On of the key hurdles that legacy organizations face in transforming themselves is the business perception of them as a utility and not as a strategic partner. If this is the environment you are working in, it can be hard to break out of the paradigm and change the conversation. The first step towards a strategic partnership with your business is to take stock of your own strengths and weaknesses. Do a SWOT analysis of your capabilities to really understand where your capabilities lie and critically examine the value that you provide.
Once you have a good understanding of your own capabilities and perceptions, you can take the steps needed to prepare yourself for a strategic partnership. Key activities to accomplish in working towards this goal would include:
Step 1: Developing an Instructional Strategy
As an organization you need to decide what your instructional strategy would be in supporting the business in their needs. On the spectrum of following a prescriptive ‘sage on the stage” approach and giving learners total control and personalizing to individual learner needs, you need to decide the sweet spot where you will focus most of your efforts for maximum impact.
Step 2: Developing Success Measures
We need to develop clear success measures for the strategy. Some KPI’s to consider:
• Reducing total budget by X%
• Increasing business revenues by X% (tied to business metrics)
• Developing revenue channels
• Optimizing Investment in projects that have positive ROI
• Tracking impact of learning interventions on business metrics
• Tracking impact of learning against employee retention metrics especially in contact centers
Step 3: Continuous Alignment through Analytics
Strategic alignment is never a once and done effort but something that requires continuous engagement and calibration with the business to ensure that we are working in Sync. In addition to the consulting skills, you also need analytical tools at your disposal that would help you bring data based solutions to the business. These tools should help you move learning analytics from a trailing indicator to a predictive indicator so that you can observe trends and proactively offer solutions before problems arise.
