by Site Staff
July 1, 2003
World-class practices can operationalize the objectives in your strategic game plan, which will improve your Balanced Scorecard (BSC) results:
Internal Learning and Development Consortiums: When L&D is decentralized, establishing an internal L&D council can realize benefits, including getting volume discounts with vendors, sharing program materials, leveraging classroom space and avoiding redundant work. Impact on BSC: 25 to 50 percent cost avoidance on shared projects (financial); share core capabilities across the organization (capabilities); leverage facilities (operational).
Migrate the Right 25 Percent of Content to E-Learning: Although there are mixed feelings regarding the benefits of e-learning, it provides one of the best opportunities to reduce costs and provide employees universal access to learning. The key is to provide the right content to be delivered over the Web and to market it to decision-makers and employees. Impact on BSC: Reduce unit costs for training by 20 to 50 percent (financial); learning available to all (capabilities); reduce cycle time to introduce new product (operational); provide customer and partner training (customer).
Use Internal Leaders as Faculty: Use of internal leaders as faculty in executive development, new-hire programs and core skills workshops reduces delivery costs. It also develops facilitation, communication, motivation and presentation skills in leaders and energizes employees who experience them as teachers. Impact on BSC: Reduce delivery costs by 10 to 25 percent (financial); develop key leadership skills (capabilities); retain talent (capabilities).
Leverage Vendors: As outsourced learning increases, leveraging vendors provides significant business opportunities. Practices include using reverse auctions to quickly find the best provider, setting up a list of preferred vendors with negotiated discounts and standard prices, using third-party bulk purchasing groups such as SmartBridge Inc. and participating in cross-industry consortiums such as Harvard Business School Publishing’s Multimedia Consortium. Impact on BSC: Reduce unit costs 10 to 25 percent (financial); get fast access to learning on core skills (capabilities); speed up time to identify vendor or content (operational).
Use Virtual Classroom for Delivery: Over the past few years the quality of virtual classroom delivery has improved, making it an ideal solution to offer training to disperse populations inside the company, as well as for accessing certification training such as Cisco and Microsoft certification by vendors such as KnowledgeNet. Impact on BSC: Reduce costs of delivery and reduce attendee travel costs (financial); learning provided to dispersed groups (capabilities); reduce cycle time for certification (operational); provide customer access (customer).
Content Prioritization by Value: Annually evaluating all programs to determine if they are adding value can be a rational process for eliminating programs. The keys are keeping the evaluation simple and based on business impact and alignment to the organizations strategic priorities as well as establishing a process to identify the 10 to 20 percent to be eliminated each year. Impacts on BSC: Reduce costs of maintenance and delivery costs (financial); streamline prioritization process (operational).