5 Hurdles You May Encounter While Implementing an LMS

While there are countless benefits of implementing a Learning Management System in your organization, there are also many challenges. Read on to know about the hurdles that you may face.

Hurdle #1: Resistance from Employees

Implementing change is one of the most difficult things to do in the corporate world. Most employees are well settled in their comfort zones and probably won’t budge when presented with a strategy that is geared towards bringing about change.

Address this by making your employees a part of the decision making process. Go for a bottom-up approach starting with the needs of the employees. Work your way up to list down different choices of LMSes. Being a part of the decision-making process will make your employees feel part of the process, and in turn, make them less hostile to change.

Hurdle #2: Getting a Leadership-Buy In

Convincing your decision makers on investing in a new LMS is not a walk in the park. If you think that you have it covered with your list of ‘reasons why the initiative is important’ and ‘how it will boost the productivity of all employees’, then Stop.

You may not have realized it, but you have been focusing solely on how to sell the initiative. Whereas, your senior decision makers are all about numbers and the bottom-lines. Get their attention by proposing an attractive Return on Investment for the LMS. You should be clear about the synergies and functioning of different business units.

For a more detailed guide on guaranteeing a leadership buy-in, you may want to read ‘Getting a Leadership Buy-In For Your LMS’.

Hurdle #3: Implementation

At a point when you are knee deep in the LMS process, you may realize that you need to complete way too many tasks, make multiple decisions, consult multiple department heads or get permissions from several decision makers.

Solve this by assembling an implementation team. Get started with assembling a core team which will take care of LMS implementation and decision making. Also, bring together a secondary team. These members will work with the LMS on a regular basis both before implementation, giving you valuable experience with the tool, and after.

The Core Team

If yours is a small-medium sized organization, your core team will work fine with 2–4 people, each wearing multiple hats. Larger organizations may need a larger core team. Regardless of the strength, the core team should include 5 main roles.

Team Leader: He/she will be the one who keeps the ball rolling towards a successful implementation, interacts with the LMS vendor, and escalates issues whenever necessary.

E-Learning Specialist: Transitioning from a legacy training system to an LMS can be difficult. He/she will be responsible for supervising courseware migration, preventing loss of data, and testing of new LMS features such as assessments, mobile apps, surveys etc.

Project Manager: He/she will be responsible for keeping tabs on all moving parts such as tasks, subtasks, resources, due dates etc.

IT Head: The IT head will be responsible for a host of system related tasks such as installation, user data migration, API integration, security, role management, etc.

Training Administrator: He/she will be the connection between the organization’s training needs and the delivery of training on the LMS. These include compliance training, certifications, learning roadmaps, onboarding programs, etc.

The Extended Team

The extended team will be comprised of eLearning authors, instructional designers and IT engineers who will be key to the successful implementation of the LMS. Activities during implementation such as administrator training, user acceptance testing, content cleanup, etc also need to be taken care of.

Include IT production support engineers, database administrators, network managers, system integrators, and security officers who will perform as extensions to the core team’s IT Head.

Hurdle #4: The Content

One of the most common questions that organizations who do not have existing eLearning content ask their LMS vendors is —

“So…what about the training content?”

Nowadays, you can buy most of the training courses you need and launch an LMS loaded with content faster than ever before. Note, that I’m talking about course content and not media content.

You can use packaged content in two ways to facilitate your training needs:

Buy Bundled Course Content Packages

Generic courses may be looked down upon by your team. However, if you need a quick solution which gets the job done, then go for these. Readymade course packages give you hundreds of courses loaded and ready to deploy before any designer creates even a single course. Remember, always buy before you build. If you’ve got time to kill, then you can try creating your custom courses. But I have yet to meet a corporate employee who has spare time.

Tailor Purchased Content

Say you purchased a Sales101 course from a content provider and assigned it to a batch of employees for a test run. You then realised that it lacked a few aspects that are very relevant to your organization. To get the best of both worlds, you may have your designer build ONLY the content specific to your organization. You can even iteratively update and improve your purchased content over time.

Hurdle #5: Language

A lot of organizations have distributed sales and blue-collar workforces. For instance, an organization that operates in multiple cities in India is bound to have employees who speak in different languages. This poses a major hurdle to any LMS’s implementation. You may want to address this by hiring course developers who speak the required languages. You may even hire professional translators to get the job done.

In Summary

The biggest hurdle of all is surprisingly not technology, but the mindset of L&D employees itself.

Most folks in L&D have deeply embedded notions about e-learning and employee training. They try to make eLearning the focus of employee training, completely ignoring classroom training in the process. Or, at times they silo-in their eLearning programs, effectively cutting off connections from all other training programs. Both of these approaches are flawed.

A truly effective training program is one where the employee is the center of all things training. A blended training approach is a great example of the same. Blended training for corporate learning is not only versatile, cost-effective, and engaging, but also a more natural way to learn.

For a more detailed read on why you need to incorporate a blended training approach and how to go about doing it, check out the links.