Learning management systems (LMS) are platforms where companies host, deliver, and optimize their training and education offerings for various target audiences. They play a key role in ensuring everyone who needs training gets it, but yours needs to be implemented successfully to deliver on its promises.
Doing so means assessing needs, choosing the right vendors, planning for integration, customizing features, training administrators and users, and launching and monitoring performance.
Companies implementing new LMS platforms need to navigate challenges to overall eLearning. Technological access and literacy are inconsistent across learner groups, and divergent learning styles demand different content development and delivery approaches. Effective learning management system implementation will position you to thrive despite these and other difficulties. Below, we’ll walk through how.
Step 1: Assess Your Organization’s Needs
Before implementing any new online training programs, organizations need to evaluate their existing training and education infrastructure. This includes all training materials and content delivered during onboarding or at any stage in a user lifecycle.
Taking inventory of what you already have will allow you to evaluate its effectiveness, whether current needs are being met, and what else you might need in the future.
One great place to start is determining your LMS implementation checklist based on the following:
- The size of your company (i.e., number of employees)
- The industries you operate within or otherwise contact
- Your goals for the upcoming year, five years, and ten years
Key stakeholders, such as business leaders and managers across learner-facing departments, should be involved early to ensure alignment.
In practice, all needs and goals must be balanced against the cost of a full, successful LMS implementation process. That includes the fundamental startup costs of building or buying LMS software and niche expenses like LMS training pricing.
Step 2: Choose the Right LMS Vendor
Next, you’ll need to narrow down a list of LMS vendors to choose from. Whether you buy a pre-built solution, build your own, or take a hybrid/custom approach, you’ll work with external vendors for software products and/or services. Getting the most out of them means knowing exactly what you’re looking for as you shop.
To that effect, some of the most important factors to prioritize are customization, support, and scalability. You want a solution that you can tailor to the exact needs of your learners and your company, with customized learning paths and robust data analytics and reporting capabilities.
Additionally, you need quality support readily available for both learners and managers. The platform should accommodate and accelerate growth rather than show signs of slowing down as your business scales.
Vendors can and should be part of your LMS implementation dream team.
Step 3: Plan for Data Migration and Integration
Data migration and integration between systems are critical and ongoing steps in any successful implementation, and they can present a major challenge when not approached with caution. Simply put, you need a roadmap for what data needs to be migrated and which specific systems need to work together.
Most organizations need an LMS to discuss customer relationship management (CRM) and human resources (HR) platforms. The business case for LMS partially concerns how a powerful learning platform helps disparate systems work in concert. As such, operations can be greater than the sum of its parts.
But, in opening up lines of communication, it’s also important to keep personal and other sensitive data safe. Quality LMS should have security and compliance features built in. If you need to abide by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), ISO 27001, SOC 2, or any other widely applicable regulation, your LMS can’t hinder that.
Step 4: Customize Your LMS
With careful planning and preparatory work out of the way and a sense of which specific solution you’ll be implementing, it’s time to start customizing the LMS to your company’s needs. The fundamental considerations at this stage revolve around the online training content that will be delivered and roles for learners and admin.
For example, your LMS implementation project plan should include specifications for lesson planning and granular delivery considerations for different learning processes.
However, it’s also important to consider presentation. Far from being just an aesthetic concern, user interface (UI) has a massive impact on accessibility. Overall user experience (UX), along with elements like branding, also influences impressions of your overall organization—beyond the experience learners have with training.
To get the most out of enterprise LMS, you’ll want a solution that you can tailor to your needs now and easily continue to customize in the future.
Step 5: Train Administrators and Users
Training is absolutely essential to any software implementation, and this is also true of platforms and programs designed for training. You’ll need to educate users (learners) and administrators on using their respective functions effectively.
Beyond fundamental offerings like webinars and hands-on sessions, you should consider a dedicated train-the-trainer program. Train-the-trainer courses’ advantages over other approaches to training begin with turning subject matter experts into teaching experts. This helps them understand learner (and company) needs.
Another consideration is that training the trainer marries form and content. By delivering material to teachers on the same platform they’ll be using to train others, future educators can walk a mile in learners’ shoes. They’ll experience any pain points firsthand so they can better avoid them and advise others on how to navigate them.
In addition to systematic approaches like these, you should allocate resources to ongoing support for onboarding and throughout learners’ and managers’ lifecycles.
Step 6: Launch and Monitor Performance
The final stage starts with a one-time event but then continues indefinitely as you monitor and adjust your deployment as needed. To nail the landing, you should consider a phased launch, such as a limited pilot program or extended beta test.
Post-launch, the LMS implementation team should monitor for key performance indicators (KPIs) and create a healthy feedback loop to address learners’ concerns.
In terms of measuring success, four KPIs for LMS and eLearning platforms are:
- Adoption: This is a straightforward count of how many learners have used your LMS, benchmarked by use case, user demographics, and other factors.
- Stickiness: This is a measure of repeat users. You’re looking for learners to return to the LMS often, whether for similar or diverse offerings.
- Growth: This is a comparison between new users and abandoned users. It’s perfectly normal for some users to leave, but you want more to be joining.
- Engagement: This is a measure of how users engage with your LMS. It can consider the total time spent, session length, interactivity, or other factors.
Gathering this information has two purposes: Improving the LMS and, by extension, improving the outcomes it generates for learners and your business.
Implement Your LMS Platform Today
Implementing a new learning management system involves assessing and planning to choose the right software. Then, you need to customize that solution to your needs, train stakeholders who will use it, and launch. But that final step is not the true end; it’s the beginning of an ongoing process of monitoring and adjustment.
Thought Industries is an ideal learning management solution with unparalleled customization, support, and integration capabilities for various use cases. We’ll help you craft and execute an effective LMS implementation plan efficiently.
Get in touch today to learn more about how we can optimize your learning program!
