2016 DTS e-Book

2016 DOTS Talent Solutions Pty Ltd 1
BUILDING
PRODUCTIVITY
AND
ENGAGEMENT
WITH YOUR LMS
You will learn how to develop a business case,
create a strategy and leverage your LMS for
maximum business impact in critical areas such as
engagement, productivity, culture and knowledge
retention.
Brian Clark

Table of Contents
5 Ways to Get Your e-Learning Strategy Off the Ground .................................................3
1. Identify and clarify the key results that the successful execution of your strategy will
bring to the organisation...........................................................................................................3
2. Begin your lobbying efforts early....................................................................................................4
3. Itemise your resource requirements clearly...................................................................................5
4. Write a compelling business case...................................................................................................6
5. Choose your project team carefully. ..............................................................................................7
8 Steps to Create a Compelling Business Case for the Percepium LMS....................9
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................9
1. Diagnostic Process ........................................................................................................................10
2. Identify Training and Development Needs...................................................................................12
3. Interview Internal and External Stakeholders ..............................................................................13
4. Map Out Existing and New Processes...........................................................................................16
5. Measure Financial Impact.............................................................................................................16
6. Build Your Executive Support Team..............................................................................................17
7. Develop the Case..........................................................................................................................18
8. Project Manage the Entire Process...............................................................................................19
9 Ways The DOTS Percepium LMS Will Improve Your Organisation’s
Performance .........................................................................................................................20
1. Growth-Sustainability - Resilience................................................................................................20
2. Simplify Access to Key Information ..............................................................................................20
3. Remove/ Reduce your compliance risks.......................................................................................21
4. Enhance your tactical and strategic decision making...................................................................21
5. Plan successions easily..................................................................................................................22
6. Retain your organisation’s knowledge assets ..............................................................................22
7. Capture and share best practices .................................................................................................22
8. Distribute information and training to your prospects and customers........................................23
9. Retain and develop high performance employees.......................................................................23
Knowledge, Innovation and Resilience Arrives for Work Every Day.......................24
Why is this important?..........................................................................................................................24
How do you retain knowledge? I am going to offer one idea here. ...................................................24
What Next? ...........................................................................................................................................25
What does e-learning have to do with knowledge capture?................................................................25
How do you get from PowerPoint to e-Learning?................................................................................25
About DOTS Talent Solutions............................................................................................27

5 Ways to Get Your e-Learning Strategy Off the Ground
(strategies are only as good as their execution)
1. Identify and clarify the key results that the successful execution of your
strategy will bring to the organisation.
This is the fun part of the process, however in my experience most people do not
think broadly enough when considering the results they can achieve with a
successful strategy. Keep in mind the key results also have horizons attached to
them; the results you deliver in six months will be different than those you will
achieve in twelve months. One proviso is that the evolution of your e-learning
strategy continues and is not curtailed once the obvious results have been
achieved.
There are a number of ways to get started. You can begin by starting to document
key performance, cultural, learning, engagement and other relevant indicators in
your organisation now and how these will change as a result of your strategy. For
example, you may currently take 2 weeks to properly induct new hires for a
particular level in the organisation. Your strategy objective is to reduce this to 5
days. You may have a performance review completion rate of only 71% currently,
however your strategic goal is to bump that up to over 90% in 6 months. You can
use a spreadsheet to begin to capture your before and after in a matrix format.
In a team environment, I have found mind-mapping tools to be very useful. I like
to have the map on a screen and people adding ideas in a real open brainstorming
environment. The mind map provides a perfect visual of the ideas and these can
be illustrated with relationships to other ideas using arrows and lines etc. Colours
and images add to the impact and retention of the information captured. The
mind-map can be saved in a number of formats and shared for further work. I like
to print out completed maps, laminate them and distribute them for people to
view as the strategy is developed and beyond as it is being executed.
This critical step is a combination of tangible results combined with vision. You need to
have a dream for your e-learning strategy and share that with others. The dream equals
the vision. No matter how compelling the vision, it must be communicated incessantly
to key decision makers and stakeholders throughout the organisation.

In my experience the vision has too often been restricted out of fear of rejection or risk
of failure. You and your team need to be realistic but bold. Other people need to get
excited by what your vision entails for the future of your organisation. For example, it
may be hard for people to get super excited about an improvement in compliance
reporting. They may get very excited at the prospect of being able to create personal
development plans and access online learning in interesting topics. Of course you can
have both but do not restrict your vision too much.
2. Begin your lobbying efforts early.
There is no reason to be a loner in the quest to get your e-learning strategy launched. I
recommend having a close analysis of the support network you need to get approval
for your strategy. There are a few key things to remember about this stage:
 For a successful roll-out you will need a representative base of champions
across your organisation. You want to have people involved in every key
business unit and functional area. The purpose of this is to ensure you are
thinking as broadly as possible about the positive impact your strategy is going
to deliver.
 Influencers are not always persons in the most obvious leadership positions. It
is important not to confuse a person’s title with their influence. There are
thought leaders, subject matter experts and influencers at all levels of the
organisation.
 Remember that people will want to know “what's in it for me?” Have your
answer to this question ready when you begin speaking to people. For
example, people in finance may be interested in better reporting for training
expenditure. The sales manager will respond to her ability to deliver more
sales and product training for less cost. The operations and production
managers will see a consolidated compliance solution with one point of truth
that includes an audit trail.

The main thing is to do your homework and identify the current pain points in your
organisation and map these to your e-learning strategy. This process will give you
a nice set of elevator pitches and make your ability to converse with colleagues
more effective. When it comes time to write your business case the work you have
done to understand the stakeholder needs in your organisation will be valuable.
3. Itemise your resource requirements clearly.
It is one thing to request financial, human and infrastructure resources for your e-
learning project, it is an entirely different experience to be compelled to ask for more
resources once your project is underway. Once the technology and the project has been
rolled out there is still a need for administration and oversight. It is easier to get
approval for a project that includes a realistic forecast of resource requirements
than it is to ask for more resources when a project is stalled.
For example, depending upon the size of the company you may need full time
administration or a percentage of one person's job role to administer the LMS and
other technology included in your strategy. This is not always an easy thing to
predict and I suggest you ask among your network of learning and development
professionals. If you are new or do not have an established network there are
groups that have great resources.
www.aitd.com.au
www.td.org
If you are not currently using social networking platforms this is a good time to get
started. My personal favorite is LinkedIn. I have been amazed at how willing people
are to assist others who share a professional interest.
You will find plenty of learning and development professionals who have experience
in e-learning projects and are willing to share their experiences and knowledge. I
have asked questions of the user community in Linked In and the results have been
astounding both in the quality of replies and the interesting people I have met and
added to my network.

4. Write a compelling business case.
If you do an internet search you will find plenty of business case templates that
you can use. Depending upon your organisation you may already have precedents
you can use to provide a structure for your business case. I suggest you ask a few
people in your organisation who may have already written a business case or
persons who have reviewed business cases on behalf of the organisation.
In some organisations there is a strong culture of conforming to document
standards and in others there is no formal consideration of how a business case is
presented.
You may use the process of finding information about business cases as a means of
exploring possible supporters for your e-learning strategy project. When
researching and writing your business case never forget the target audience. It is
often a good idea to write down a demographic and psychographic outline of the
target audience to ensure your work remains aligned to their needs and
expectations.
I recommend creating a short (2 to 3 page) document that provides a good outline for
stakeholder review. This is often a good `thermostat' to test the decision making
environment for your project. You can proceed to your `in depth' document if you
are getting positive feedback from your overview and you are convinced that your
research has been thorough enough to proceed.

The full business case will be a cost - benefit document. You need to write clearly and
for the target audience who may not understand ‘jargon' and acronyms. Include the
following:
 Strategies for managing risks (change and market risks)
 Scenarios - you may include three but you will overly complicate your
document if you add many more.
 ROI analysis using as many parameters that make sense. Do not forget some
of the `soft' results along with the hard numbers. You have created a
‘before’ and ‘after’ matrix to make it easier to link results to business
issues.
 Identify the value the project will return. Scan for wide ranging identified
value returns from your project. Your senior leadership are always concerned
with productivity and talent retention. Link these outcomes to your
competitive operating environment, succession planning, and financial results.
You do not need a list of blockbusters; for example, if the onboarding process
is reduced from 10 to 5 days that has a direct impact on cost of hires and
productivity.
5. Choose your project team carefully.
Your project team includes people in your organisation, technology vendor(s),
technology support providers and of course the obvious ones in the organisational area
undertaking the e-learning project.
In my experience there are those that are energised and motivated by a new project
but lack the focus to execute the whole project to completion. There are others who
dig in and thrive on execution and the sense of victory when the project is
completed and outcomes are realised. Both of these types are very useful but ensure
you have not over loaded your team with the energetic starters.
I recommend profiling individuals in project teams as well as a team profile to empower
everyone to understand how they can be more effective as a team. I use an exceptional
tool called Extended Disc. Once I have profiled possible project team members I debrief
each person and assist in the induction of each member to the project team.

With a team profile, I am also able to design communication and collaboration systems
and processes that suit the team. I am able to forecast interpersonal relationship issues
and take preventive steps to ensure the team operates well. The allocation of tasks and
milestones is also facilitated by understanding the team’s behavioral profile to ensure
maximum productivity.

8 Steps to Create a Compelling Business Case for the Percepium LMS
Introduction
You may know it and your team may know it but you cannot take it for granted that other
members of your organisation understand the benefits from an LMS. As you develop your
business case you must remain aware that there are a number of facets to it that will
collectively determine the success of your case. These facets include marketing, financial
and operational.
You will need to market your business plan to influencers and decision makers in your
organisation. Do not get complacent that your business case will rest on its own
laurels; it will not. You need to think carefully about your communications and
information that supports your case.
Although financial facets of your business case may not be a comfort zone for you
they are absolutely necessary. You must be able to adopt a financial perspective for
your business case that ideally includes you thinking like a finance person would.
Operations is a big area. What we are talking about here is being able to look at
existing processes that exist not just in the learning and development area but more
broadly. There are usually a bunch of processes that are directly aligned with or on the
periphery of L & D that are clunky, inaccurate and kill productivity. One of the most
common of these is on-boarding/induction, knowledge retention, skills gap analysis
and succession planning.
Ok, with these concepts in mind let’s get started.

1. Diagnostic Process
We like to think of this phase as diagnostic since this word accurately reflects your
objective. You need to create a diagnosis of current reality in your organisation
that is clear and supported by information.
Needs analysis Another common term used for needs analysis is business requirements.
There are probably some needs you have already identified that have prompted you to
begin this journey to LMS adoption or replacing your current system. You need to cross
check that these needs are not you centric. Needs analysis must incorporate the entire
organisation and stretch out to include external stakeholders as well.
Recently one of our clients was successful in gaining approval for an LMS based on the
compelling outcome of increased customer contact and product training effectiveness.
The company is very focused on revenue growth in new markets so this benefit was
high priority. The LMS was implemented to provide their prospects and customers high
value information and learning opportunities related to their range of healthcare
products.
The more you analyse your organisation the more you will uncover. The Percepium LMS
has an extensive feature set and this will permit you to look at needs such as continuing
professional development tracking, profiling, competency management, internal and
external surveying, training vendor management, performance appraisals, inductions,
succession planning among many others. The key is to dig and dig deeply.
When a need is identified, it is advisable to include the following in your documentation;
 an accurate description of the need/requirement
 a brief overview of the current situation
 a vision of how the issue is resolved with the LMS
 clear benefits to the organisation and its people

Strategy alignment It is absolutely necessary that you understand your organisation’s
strategy. There may be strategic horizons including the current year, two years, five
years and so forth. Your LMS business case must address the strategic objectives within
each of these horizons and demonstrate its utility in both the execution and ongoing
support of strategic objectives.
Strategic objectives may include ones that are focused on areas such as:
Business Growth
- revenues/head count/locations/acquisitions/mergers/new products among
others.
Business Consolidation
- changed focus areas/sale of business units/office rationalisation/hiring
freeze/reduce or increase outsourcing etc.
Resource Planning
- talent attraction/talent development/succession/manufacturing planning/
new markets/capital expenditure/relocation/expansion/suppliers/
currency management/materials sourcing etc.
Financial and Operational targets
- improvements to efficiency, cost reductions, capital investments, R & D budgets,
mergers and acquisitions.
Stakeholders
- board composition/shareholders/suppliers/partnerships/institutions etc.
Your business case should be as comprehensive as possible in linking the LMS technology
to the strategic objectives in your organisation. The level of detail in a strategic plan
available to employees varies greatly. Do your best to get the most up to date
information and you may be able to supplement this during your stakeholder interviews
later on.

Purchasing process You can avoid a lot of heart break and disappointment if you know
how your organisation manages software purchasing before you get too far in your
business case. You should be clear on all aspects of the purchasing process so that your
business case does not contradict or potentially contravene these processes.
Here are some examples of the information you must have:
 What is your organisation’s capital expenditure level?
 Has your organisation purchased hosted or SaaS software previously?
 Who is involved in a software purchase? (IT/ c-level/external vendor or
services provider/you/your manager etc.)
 Is there an existing budget allocation or will one need to be made?
 What will happen to your business case during the purchasing approval phase? Will
you still participate? Who will drive the case if not?
 Does your organisation typically pilot new software systems prior to engaging fully
with them?
2. Identify Training and Development Needs
This step should be fairly straight forward since it is likely training needs precipitated
your creating this business case. This step requires you to think just as broadly as you did
in listing out your organisation’s needs and there may be some duplication.
When identifying your training and development needs, try to link them to your
organisation’s strategic objectives. Your training needs may be different for different
parts of your organisational structure, professions, vocations, locations etc. In many of
our clients there are training needs identified for customers, suppliers and strategic
partners. Your training needs should have both time and stakeholder horizons.

3. Interview Internal and External Stakeholders
There are two aspects to your interviewing phase. One is straight information gathering
while the other is more sublime. You may use your interviewing phase to collect
champions, supporters and influencers for your business case.
As you interview across your organisation you will by default be presenting a picture of an
improved organisation for each of the people you interview and their area of
responsibility.
Once you have collected your champions, supporters and influencers they are added to
your communication and collaboration list. From now on you keep them up to date, ask
them further questions and so forth to keep them engaged with your business case.
I recommend you use a tool such as Microsoft Sharepoint, Google Sites, Evernote,
OneNote, Podio or any other option that is available to you. You can set up a portal or
site that people can view your communications, add comments and other files to support
a comprehensive knowledge management solution for your project. This eliminates the
need to rely on email.
We have recently worked with an L & D team that are masters of this phase. They
operate within a comparatively small business unit but interviewed across the
enterprise. Within two months they had so much energy created around their LMS
business case that the other larger business units began clamoring for the LMS as well.
In their case the momentum was unstoppable, the project was approved and they have
retained project stewardship for the enterprise roll-out.

Stakeholder Management
This diagram illustrates one way to segment your stakeholder population and how best to
communicate with them to manage information sharing, influence and participation in
your project. Apply this diagram and you may like to add persons to a list with their
quadrant or add names directly to the quadrant.

Here are some ideas for your stakeholder interviews;
Interview Questions Notes
What are your goals for the
quarter/financial year?
Do you have a plan you can share with me?
How are you measured in your position?
How is your team, department, business
unit measured?
What metrics do you use to track your
team, department, business unit?
What are the key issues you face now?
Is there another department or business
unit that has direct influence on you
achieving your objectives?

4. Map Out Existing and New Processes
While you are interviewing you can capture information on how things get done in the
various parts of your organisation. I am certain this will uncover some insights about how
your strategy will alleviate ad-hoc processes and administrative resource intensity. For
example:
 how does a manager deal with a training request from an employee?
 How does your team manage these requests?
 How does an induction program get organised for new employees?
 Is there a process for rolling out performance appraisals?
 Do you have a process for identifying high potentials?
There are many processes you can identify and some may be so nebulous from a process
perspective that each instance may be more ad-hoc. Despite this, map out as many as
you can and these will provide the foundation for demonstrating how the Percepium LMS
will deliver more structured, automated processes and productivity across the
organisation.
In our experience we have found that with the best of intentions many organisations
have learning and development processes that are dead ends. For example, employees
not hearing back from a training request, not being able to apply for internal positions,
not getting feedback on their work, and lack of professional development.
Keep this in mind when you are process mapping since many processes in learning and
development are circular as opposed to linear.
5. Measure Financial Impact
This step in your business case may be difficult outside your operational area. You should
have been able to gather some financial impact information in your interviews however
not all people use financial impact measurement in their analysis.
It is perfectly fine to include projections, estimates and forecasts that are based on best
available information. Do everything you can to ensure the reasoning behind your
projections, estimates and forecasts is sound.

Some examples of financial impact that our clients have used include the following and
these are only a guide;
 productivity gains enabling re-deployment of human resources
 cost savings in training delivery
 fast induction and job readiness saving x hours/days
 reduction in number of information systems/database
 risk reduction in compliance management (value of possible damages incurred by
the organisation)
 reduction in staff turnover
 consolidation/elimination of external training vendors
6. Build Your Executive Support Team
You can build your executive support team during your interview phase if you secure
some face time with your executive team. You may be surprised to learn that many of
our clients found enthusiastic support from the CFO and other financial executives more
quickly than others.
Your business case will have cost savings, efficiencies, and productivity enhancements
made obvious to the readers. Your CEO may see risk management, your CIO may see a
system she does not have to worry about (fully hosted LMS), marketing will see another
communication channel, operations may see faster on-boarding reduced compliance
risk.
The fact is all members of an organisation see reality through the lens of responsibility
and stewardship. As a learning and development professional you must see the
organisation in its entirety and your business case will reflect this. When you have
successfully completed this phase of your business case your probability of success has
increased dramatically.

If you work in a large organisation or one that has some insularity in its executive ranks
your job is much harder but not impossible. You need to plan your approaches to the
executive team more carefully. This may necessitate finding creative ways to gain
contact with the executive team. This could be as easy as finding a go-between for an
introduction or as bizarre as a well planned interception in the car-park.
7. Develop the Case
This is just a basic framework to help you create your business case.
Your business case should include supporting information that is easily read and absorbed
by the various readers of the document. It is advised to include as many visual
representations of information such as graphs, shapes, tables and images.
Current Situation and issues
across the Enterprise that have
been identified
The LMS solution that will solve
these issues
Improvements that will be
realised with the solution.
Include all of the issues you
have identified
Strategic objectives that will
be supported and sustained by
the solution

8. Project Manage the Entire Process
A word of advice, learn what you can about basic project management. If you can
understand the principles of project management, gain competency in your chosen tools
and set up a project plan. An understanding of basic project management principles will
help to instill confidence in others about your project. Beyond this, you will be managing
a range of parallel and dependent tasks and milestones. It goes a bit beyond managing a
to-do list. You will be more effective and productive if you use project principles and
tools to support your work.

9 Ways The DOTS Percepium LMS Will Improve Your Organisation’s
Performance
1. Growth-Sustainability - Resilience
This whitepaper is based on over ten years working with organisations that have implemented
learning and collaborative technology. We have consolidated the enormous amount of data
we have on the results our clients have achieved with the Percepium LMS into 10 key
result areas.
The market for Learning Management Systems grew over 21% in the last 12 months and the
overall market is estimated to be over 2.5 billion USD. This growth is based on impressive
precedents established by organisations that have realised substantial return on investment
by implementing Learning Management Solutions.
In the current economic environment there has been a surge of interest in learning and
collaborative technologies as organisations reduce travel and other expenses linked to
training and development.
The feedback we receive from clients is that once established the LMS has changed the
learning and development paradigm in the organisation significantly. The cost reductions
achieved by our clients include increased productivity, reduced travel, improved planning
and decision, risk reduction, among others.
2. Simplify Access to Key Information
Most of the clients we work with have their learning and development information in a
number of databases or Excel spreadsheets. In addition to these sources there is information
retained in payroll systems and document folders and personal information management
systems such as Outlook. In this type of environment information is difficult or even
impossible to access and consolidate. This has enormous impacts on the organisation.

With Percepium, our clients achieve these benefits consistently:
 Enhanced productivity
 Informed planning and decision making
 Improves the strategic posture of learning and development
 Eliminates manual processing and errors
3. Remove/ Reduce your compliance risks
This is where many of our clients started their e-learning journey. These clients often reacted
to legislative requirements that directly impacted on the ways they managed their business.
E-learning and talent solutions provide a fast and auditable process to deliver and assess
people in compliance related content. People who undertake compliance based learning can
be tracked automatically for compliance expiry and re-training. The organisation has a real
time ‘snap-shot’ of the compliance gaps in the organisation and can easily address these risks.
The use of Percepium enables the easy delivery of supporting courses and
collaboration tools to ensure the learning is retained and applied on the job.
4. Enhance your tactical and strategic decision making
When you have access to the right information you can be far more effective in your tactical
and strategic decision making.
This key information is available in real time and across many key drivers of individual and
organisational performance when you have a system like Percepium that automatically
captures data.
Percepium eliminates the need for searching for information when you need it. Learning and
Development is able to position itself more effectively as a key strategic input when it is able
to supply timely information that relates to risk, compliance, retention and attraction of key
talent.
You have the option to decentralise the reporting to enable line managers to have access to
information about their specific team members.

5. Plan successions easily
The workforce demographics are changing dramatically all over the globe. Succession
planning is one of the primary resource planning risks facing organisations in an environment
plagued with skills shortages.
Human resource planning requires alignment with the organisational strategy and growth.
To assist in succession planning a solution like Percepium identifies potential succession
gaps as well as facilitating skills acquisition for persons identified to undertake learning
paths and developmental plans. Percepium facilitates predictive planning and decision
making.
6. Retain your organisation’s knowledge assets
Does your organisation have processes to retain the knowledge that is within each of your
employees?
It is one of the most overlooked assets and competitive advantages that can be leveraged.
We have worked with clients who have effectively tapped into the collective knowledge of
their employees with common tools such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Visio, Excel, audio and
video files. These files are easily converted to SCORM (if desired) or simply imported into
Percepium in their native form.
Once you have the knowledge captured it can be used as online courses, blended workshops
and published content in the Percepium Libraries.
7. Capture and share best practices
Organisations are able to capture and distribute best practices very effectively. You may
wish to enable best practices to be captured directly by the practitioners. These people can
capture their practices in a range of formats and then distribute to the entire organisation or
to specific user populations.
The best practice content may be as simple as PowerPoint or include audio and video files.
People creating this content require no technical or special software skills. There will be a
permanent record of who accessed the best practice content as well as discussion groups
and libraries where further information may be viewed or downloaded.

8. Distribute information and training to your prospects and customers
Organisations are able to grant access to unique Percepium web portal environments to their
clients, prospects and other stakeholders. Your prospects are able to learn more about your
organisation, your products and services by accessing information in a range of formats and
styles.
One of our practice areas delivers enhanced business development capacity in our client
organisations.
9. Retain and develop high performance employees
Most organisations acknowledge the need to retain high performing and high potential
employees. Percepium provides a self-service platform for these employees to take
stewardship of their careers. In Percepium they can explore career paths and gain clear
understanding of what competencies and skills are needed to progress in the organisation.
They can access learning and development opportunities as well as demonstrate their
commitment to shared goals and objectives through contributing to Discussions, Libraries,
Courses, Surveys and other tools. Coaches, mentors and managers can utilise the Percepium
360 module to create profiles to facilitate constructive feedback, self reflection, and award
behavioural competencies.

Knowledge, Innovation and Resilience Arrives for Work Every Day
You can achieve dramatic results in your organisation by harnessing the power of e-
learning and collaboration. You can increase this power and maximize the returns on
investments you have made in your learning strategy by tapping into the embedded
knowledge you have in your people. This article is a simplified overview of a process that
achieves knowledge retention with flow- on cultural benefits for the entire organisation.
Why is this important?
Knowledge retention goes hand in hand with talent management and staff retention. In a
market with skilled talent shortages it is imperative you have strategies to retain your
best people while attracting new hires. However effective these strategies are people
will still leave; whether they are poached, start a family or retire.
The costs of staff attrition are high and one key cost is the loss of knowledge in your
organisation when experience people leave without a knowledge legacy available for
successors and others in the organisation.
How do you retain knowledge? I am going to offer one idea here.
Every organisation has thought leaders. These persons come from all parts of the
organisation and their thought leadership is usually recognized by others in the
organisation; who tends to get asked questions the most about a particular topic? The
thought leaders do not necessarily represent the most popular, vocal or otherwise high
profile persons in the organisation.
Talented people, regardless of their position, regularly innovate in their positions. It may
be small incremental work flow process changes or it may be a completely re-engineered
system or process that delivers tangible improvements in effectiveness and productivity.
The results produced by these people may be noted, but how often are their work
practices explored with enough depth to document and replicate?
This knowledge capture strategy needs to be approached as an organisational project
initiative. The project needs to be approved and adopted throughout the organisation, top
to bottom. The project must have resources committed and the initiative needs to be well
communicated. Once the project is underway there is no reason why it cannot be made a
part of the embedded culture of the organisation.

The key is to provide your people with the tools to capture and share their ideas with
others. In my experience the easiest tool is often Microsoft PowerPoint. PowerPoint has
been a part of most people’s desktops for a number of years now and whether or not a
person has progressed past beginner level proficiency, they are usually familiar enough to
put together some basic slides.
What Next?
In some of the businesses I have worked with, the roll-out of the knowledge project has
been woven into the performance review process. The performance review often
presents an ideal environment to ensure persons understand their role in the project and
the organisation’s willingness to support the individual in the project while engaged in
their normal work responsibilities.
What does e-learning have to do with knowledge capture?
e-learning technology serves as the distribution and tracking system. There are all sorts
of variants that will serve as good platforms to share knowledge and make it available
anytime and anywhere. As a leading developer of a learning and talent management
solution, I am biased towards our solution called Percepium.
Percepium includes many learning, performance and collaboration features to support a
project of this type. Percepium and other solutions automate all the processes
associated with online learning access and delivery as well as tracking and recording all
activities performed. Other solutions can be as simple as CD/DVD or a Wiki or Microsoft
Sharepoint.
How do you get from PowerPoint to e-Learning?
I am the first to admit that this type of e-learning project will not produce ‘level three’
e-learning content. The content need not be too prehistoric either. If you are interested
in seeing what is possible with PowerPoint you can visit this site with some great tips.
Microsoft Mix is a free add-on for PowerPoint that supports the development of SCORM
courses from PowerPoint presentations. There are other tools as well such as Articulate
Storyline, Adobe Captivate among many others.

A Simple Overview of the Steps
Identify and assess your organisation’s knowledge risks
Prioritise these risks and add timelines if desired
 Which ones are critical?
 Will they cost money or present litigation risks?
 Will they compromise or destroy the competitiveness of the enterprise?
Identify a Project Manager
 This has often been a learning and development professional in my clients,
however we have worked with sales managers and even ‘c’ level executives and
others. Your project manager selection is based on the scope of the project and
the skills needed to manage it. (If sales knowledge is the critical risk, it makes
sense to consider the sales manager).
Identify the thought leaders/knowledge sources
Determine the tools needed to capture and deliver the knowledge
 Acquire the tools.
 Train people in their use. One of the most successful projects I have worked
on included training a small group of sale professionals some advanced
PowerPoint skills.
Create and roll out the communication plan to the organisation
Coach and support the thought leaders in their authoring work
 Ensure that time is allocated for this work. I like the idea of ‘sanctioned
time’; depending upon the culture of the organisation this could be time
spent in the office without disruption or permitting people to work at home.
Publish the content to the e-learning system

Demonstrate the content throughout the organisation
 Establish access protocols.
 Configure delivery platform as desired.
Keep the content updated as needed.
 Establish review cycles and include feedback as part of the delivery of content.
This is a short primer on how you can tap into a wealth of knowledge that is often taken
for granted and lost for a number of reasons. DOTS Talent Solutions can help you design
and execute this type of project. Once we show you how you will likely be able to
maintain this type of knowledge initiative and reap the benefits as a learning organisation.
About DOTS Talent Solutions
We are a specialised software and consulting business that delivers improved enterprise
performance to organisations of all types and sizes. We design and develop the Percepium
LMS that has a global client community.
We are well known for our experience in working across a range of industries and user
populations. Our technical team is renowned for its responsiveness and knowledge of
client requirements.
You will not find a more effective and knowledgeable partner for your LMS and talent
requirements.

2016 DTS e-Book

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