It takes a village to raise a child. Make sure that you are enabling every learning person as an admin. Unlike other HR systems, the LnD team needs to upload course content, assign, track and monitor on a daily basis and it’s important that the LnD team knows how to do this. Do upskill your LnD department as admins and ensure that they continually certify themselves.

Migrating learning platforms is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Although the returns come later, the initial euphoria fades into user complacency. Motivating both the LnD folks and the users is imperative if you want to ensure a better adoption of the platform.

 

LMS

SAP

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HR systems