Chief Learning Officer - April 2008 - (Page 43) IN PRACTICE SAP GOES TO THE MOVIES outreach with all relevant product benefits brought to bear to persuade a prospect to become a customer. Given these phases, when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of the marketing of your learning programs, what should you measure? Metrics that indicate how well your marketing is creating awareness of your learning programs could be taken from an annual employee engagement survey or your department surveys that ask how well learning needs are met across the organization. Measures that show levels of employee inquiry or trial are easier to see: the increased number of management requests for courses and new learning offerings, the number of employee requests for more course information and the number of employee and management e-mails to learning with questions about courses. Measures on “closing the sale” — enrolling someone for a class — also are more concrete: the percent of people who inquired about the course and went on to enroll in the course, the percent increase in the number of employees who took at least one course and the percent increase in the number of employees who took multiple courses or increased the amount of learning they took during the past year. The key words for learning in the boardroom today are alignment and results. The enduring questions are: How can learning align its work to the needs of the business? How can it help drive results? Alignment measures components of marketing, such as strategy — how well the learning maps to overall organizational priorities and positioning and how well the program meets the needs of learners and their managers. An alignment index measures how well learning executes on its value proposition. It would typically be made up of commitment-based metrics such as the percent of planning meetings scheduled and held with stakeholders and the percent of learning initiatives committed and delivered, as well as select question responses from posttraining and follow-up surveys targeting alignment. Most course surveys and tests measure the stated goals of the learning program itself. Often, these are efficiency- and effectiveness-oriented measures related to how well and how quickly learning enabled some part of the organization to better perform its mission. One of the most effective marketing tools for learning in the executive suite is the success story, taking a positive business result that was enabled by learning and promoting it to others. Yet CorpU’s 2008 benchmark study reveals that only 39 percent of the learning functions surveyed included testimonials in their marketing materials. Although the LMS may not capture the conversion of this type of marketing initiative, learning should use these stories as it goes out to other parts of the organization to sell itself as a strategic partner. As parts of the organization come back to learning and ask, “Could you help us in this particular area?”, it usiness software solutions provider SAP went to the movies recently — to raise awareness among its project managers of a new learning offering on virtual team management. In 2004, the enterprise software company saw that several software development projects being worked on by globally dispersed associates were slipping and knew the realities of multiple time zones and cultural differences significantly contributed to the problem. But only a minimal amount of learning was (and is) mandatory for SAP employees each year, so the Walldorf, Germany-headquartered company knew it would have to do something different in marketing the course to persuade busy project managers to make time to take the new offering. Enspire Learning created the six-module, self-paced virtual team management Web course for SAP, using a game-based approach with tutorials and virtual puzzles to boost learner interactivity. Then Enspire reused pieces from the course to create a two-minute video that advertised it in a style that spoofed the typical “coming attractions” trailers shown before a movie plays in theaters. SAP University launched this program in 2005 through its LMS system, SAP Learning Portal. Enrollment was open to all employees in the organization, but was aimed at managers responsible for projects that upgraded SAP’s software offerings. From experience, SAP anticipated that the new course would be taken 500 times in its first year of availability. SAP marketed details of the new course through several internal communication channels, including e-mails sent from executive managers to line managers, an article in the internal SAP newsletter and a mention of the course with a link to the movie trailer on the landing page of the corporate portal. The trailer video also was attached to broadcast e-mails sent to all project managers and their managers. Total costs to design, develop and produce the six course modules were about 300,000 euros. With generous reuse of course content, the movie trailer cost less than 3,000 euros to produce. In one year, from 2005 to 2006, 1,152 SAP managers took the course, more than 125 percent beyond what was anticipated. Additionally, using the Boudreau learning utility formula (described below), SAP University computed a net utility for the virtual team management course of 1.3 million euros, on a total program cost of 800,000 euros. This represented an ROI of about 500,000 euros, or more than $750,000 (as of February 2008). CLO BOUDREAU FORMULA: U = TxNxdxSDY-C U = the dollar value of a training program T = the duration, in number of years, of a training program’s effect on performance N = the number of applications of the training D = the true difference in job performance between the average trained and the average untrained employee in units of standard deviation SDY = the standard deviation of job performance in dollars that is affected by training C = the cost of training B
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.