1. Define Clear Objectives
If you don’t know where you want to go any road could take you there. This applies to eLearning Outsourcing equally well. If you are not clear about what you want from a particular eLearning project you can be sure no one else is either. The vendor will often create a sketchy picture of your goals and try and achieve that. That’s NOT what you want.

• Use well defined Statements of Work when outsourcing eLearning projects.  Detail the vendors’ and your responsibility as accurately as possible.
• Define the ‘level’ of output by using reference of previous projects (your or vendor’s). If you can add more details good. Just agreeing to something like ‘Level 2 output’ is fuzzy and will create confusion later.
• Study and understand the Project Scope Documents and Design Documents well before you sign them off. If you don’t understand them your vendor will be happy to walk you through the documents.
• Include any specific goals your senior management has from the program and articulate that for the vendor development team and yourself. If these come in late in the development cycle costs will escalate and timelines are sure to be affected.

2. Follow Process

You’ve checked the vendor’s process documents & maturity models and how they’ll work for your projects when you selected them. Now it’s time to allow the vendor to conform to that process and those models,  and for you to emulate them yourself. There are times when deadlines are advanced, and you may be tempted to skip that prototype stage. Skipping an earlier stage comes at cost – the quality or delivery dates suffer due to endless modifications and rework. Apart from the additional cost, it would also mean frustration for the development team. You need to stand by and conform to the process in the best interest of your project.

It’s very important to understand your role in the project process. Reviews & feedback on the many deliveries you receive along the way need time commitment from you. A Common mistake clients make is to assume it is a simple task and can be done quickly. Have someone capable & experienced to do that work. I suggest you check with your vendor during the kick-off stage about the time based project needs and at which stages. A day’s delay from your end could sometimes lead to more than a day’s delay from vendor’s end especially if you are not working with a dedicated team at the vendor.

3. Get the Communication Right
On outsourced projects sometime communication can become more important than the actual deliveries themselves. We’ve heard clients complaining that the lack of information bothers them more than the missed deliveries. At most times they feel confident of handling the situation if timely information is available about the status of the project rather than find out at the 11^th hour about deliveries being missed or delayed. But that’s something any responsible vendor should do.

It is important to setup proper communication channels and keep them open to create an environment of confidence & trust between your own team and the vendor’s development team. Signed off specifications documents and approved prototypes should not necessarily hold you from having discussions on new ideas that may emerge. Also provide constructive feedback whenever there’s an opportunity. This tends to prompt the vendor to commit even more to your project.

If you are working with a vendor on multiple projects have periodic review discussions to evaluate how the relationship is going. Iron out any persistent issues in the processes or otherwise. Be forthcoming in resolving your side of issues too.

4. Define and Measure Quality
Like beauty quality is subjective too.
While a sense of ‘quality’ should emerge from your defined objectives you still need to clearly spell out what you mean by quality. Understand your team’s and management’s collective expectation about quality and make sure your vendor knows and understands them clearly. Ensure to list individual details about features, elements and any other specifics of the program that you consider a part of good or acceptable quality. For instance some clients consider the amount of animation and interactivition to be an indicator of high quality while others don’t.

Quality is what TRULY affects the outcomes of the program in a real sense. A good quality product will have the intended learning impact on the audience. I suggest you focus on what the learners are supposed to ‘do’ or ‘perform’ after the program and whether that’s being achieved by the program.  While you may add several bells and whistles to an eLearning course, the core has to be solidly focused around achieving that single most important objective. The cost of bad eLearning is much higher than you think.

It’s a good idea to define the quality assessment criteria for a program and approve checklists the vendor will use for testing. This will the development team give output that’s closer to your expectations and will eventually require less number of iterations.

5. Think Long Term
As your organization grows, you will probably outsource eLearning projects more. Every time you work with a new vendor it’s a learning experience for both the teams as they come to understand each other and their unique working culture and style. After working together on a few projects the communication and understanding between the teams reaches a level where projects start to flow smoothly. It just does not make sense to switch vendors every now and then. Think of your vendor as a possible long term partner from the very beginning. Invest in building their understanding of your organization, how it functions, and what’s the short term and long term goals; the returns will be well worth the effort.

If you work with an innovative vendor, it helps your team to develop new thoughts and skills too. This in turn could help you sell your services better internally or to external clients. Encourage discussions with your vendor to explore advances in the field and how you could take advantage of them.

One way to greater involvement is to revamp the engagement model with your vendor from being just a ‘cost-reduction’ or ‘staff-augmentation’ option towards becoming a ‘strategic-partner’. Getting formal engagement model agreement in place helps vendor commit resources and energy to think about advancements for your organization holistically rather than just work on a per project basis. Think business performance improvement & strategic capability building beyond cost savings.

Lastly I feel you should remember that your partner needs to be profitable to remain in business for the long term and be a suitable strategic partner. Don’t splurge but be ready to pay for experience and expertise.

I believe these five keys can you help you reap the benefits of eLearning outsourcing to the fullest.

The post eLearning Outsourcing: 5 Keys To Make It Work first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

This post deals with the benefits of eLearning outsourcing.

Why outsource?

Significant cost advantages
Undoubtedly, this is one of the key reasons for you to even consider outsourcing. Outsourcing arrangements enable you to reduce fixed costs and leverage the scalability of the service providers. This study by Bersin Associates – Offshore eLearning: What Works, estimates savings between 20-40% by outsourcing to India. It could be even more in some cases. Whether you are a corporate or a training company, you could gain from outsourcing (parts or full) projects to India. Of course you would need to choose a good vendor (I will discuss how to do that in a subsequent post).

Scalability without headaches
Outsourcing could help your team to be scalable – on demand. You could engage a team of 5 or 50 or 500 depending on your needs without having to worry about hiring, retention, firing etc. The vendor would manage everything including their training and providing replacement resources. This is hugely important for smaller companies given the kind of business environment we find ourselves in. It also helps in starting projects quickly, ramping up the team much faster, sometimes even putting the project on hold without much additional costs.

Better quality through innovation
Your eLearning vendor is better placed to deliver better quality – assuming you selected a good vendor to start with – on a consistent basis. This is a natural outcome of the continuous improvement that happens as your vendor’s team handles more projects of different kinds for diverse clients. That experience helps them anticipate problems in advance, troubleshoot better when needed, and also propose value added inputs based on their previous experiences. Chances are you can rely on your vendor (much more than you can on your internal team) to be ready with cutting-edge solutions. It is their business and they would (well, should) invest in innovation.

Reduce project risk
When outsourcing, you need to define your project very well to get RFPs ready. That reduces the risk to a large extent as everything you need is in one document – most probably has agreement of key stakeholders as well. The development process is better managed by the vendor including proper documentation (specification sheets, test plans, project plans, IDD, storyboards – with proper versioning etc.) and pre-defined delivery / sign off process (prototypes, Alpha & Beta deliveries) ensuring success of the project. You could even consider risk diversification by distributing work between multiple vendors i.e. if you have significant volumes of work to justify having multiple vendors.

More reliability on project completion
Often the company that you outsource to does only eLearning development as its core business. Consequently, all its processes and systems are specifically defined and well geared up to deliver eLearning products / projects. There is almost no chance of those resources being diverted to some other ‘more important’ tasks. That’s common when working with internal project teams. This reliability could mean a lot for certain critical training programs.

Focus on core / strategic goals
Though I list this at the end, this is the most important benefit you would get from outsourcing. Outsourcing helps bring greater focus to the core or strategic tasks of your training function – without sacrificing quality or service. You would better spend your energies on planning for future about how the organization and its business is changing, what skills are required now (& in future), and how best to make those skills available; evaluating success of training programs mapping them against business results, improving the whole training and development function to align it with business needs; and implementing organization cultural change plans to get it ready for the coming decade. These are tasks which only you can perform.

If you have outsourced for any other reasons we would love to hear from you. Please do share any other thoughts too.

The post eLearning Outsourcing: Why Consider It? first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

1. Client Demand: The provider’s clients have started demanding eLearning solutions (and training providers want to retain them). This is a pure survival and growth reason which I blogged about earlier. Undoubtedly, in the current economic situation there is a BIG push for training companies to move towards eLearning.
2. Cost of Training Delivery: To reduce cost of delivery for training companies and their clients. This is mentioned universally and has come into focus even more due to the recession where budgetary constraints (especially on travel) have impacted the off-take of classroom training in big way
3. Flexibility: Increase flexibility of access (anytime, anywhere). Most training companies mention it’s becoming difficult to pull employees out of their jobs for 2-5 day instructor-led sessions. With managers forced to do more with less people (several organizations have retrenched people) letting anyone off for even a day can become difficult.
4. Increase delivery options: Blended learning options to cater to the unique requirements of different clients. Some want more eLearning and some want less of it, others want mobile learning. This helps training providers reach client companies who otherwise had not been able to afford their classroom training – opening up a new stream of business. I’ve blogged before about why Blended Learning is the best option for training companies.
5. Improve efficiency: Improve efficiency & effectiveness of instructor led training with technology enabled components. Adding pre-workshop eLearning modules, post-workshop eLearning sessions (can be synchronous), mobile learning components for follow-ups that help increase retention. Using technology such as ARS (Audience Response Systems) in classrooms & providing collaborative environments can create learning opportunities for users. As training providers, they want to make their courses the ‘best in class’ using technology enabled learning affords them that opportunity.
6. Learning Management: Making management of reporting easier and be able to check off some important checkboxes (guess more relevant to compliance type training). As the paradigm shifts, Learning Management Systems will change and focus would be on truly managing learning and not just checkbox compliance.
7. It is better now: ELearning has improved since the time they last considered it. There is NO doubt about this; eLearning has come a long way. The addition of games, simulations, mobile based learning, social learning frameworks, collaborative tools and much more has come to instructional technology.  Rather than simple page-turners the industry is slowly turning to provide instructional experiences, both interactive and online.
8. Am I late: Don’t want to miss the boat. Well none of our prospects said this but it seems to be the overriding feeling amongst training providers. All of them realize that the days of classroom-training only are limited and they’d better start now.

The post Top 8 Reasons Why Training Providers Are Adopting eLearning first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

Training companies are now adopting eLearning for survival & growth. Bersin & Associates in a report earlier this year said about 40% of training organizations have an LMS. For training companies considering offering eLearning solutions, Blended Learning is the best bet too – albeit for a slightly different reason.

We have had several meetings earlier this month with prospective customers (training companies) about how we could help them with their eLearning initiatives. Some of these training companies are very new to the world of eLearning. Their interest in eLearning is due to several reasons, of which the most common ones are how to reduce costs and reduce time away from job. Their clients have slashed travel budgets, while managers in client organizations are not willing to let their employees go for training – as they are already managing with less manpower. Such factors are pushing training companies to look for alternatives to long classroom training programs.

eLearning fits in very well here – to the extent the content and program objectives allow.
However, from the training companies’ perspective, there is this big decision to be made – How much to let go (to eLearning)?

Training Companies would ideally want to hang on to all of their classroom training as that’s their core competency – something they really excel in and have relied on to satisfy & retain clients for years. Balancing market demand and the desire to retain the core competence leads to ‘blended learning’ emerging as a natural choice. It gives them the flexibility to customize programs to suit their clients’ budgets and time availability. We believe by doing blended learning well (and sooner than their competitors) training companies can further their competitive advantage.

The post Blended Learning is The Best Option first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

The common theme emerging from these meetings is that their clients have started asking for eLearning solutions or blended solutions. As an owner of a small training company said –“My clients could have stopped training last year and I could have been in big trouble” (his actual statement). Resonating but with a different tone some of bigger training companies mention –“We need to consider eLearning to maintain our leadership position and avoid losing clients. It helps make our offerings more competitive in the marketplace. It also helps us appear more progressive offering all possible options of training delivery.” (my interpretation of their statements)

That doesn’t surprise us at all. We’ve foreseen this kind of growth in demand for eLearning in the wake of recent widespread recession (which is not over yet!). Last quarter we saw growing indications of Training Companies Adopting eLearning and now we see that trend gaining momentum. We actually expect eLearning to grow well over the next couple of years and beyond.  We’re not suggesting face–to-face training is dead. It’s just that eLearning is growing and you need to sit up and take notice. We’d recommend Training Companies take a hard look at how the training market is re-shaping itself and how eLearning is beginning to take centre stage in the training portfolio of many organizations. It would be prudent to re-align your offering to suit your clients changing needs in order to retain your client-base.

If you’ve no experience with eLearning development yourself, you could align with an eLearning development vendor like us. Conduct some basic website review, sample reviews, reference checks, cost analysis, and even a small pilot. Even if your current clients are not demanding eLearning right now, it may make sense to develop eLearning options just to be ready. Of course, it makes sense to start small and gain some experience of how it works.

Needless to say we are happy to help if you have any questions or need assistance. Please feel free to write a comment here or email at info@upsidelearning.com.

The post eLearning Outsourcing: Training Companies Turn to eLearning for Survival & Growth first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

To follow-up on that discussion, Tony organized a free webinar on the Future of Learning as a Business last week. The panelists included some well known personalities from the Learning industry like Josh Bersin, Jay Cross, Harold Jarche, Ray Jimenez, and David Wilkins amongst others. The webinar was meant to discuss how the future of learning as a business looks and what the training departments and training companies could do to ensure theirs. There was a special focus on ideas/solutions that could help Training Companies sell more.

I thank Tony for inviting Upside Learning to share/showcase what its Innovation and New Projects Team is focusing on these days. In that presentation I spoke about our focus on Simulations & Games, Mobile Learning, Integrated Accountability, and Social Learning. For those who missed or could not attend the conference – the recording is now available on Learn Trends.

It was a great learning experience listening to the wonderful speakers that Tony invited. Some of the information I heard was new while a lot of it confirmed what we have been discussing internally – which is quite reassuring.

I do plan a follow-up post as I put together my thoughts from the conference.

The post Future of Learning Business – Focus of Our Innovation Team first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.

We have been listed as an Emerging Leader in Training Industry, Inc.’s 2009 list of “Emerging Leaders in Training Outsourcing”.

This list includes 15 top companies worldwide who, based on Training Industry, Inc.’s assessment, “are recognized industry leaders that have demonstrated innovation and excellence in providing outsourced learning services in selected business process categories and are poised to increase their level of services to clients”.

The list is compiled to provide businesses, government agencies, and training companies seeking learning solutions partners with a short list of reliable and proven training and eLearning business outsourcing companies. This can help them to make more informed decisions and procure high-quality learning services.

This is a significant milestone for us, and our team is thrilled that we have been listed as an Emerging Leader.

Click here to view the complete list.

The post Emerging Leaders in Training Outsourcing first appeared on The Upside Learning Blog.