Procure and Implement a Learning Management System
The Situation
A major crown corporation in Canada was looking to procure and implement a Learning Management System. The project was positioned as an “IT project” – gather the requirements, procure a product through an RFP, install it and migrate the data from the existing system. They hired me to lead both the IT and business-side teams.
This case study captures the story of how an “IT Project” was transformed into an outcomes-driven business initiative that delivered substantially more value than planned, all within its original time and budget allocations.
The Task
I was asked to procure and implement a Learning Management System (LMS) for a major crown corporation. It was the classic “here’s the solution, what’s the problem?” scenario.
Another similar organization had just done the same kind of project, so I was to simply grab their RFP (all 246 pages of it), make some modifications to suit the clients context, and initiate the procurement. A caveat is I was to use Scrum to run the procurement process. Sounds easy enough. Except no one on the team had experience using Scrum as part of a procurement. And the response of the on-site Scrum coaches when asked to help was…it can’t be done.
I was also asked to lead both the business and IT teams as well as the procurement team.
So I decided to start with WHY…WHY were they doing this? WHY now? Who else’s WHY might matter?
The Action / Approach
I introduced the business and IT teams to outcomes management, a modified version of the Business Model Canvas to define, design and build the business services on offer, a Services Catalogue modeled after the ITSM space, as well as Scrum and other agile approaches to run an Agile procurement, as well as introducing agile approaches to designing, developing, and deploying learning content and for business processes as well.
I led all three teams in combining applicable business and IT frameworks, methods and practices in a non-dogmatic manner to create clarity around the WHY for the project. The process of discovery enabled the business to re-design the problem to be solved in business terms, rather than in technical IT ones.
During the first three to four months, I asked a lot of WHY questions as I introduced the team to a series of approaches to help them plan out an iterative and incremental approach to the work:
– An outcomes-driven approach that used a back-casting approach to define the ultimate, intermediate and immediate outcomes
– The resulting Outcomes Map identified the required portfolio of initiatives that would have to be undertaken and what each initiative would need to accomplish, as well as the order in which they would be executed
– Each initiative was purpose-defined to deliver a specific portion of the strategic intent (i.e., the immediate, intermediate and ultimate business outcomes to which they would contribute)
– A modified version of the Business Model Canvas was created, called the Service Canvas. It helped the Learning and Development team to capture their current services and define the new ones that would be needed
– Required business capabilities that would be needed were identified and updated based on the Outcomes Map and the Service Canvas
– Introduced a technique for prioritizing business value that proved instrumental in saving 98.5% of the originally forecasted budget of $1M for purchasing the LMS license (this saved the corporation over $200,000 each year thereafter in software maintenance costs)
The Result
Some of the direct key results for the organization from the approach used included:
– Clarity around what L&D did and the service commitments they would uphold for their business clients as documented in a Service Catalogue (no such catalogue existed previously)
– On-line and Blended-learning delivery were supported, whereas only classroom delivery was previously done
– New processes were created for learning content design, development, deployment and management that were not part of the original plan
– Contributions to initiating talent management were achieved which were also not part of the original plan
– An Agile Procurement was conducted, which saved $975,000 in the LMS purchase and over $200,000 in annual LMS licensing
– The $975,000 LMS license-cost savings was redeployed to deliver business value that had not been identified as part of the original project
