If your performance as a CLO is in the red this fiscal, you may be wondering how you can possibly convince your Board not to squeeze your budgets any further for the next fiscal, if not worse. At the Board meeting this April, make a bold statement, “By the end of this fiscal, I will reduce learning costs by 15% and increase revenues by 15% …” You may probably be thinking it was mistake clicking that hyperlink that took you to this page of wishful thinking. Read on …
By implementing the best practices of lean manufacturing and lean systems, you can actually achieve the above outlandish utterance.
For starters, take a long, hard look at your entire Learning & Development (L&D) process. Which are the activities that do not add value—activities that your internal and external customer will not pay for? For example, is the Sales Head seeing performance improvement in their team after that induction program? Does that satisfaction survey add value to the performance of your Production Head? If the answer is a “No” or even a “May be not”, axe the activity. When it comes to sanctioning your precious L&D budget, just follow the rule of thumb, “When in doubt, cut it out!” Easier said than done? Not really, if we go by this 1-2-3 process of Lean Learning:
- SUPPORT: First, reduce learning burdens by removing cumbersome activities from the L&D process. These could typically be administrative activities that could either be outsourced or deleted altogether. Analysis of the learning strategy and process is the key.
- STREAMLINE: Next, reduce learning inconsistencies by delivering JIT learning of nano-modules. Here, module design, learner enrollment, and scheduling are the focus.
- SIMPLIFY: Finally, reduce learning wastes by evaluating the outcomes of the above process simplification and streamlining efforts. Note that you need to ascertain whether the waste activities thus identified are “non-value adding essential activities” or “non-value adding non-essential activities”; correct the former, kill the latter.
In sum, Lean Learning = L&D Waste Reduction + L&D Process Improvement
