Bob took all the benefits of this L&D initiative to the Board at the annual general meeting to review the entire project. All key stakeholders were present at this meeting. Over the review, the team identified many benefits, such as rise in sales by 13%, increase in repeat orders, improvement in customer satisfaction index, and recovery in market share. Though the initiative definitely brought significant benefits to the organization, it had its own drawbacks. The gross project cost was about 200% over the budget, with a schedule variance of approximately 100%. The feedback from the learners showed that the quality of product/technology needs improvement; the stakeholders’ feedback showed a need to improve the quality of process and people. From the feedback, Bob took the following decisions:
- Outsourcing as an optimal (effective & efficient) solution
- Outsource the needs analysis and implementation to a team of external consultants
- Based on the recommendations, outsource content development to an e-learning factory
- Outsource “Train the Trainer” programs
- Outsource L&D Managed Services
- Outsource LMS management and tracking
Delivery was decided to be done in-house and was planned to be outsourced after 3 years. The entire outsourcing would be anchored by Bob as Single Point of Contact (SPOC). It took Bob almost a year to action all the decisions. Upon implementation, the organization noticed the following benefits:
- Cost of content development reduced by ~25%
- Speed and quality of development was impressive
- Helped resources to focus on core competencies of the organization
- Productivity skills enhanced for employees
- Overall operations scaled up
- Operating costs reduced
- Minimizes risks associated with investments in technology
L&D outsourcing definitely worked for the company. It brought immense value to Acme Corporation and furthered the career of Bob.
I have just read all seven postings – great stuff!
I work in the UK, specialising in helping companies to transform their L&D functions as outlined in your excellent postings. I would like to combine them into one case study and post them as a resource on my website – attributing them to you. Could you please contact me to confirm this is ok?
Juliet Adams
Strategic Learning specialist
Managing Learning