The first thing we need to understand is who the stakeholders are. After that we can look at ideas on how to get them engaged in our initiative. So, who are stakeholders? In a nutshell, they are anyone with any interest in or influence on the change, whatever it may be. There are types of stakeholders which I will outline briefly:

Key Stakeholders – These are people affected by the change taking place, whose influence could ultimately cause the project to succeed or fail, and whose interests must be taken into account if the change has any chance of success. Typically, in the Learning world, these are your executive sponsors within the group implementing the system—the people that sign the purchase order, or those who can quickly halt the entire project if they aren’t happy. (If you’ve made it through procurement and are looking at implementation, these folks have already been identified). So, they signed—what now? It is important to ensure that you truly understand the expectations of the key stakeholders so that your idea of success aligns with theirs. You can do that in many ways, but the easiest is simply person to person communication to ensure that expectations are realistic and properly set.

Stakeholders – This group is typically composed of those who have a vested interest in the outcome, but have little influence at the decision-making level. In our world, this would be the trainers, training administrators, coordinators, or anyone else in the training department who wants life to get easier but relies on the key stakeholders to make it that way due to lack of signature authority. Once signed, though, the stakeholders take over and own the outcome. Typically, the stakeholders are the ones driving the change once it is in contract, so engaging them isn’t as much of an issue because they are typically already 100% engaged since the outcome weighs on them.

Users – Too often in a change management initiative the users are overlooked. This is the largest mistake that organizations can make—especially when results depend on user adoption. Users are simply defined as anyone having contact with the implementation/change/process/product. In our world of Learning, they are the learners. Regardless of how well we get key stakeholder buy-inand have stakeholder engagement, if we don’t have users, we have nothing.

Engaging the various stakeholder groups should ideally begin prior to a vendor being selected, and most often the ‘Key Stakeholders’ and ‘Stakeholders’ mentioned above are already in communication due to the fact that they are typically involved in the decision-making process. Ideally, the end user stakeholder group should be strategically communicated to during the vendor selection process so that they know change is coming and can prepare for and see it in a positive way. Once a decision is made, the users definitely need to be quickly brought into the fold around the time the project is kicking off, so that as implementation is occurring, users are feeling a sense of involvement in the project and the coming change and are consistently engaged in the initiative in various ways. That way, by the time the ‘Go-Live’ of the system occurs, the users have had many weeks of exposure leading up to it and are fully on board, excited, and ready to start doing things in a new, and hopefully better, way.

So, we have defined who we need to engage and who is, typically, already engaged, but how do we engage them? There are various ways, which are already discussed on the net, of engaging and communicating with large groups of stakeholders, so I won’t reinvent the wheel. I will simply guide you to resources. Prior to doing that, though, I will leave you with this thought, and it’s not monumental–put yourself in their shoes, understand what is important to them, and allow them a voice in that regard.

Now, go learn something!

For more information on stakeholder engagement methods and tactics, these are some sites I found helpful:

http://changeleadersnetwork.com/free-resources/stakeholder-engagement-opportunities-types-and-vehicles

http://www.ifc.org/ifcext/enviro.nsf/attachmentsbytitle/p_stakeholderengagement_full/$file/ifc_stakeholderengagement.pdf

http://www.ieso.ca/imoweb/consult/stakeholder_methods-process.asp

http://www.immi.gov.au/about/stakeholder-engagement/_pdf/stakeholder-engagement-practitioner-handbook.pdf

In my experience, I have seen two distinct beliefs that drive clients’ decision making process with respect to the “build v/s buy” decision. At one end is a belief that they can develop (or get developed) everything needed and that no off-the-shelf solution will fit their needs easily. The other side of the coin is the belief that an off-the-shelf package will be more cost-effective and will be able to fit one’s needs. Unfortunately, both paths frequently may lead to disappointments if not carefully and thoroughly evaluated. Below are a few points which need to be considered while evaluating the “build v/s buy” decision.

Does off-the-shelf LMS match your business requirements? How much?
It is important to understand how close the match is between what the business requires and what an off-the-shelf LMS provides. The traditional rule of thumb is that off-the-shelf LMS must meet a minimum of 80% of the required functionality and almost all of the required ‘critical’ functionality. off-the-shelfoff-the-shelfFor ease of comparison and evaluation Requirements must be broken down into a list of  features and functions and given a weightage as per their criticality.  It is utmost important that an off-the-shelf LMS provides a great flexibility in adopting your business requirements with very minimum customization efforts.

Evaluate cost of customizing off-the-shelf LMS v/s Custom Development the LMS
If the off-the-shelf LMS matches at least 80% to 85% of your business requirements, then it becomes very vital to evaluate how much will it cost to build rest of the custom requirements?  Also if you decide to custom-build the LMS how much will that cost? While doing this evaluation it is important to consider the functional expertise required for designing and developing the LMS and the cost associated with the same along with the development and project management cost. While developing the LMS from scratch, internal development capabilities could become the bottleneck in delivery of the project and may result in shooting up the total cost of development. Whereas in off-the-shelf LMS the expertise comes with the vendor itself.

Time to Market
An off-the-shelf LMS does offer greater predictability with respect to the overall implementation time. If time to market is the critical factor in your LMS implementation then it is always advisable to evaluate an off-the-shelf LMS instead of building it. With this you can focus on the core activity of Learning and development without worrying too much about the technicalities of the application. Off-the-shelf LMS offers greater predictability to plan the roll out.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Many a times the decision of custom building an LMS in-house may lead to a very high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as development, project management and support activities requires a dedicated workforce. Whereas with off-the-shelf LMS, you can bring the Total Cost of Ownership down to a much greater extent as most of the modules are readily available. On the top of it, if it is a hosted solution then the cost of buying the infrastructure (hardware/software) is also eliminated. The support is also managed by the vendor at a reasonable cost.

Risk & Mitigation
All projects involve risk, some less and some more. Each of the “acceptable” alternatives should be the object of a detailed risk and mitigation review. You may discover, for example, that the implementation of off-the-shelf LMS can be broken into smaller phases that will both reduce the risk of a big bang implementation, and give the organization time to adapt to the new, more efficient business processes.

Eventually, it’s an organization’s decision to choose one of these options but the above mentioned points can help prepare a clear evaluation sheet to make a more objective decision.

- Select a vendor and purchase LMS.
- Assemble internal project team consisting of Training and Development staff and maybe IT representation.
- Conduct meetings with vendor (using only input from the training administrators, instructors, and IT) and configure the system.
- Test it, load it up with courses and push it out to the users.

Obviously this is a simplified version of the overall process, but does capture the overall scope of how things were done. Point being that the user community themselves had no real involvement in the LMS until it was “rolled out”.

Just as technology changes, so should approaches. Through my experience of implementing LMS systems it became quickly obvious to me that regardless of technology – having the greatest system money could buy and setting it up in the most effective way possible was nowhere near as important as getting the end users engaged in using the system. This can of course be done by force, by mandate, or whatever negative feedback mechanism is chosen but ultimately this method would produce limited and, most of the time, unsustainable results.

It has become apparent to me over the years that the companies that succeed, whether it be a tech project, learning project, or just policy changes in general are companies that integrate stakeholder engagement into change management within the organization as part of the culture. It has always been known that the learner is the variable producing the data that training administrators and HR Executives need, so why would the focus and emphasis not be on the user community and gaining their buy in rather than deciding what to call a field or how this or that button should work?

So, the learner is paramount – I get it now. Now what?

There are many ways of engaging learners in the pre-implementation process. With today’s LMS technology, nearly every vendor offers the functionality of learning portals per audience, so the first step in stakeholder engagement would be to identify those audiences. For example, in a manufacturing environment you may have the following stakeholder groups in the learner community (and maybe more, these are just examples): outside distributors, research and development, manufacturing floor workers, engineering department, facilities and safety departments, supervisors, administrative staff, etc.. Given that the technology supports an independent portal for each group, engaging them up front and allowing them to voice their opinions about what is important to them and meaningful in their world from a learning perspective allows them to feel like they have ownership and therefore responsibility and accountability once the system is launched. And, for the most part, accommodating their differences is easily possible within the LMS system.

With the demographic of the current US workforce and the “baby boomer” generation leaving a shortage of experienced senior staff, anything that can be done to create a more cohesive, engaged workforce (especially in a learning initiative) will be critical to ongoing success of companies that rely on knowledgeable and experienced workers. It is proven that companies that rate higher in employee engagement also have lower turnover and ultimately are more profitable. Now, more than ever, it is not good enough to simply have a good piece of technology in place – it is the people that make all the difference, and their ownership of the initiative and up front engagement will go a long way in ensuring a successful implementation with better user adoption rates and improved long term ROI – so include them early.

Stay tuned for my next blog on how to specifically create a strategic communication plan around LMS and various specific methods of stakeholder engagement that can be implemented easily at a practical level in any organization.

Now, go learn something new……

This is evident as we look at changing role of LMS in Training Companies. From a time when its main purpose was to deliver core training activities, to today when social and informal learning components have become de facto the default features, the Learning Management System has come a long way since its inception. It has grown and continues to grow and offer the right set of tools both for formal and informal learning. We have captured this entire journey in an eBook: LMS in Training Companies – Then & Now.

A SWOT analysis of the LMS further enables us to understand that though there are clear and actionable weaknesses and threats that the LMS faces today, there is also a set of opportunities that the LMS can avail and continue to remain relevant for the target audience. Like the social and informal learning trends. That the LMS needs to incorporate social learning elements is no longer a point of debate but both a question of survival for the LMS itself and also a test of how the LMS handles the balance of both the elements of training and the ‘networkedness’ of the social learning.

Is Open Source The Way Ahead?

Beyond these dynamic factors of the past, present and the future, lie some other factors that have and will continue to remain constant over time. The most crucial being – selecting an LMS.

While you are evaluating different LMS systems, one thing you need to be clear of is that open source is never cheap, leave alone free. The thumb rule goes that – for any open source LMS only the license cost is zero. Nothing else! So this leads us to the question – what is the real cost of a free (open source) LMS? To me, it seems most of the vendors are offering the open source LMS because it is quick to deploy and they don’t need a lot of technical skills to offer it. However if you have decided to go the open source way, it would help to read my other post – the right way to go about open source LMS. It covers the entire process – right from selection through getting it live and running and other considerations involved.

The Best Value LMS

There is a high probability that an organization looking for an LMS (new or changing) would have encountered some traps in one form or the other. Some may actually have fallen into these traps unknowingly. So what you really need is an LMS with no traps. And UpsideLMS, our best value Learning Management System, is an excellent example of this. With over 160 features that are a perfect blend of traditional management and innovative tools, UpsideLMS is available at a cost that is less than the annual maintenance fee that many companies pay for their LMS systems. Do check out these tools that can help you get the most out of your LMS.

Besides this, a number of recent awards and recognitions make UpsideLMS a widely recognized and renowned Learning Management System.  To name a few, Brandon Hall Group has bestowed on it, 5 Excellence in Learning Technology Awards in 2010 (the maximum number of awards to be received by any single LMS) and 3 in 2009 (again, the maximum number of awards to be received by any single LMS in that year). While Training Industry has featured it in its Top 20 Learning Portal Companies List and Chief Learning Officer has listed it as one of The Five Emerging LMSs to Watch.

These are just few of the reasons why UpsideLMS is truly the best LMS available today. Know all the 8 reasons why you should choose UpsideLMS.

If video is your kind of thing, here’s a short AV that will give you a quick overview of UpsideLMS in less than 3 minutes.

To experience UpsideLMS for yourself, please register for a Live Demo. If you are looking for more information or a quick chat – please drop us a line at sales@upsidelearning.com and we will have one of our sales guys speak with you.

The problem we find with it is that it’s often not a well researched decision and many of these clients may have to review their decision at a later stage.

In an attempt to advise our clients to choose an Open Source LMS after doing proper home-work, we have written these articles:

The Real Cost of Free (Open Source) LMS

The Right Way To Go About Open Source LMS

Recently a colleague of mine pointed me to the prices of Moodle and a re-branded Moodle being offered by a leading vendor in the UK. I’m quite speechless to see the prices range from 20-55k Sterling Pounds per annum. To me this is outrageous sums of money to be spent on something you probably got attracted to in the first place because it was ‘free’.  I truly think UpsideLMS provides best value in the LMS space and if you are willing to consider such high prices for Moodle you’d rather consider UpsideLMS.

As in the previous year, this year too, UpsideLMS won awards in all the categories it was submitted in. In every category, Brandon-Hall announces Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners and UpsideLMS’s tally, for this year, stands tall and impressive with a list of 2 Gold, 2 Silver and 1 Bronze.

	Best Advance in Learning Management Technology for Blended or Informal Learning
	Best Advance in Learning Management Technology for Compliance Training
	Best Advance in Learning Management Technology for Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses
	Best Advance in Social Learning Technology
	Best Advance in Learning Management Technology for External Training

Nothing demonstrates the flexibility and robustness better than a single LMS product winning awards across 5 different categories. And UpsideLMS sure has lived up to its promise!

Categories as diverse as ‘Compliance Training’ and ‘Informal or Blended Training’ (UpsideLMS won Gold in both these categories) require the LMS to be able to cater to the specific needs – in terms of the overall features and benefits it offers. A new category for UpsideLMS this year was the ‘External Training’ category. UpsideLMS’s innovative 3-tier architecture (the multi-tenant/multi-portal system) makes it extremely easy to extend the Learning Management System to a company’s external partners/stakeholders. With an early adoption of Social learning components in the LMS, UpsideLMS won, second time in a row, in the category for ‘Social Learning Technology’. And, last but not the least, the Silver in the category for ‘Small- and Medium-Sized Business’ (once again, second time in the row) truly establishes UpsideLMS as the best value LMS available today.

I’d like to congratulate everyone at Upside Learning for this achievement and recognition. This is a major milestone for us and one that motivates the entire team at Upside to work harder and reach new milestones.

Cheers!

What is a Learning Management System used for?

• Administration
• Documentation
• Tracking and Reporting

Is that it? Not really.

Most instances of the LMS are capable of a lot more than what they are currently utilized for. Let’s look at how you can exploit the capabilities of your LMS to the max.

MICRO-BLOGGING: Check if your LMS offers a Micro-blogging feature. The micro-blogging feature is a great way to build a network that can be used for varied types of learning. It allows users to create their own workspace, provides a quick ability to post status updates, customize feeds, search and follow new individuals and a lot more.

WIKI: Check if your LMS includes a Wiki. Wikis are simple, efficient tools for managing knowledge and collaborating. They’re particularly convenient in today’s busy and international workplace.

• They’re easy to learn and use.
• With wikis, knowledge doesn’t get buried in emails, locked into file systems, hard drives or servers, intranets or extranets, or closed in more specialized data management systems and knowledge management systems.
• Wikis are online so users can access, collaborate, and share content, knowledge and files anytime, anywhere.

You can read more about LMS Wikis here.

TWITTER INTEGRATION: Check if your LMS is capable of Twitter integration. Twitter is a fast growing and influential social networking service that is being leveraged as a great learning tool. Letting users create their own network, it makes information sharing across domains easier and faster. Integration with the Twitter web service will make it easy to share information across domains.

COMMUNITIES: One of the key features of social networks is the spontaneous forming of communities around shared interests and concerns. Check if your LMS gives users the ability to create and participate in such communities, letting users share their knowledge and expertise with others in their community. This sense and place of community is a powerful force that can drive learning in the enterprise. In the organizational context, knowledge is no longer contained in silos defined by geography, function or domain and can be shared and viewed transparently.

Discussions and comments are a great place for information exchange and thus, the communities module effectively provides the enterprise with a tool to seed and grow communities and, impact learning positively.

RSS AGGREGATOR: Check if your LMS comes with a feed aggregator built-in to retrieve feeds from the internet and display the items within the LMS interface. RSS is rapidly becoming a popular way to access news and other information without having to reach out for it regularly.

DISCUSSION BOARD: Check if your LMS provides a Discussion Board feature. The discussion board serves as a forum for all users to interact, ask questions, post queries, get responses, and generally share information across the board.

The Growing Importance Of Social Learning

In an earlier post, Abhijit had remarked “That the LMS needs to incorporate social learning elements is no longer a point of debate but both a question of survival for the LMS itself and also a test of how the LMS handles the balance of both the elements of training and the ‘networkedness’ of social learning.” I firmly believe that Abhijit was spot-on when he said that.

An LMS with inbuilt social media technology enables you to not only access learning content but also participate in surveys, polls and forums; network with friends and peers; seek answers from content experts; and much more. It also allows you to share photos and videos with other users leading to collaborative learning.

If your LMS provides these features, utilize them to turbo-charge your LMS experience today!

Now, more than ever, Training Companies are accepting eLearning with open arms. Now, more than ever, Learning Management Systems are undergoing a massive transformation.

From the days when Classroom/ Human Mediated Training was the norm for Training Companies, to today when different modes of training delivery are, slowly but surely, making their presence felt, the Learning Management System has evolved (and continues to evolve) with each step in time. ‘LMS for Training Companies – Then & Now‘ is an eBook which will take you through this journey of the LMS. It will help you understand why training providers had to break away from their core competency of classroom training and also the ever changing and the evolving role of the LMS. It will also give you a sneak peak into the future by making predictions about the changes that one can expect in the LMS in the coming period.

It’s an eBook that is a must-have not just for folks in the training industry, but for others interested in the Learning Management domain. And here’s the deal – it’s absolutely FREE. So download now .

Tweet it, email it and share it with your friends and colleagues.

What’s so great about wikis anyway?

Although wikis are not perfect, they do have powerful benefits.

• Wikis are ideally designed to be the most useful training resource in the workplace of the future.
  “As the pace of technological change speeds up, many jobs will require constant adaptation, because of new information and new task requirements. In this context, the distinction between learning and work will disappear. A trend toward integrating training with on-the-job activities will be a result. This trend will extend itself to the point that training, as a distinct function, will no longer be the primary learning vehicle for many types of jobs. Works will use on-the-job information systems instead.” — Attributed to Tony O’Discroll, “Achieving Desired Business Performance: A framework for Developing Human Performance Technology in Organizations, 1999 International Society for Performance Improvement”
• Being able to access the LMS Wiki anywhere you have a web connection is another advantage all on its own. If a user is traveling then they don’t need to worry about bringing any files with them. They can simply log onto the wiki and have all the information they need.
• Emailing a large document to several people can take time and some people may not receive it due to spam filters. By using a wiki one user can share his or her work with all of the users at one time.
• Another advantage to using a wiki is that all the drafts of a document are saved. If a team of people have altered a document several times and feel that using the original introduction would now work better than the revised version, they can easily go back and retrieve the original. Wikis’ inherent version control means you never have to worry about losing a document again.
• Documents are edited in a very visible way, which adds accountability. Members of a team have to justify the changes made to documents because everybody can see it.
• A wiki also gives the advantage of being able to put many ideas together and then going back to edit them when necessary or when time allows.
  • For example, you could use a wiki to keep track of all your projects. A user account can be set up for all project members and a page can be created for each project. Then team members can provide inputs on what has been done on the project and what they still need to do.
• When communicating through a wiki there is no worry about emails getting lost or thrown away. All communications will be kept inside the wiki. Users can also upload files to the wiki, which is another great tool for collaboration as everyone can access them at any time.

By implementing the use of wikis, you will be able to stay on top of projects and have a better sense of organization.

While I was reading the post, in my mind, I kept trying to check and recollect if my company does that / has done that, knowingly, half-knowingly or unknowingly. One of the questions that I kept asking to myself was – is my sales workforce in line with our philosophy and does it also understand the product deeply which empowers them to answer to prospects without attempting (knowingly or unknowingly) to look at any of these traps. Because, you may sell once to a customer using these traps but there is no way you can earn both trust and confidence of many others in the long run. So, you may gain short term sales but it is going to be challenge to build a lasting brand on a hollow foundation.

Without the need to say it, I iterate that we are here to create lasting relationships with our customers and its imperative for us to make sure that there is absolute transparency both pre and post sales.

So, how do we, as a sales organization, ensure that we sell UpsideLMS without using any of these traps? And more importantly, how do we deliver the value we promise, and what the customer expects from us when it comes to our LMS?

Simple: honesty! But there are angles to it which I believe organizations looking for an LMS should also be aware of. I mention a few below, and I use the sequence and names of traps used by Craig Weiss in his post here:

1. Snake Oil Salesperson

a. Interoperability: Here’s what we have trained our sales force to respond: “UpsideLMS can work with third party courseware which is compliant with SCORM 1.2 or AICC or SCORM 2004 (without sequencing and navigation controls). In case of AICC there may, sometimes, be some additional work we would need to do. In case a course is not compliant with these, then we need at least one HTML file to launch the course with tracking limited to open and nothing else”. Additionally, we invite our customers to upload sample courses themselves on the sandbox we set up for them. I agree with Craig when he lists it as the first point because for many customers, this could become the primary source of headaches.

b. Integration with 3^rd party or ERP tools: At best we commit that all kinds of integration is technically possible provided these four things can happen:

i. UpsideLMS team will need access to the 3^rd party tool technical team to understand data schema and APIs (if any).

ii. Some work may need to be done at their end (this needs to be confirmed by the customer early on)

iii. The system is available to access via internet (in case of UpsideLMS being hosted) or the required ports and access is opened for data transfer to happen

iv. We request for sample data during initial part of implementation so that we can test before making it live

c. Response times: Till late last year we offered support with limited timings and all our conversations, proposals would represent the same. From this year, we have upgraded our support to Mon-Fri 24 hours with first response committed to be under 30 minutes and an immediate response for any emergency. We are confident of providing this and  have  published this standard on our site too. Check it out here.

d. Social Learning / Mobile Learning / New age stuff: Well, we have both of them and additionally have some awards and recognitions to vouch for how we have done those.  But I remember, when we didn’t have them and we were asked we did use to say that we are working on these things but have nothing to demonstrate as of now. In our case that was true as we were working on these modules. However I think it was important to let customer know that as a company we are tuned to the new things and have a plan in place.

e. APIs: Despite all our technical expertise, we still do not have these in place. ‘And we are REALLY working on it’

2. Number of users and clients
I agree with most points raised by Craig. True, the prospect may not really care as their focus would be on their needs, etc. We try our best to put the information in as clear terms as possible. IMHO I think it is important for an LMS vendor to showcase number of users, number of clients using their product. It’s an important marketing tool and more so it’s a great way of building confidence in your system even before the prospect would talk to you. I think these numbers do, to a significant extent, tell a story in a short number of words. But, yes numbers are numbers and can point in wrong direction. I remember the wait we had before we released our first internet PR on crossing 100,000 users milestone! I think it is important to quote the numbers as they are rather than as you assume prospects would like to hear.

3. White Papers, Case Studies in eLearning
I agree completely. These are marketing tools and companies would showcase the best and the positive ones. To me, these are necessary. For plain simple reason – these are marketing tools. Also, a great medium to be able to present information relevant to a potential customer – similar industry, similar size, similar pains kind of case study helps relate better. In almost all discussions during pre-sales, a vendor is asked about a similar experience and if the vendor can share case studies to prove the experience. I think these help a prospect as well.
What we do is that we get all our case studies, PR concerning a customer reviewed and approved by the customer. Yes, this process also has all the flaws Craig mentions but I can’t get my head around in how to avoid those. I think it is best to be true in case studies.

4. Demo Time!
I think Craig has hit a huge pain point right on the head. We had the similar problem up to about 4 months back but the problem was OURs and not prospects’. The problem we had was – how to explain, in simple and clear terms, the whole value proposition and what a customer would get at what price. Due to the number of modules, installation options, customizations, etc. even a transparent proposal would look like a maze of confusing numbers. We used to manage the confusion during the contract stage where we would put in the key discussion points, expectations of the customer on paper and get it approved by them. However, that also helps only to an extent. About 3 months ago, with the objective of making it simple for anyone to understand, we did something unusual for our industry – we published our entire pricing model on our website with as much details as possible. And yes, we have seen a significant reduction in that initial confusion. We have avoided using stars, footnotes, fine prints to make it completely transparent. Hard to believe? Check it out here. Given the limited time during the first sales demo, I believe the sales people would continue to show only what is relevant to a customer. But, having these extra pieces of information on our website has definitely helped us.

5. Bogeyman data.
To be honest, in a recent case where a customer did not renew UpsideLMS, our support team went out of way and contract and gave them dump of data in a number of CSV files. We, in fact, created simple formats without references to our database structure so that its easier for them to use the data as they want to use.
Additionally, if a customer uses authoring tool from our LMS itself, we have provided links to download the course themselves in SCORM or AICC format.
I think, for whatever reasons a customer may not be renewing, it is absolutely important to leave a positive and happy feeling in the relationship.

In the long run, transparency and ethics rule. In fact, slide no. 9 on this presentation we posted on our website would be best to summarize – Why Upside Learning.

We are kick starting the year with a Brandon Hall Research webinar on ‘How to Select the Right LMS for Your Small/Medium Business’. Scheduled on January 19^th, 2011, this would be the first of many webinars that we have planned for 2011. This FREE webinar will be sponsored by Upside Learning and will address the critical problems and questions faced by most Small- and Medium- Businesses (SMBs) while selecting an LMS.

The thought for the webinar is rooted in the fact that Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are playing an increasingly important role in workplace learning by providing a suitable platform for managers to manage learning effectively.  Although large organizations have adopted these systems readily, their high costs and technological infrastructure requirements have prevented Small- & Medium- Businesses to utilize LMSs to their full potential.

Tom Werner, a Brandon Hall Research Senior Analyst in charge of LMS research, along with Richard Nantel, CEO of Brandon Hall, will conduct the 1 hour session, sharing insights on how to make LMS selection efficient and accurate. The session would be concluded by a Q&A session wherein the participants would have an opportunity to interact with the experts one-on-one.

The FREE 60 minute webinar will be held on January 19, 2011 at 1:00 p.m. EST.

You can register a seat by logging on to: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/616166926

Training Companies needed to enable themselves with the tools and technologies needed to go online with their training material and find the right systems and backend partners to support them during and after this crucial exercise. And as such, an appropriate Learning Management System (LMS) was the key to the successful execution of this piece of strategy.

Two years on, the LMS has taken a centre stage in Training Companies’ functioning and has grown to offer the right set of tools both for formal and informal learning. In general, it recognizes that the needs are constantly evolving – now to embrace social networking, mobile learning, knowledge collaboration that from within the LMS framework.

It is this understanding that has led us to design a Learning Management System that can specifically cater to these unique needs of Training Companies. UpsideLMS is equipped with over 160 features that are a perfect blend of traditional learning management and innovative learning tools. It is a multi-award winning, best value LMS available for SMBs and Training Companies.

Here, I have tried to explain one such implementation, wherein our client, Dillon Productions, a premier supplier of customized video training solutions in the UK and Ireland, was looking at a solution that could help achieve a two-fold business objective of delivering eLearning to its customers using an LMS platform, and offering a mix of eLearning and an LMS platform to its customer as a separate solution or re-selling the LMS platform.

For its first requirement, UpsideLMS was setup as Dillon Productions’ learning platform with a capability to create multiple portals for its customers. While, for the second, an arrangement was created which permitted Dillon Productions to resell UpsideLMS to its customers.

UpsideLMS’s 3-tier organization fitted very well to Dillon’s first need, where an account portal was set up for each customer, with separate branding and rules.

Upside Learning’s pricing model was designed to align with Dillon Productions’ own business model, which allowed Dillon to clearly calculate costs and margins for its business through UpsideLMS.

James Dillon, CEO and Founder of Dillon Productions, comments, “At Dillon Productions our blue-chip clients have always expected and received the highest standards in regard to content development through our bespoke video training solutions. It was imperative for us that we could partner up with an LMS provider that was as innovative in their approach to delivering cutting edge solutions as we are. Our core principles are built on innovation and flexibility and being able to react to our clients needs rapidly. To that end our relationship to date with Upside Learning has been the perfect marriage.”

2 years post the implementation, Dillon Productions continues to effectively meet its customers’ varying needs from the same platform and also records high sales for UpsideLMS.

Click here to know more about this solution.