Top LMS Implementation Strategies To Ensure The Success Of Your Business
With the LMS market poised to be of $22.4 billion worth by the time we reach 2023, more and more businesses are willing to contribute to raising the number even further.
The benefits that come attached to an LMS, which we will look into later in the article, have been the reason behind this mass adoption that LMSs are witnessing across industries.
Now, even amidst all the different advantages and benefits that an LMS offers, the market growth is still several points back because of the difficulty to implement the system in an organization.
In order to help businesses avail the many perks that an LMS offers and take the worry of the after-effects of a wrong LMS implementation, we have curated a list of steps to follow for a successful implementation in your business.
But, before we get into that, let us look at the benefits that a business can avail from the addition of a Learning Management System in their process.
5 Benefits That Come Stringed With A Learning Management System
1. Learning Consistency
Delivering the course through the LMS routes helps in keeping the content centralized in a way that there is a single updated source of instructions, content, and questions. So, everyone is up-to-date with the learning material.
2. Creation Of Engaging Courses
Unlike traditional learning systems, LMSs give you the option to mix images, video, and texts. This mix of the mediums makes the whole learning process all the more engaging for the students while giving the instructors the space to be as creative as they want to be.
3. Simple Distribution
Passing over the LMS content from one person to another is a lot easier than when using traditional learning systems. All you have to do is send invites to the users from the software itself through email or even simpler, you can distribute the URL link of your content to other people.
4. Keep The Courses Updated
With LMSs, it becomes very easy to keep the course updated with all the latest content. With the management of the complete course, content, and structure being in your hand, you can easily modify the content.
5. Simple Tracking
With LMSs, it becomes very easy to keep track of how learners are engaging with the course, while you are also getting a complete insight into parts users are using or even ignoring the most.
So, these were the 5 benefits that usually come tagged with an LMS or, in other words, the benefits that have contributed to shaping a flourishing market picture of the learning domain.
And now that we have looked at the various benefits, it is time to deep dive into what we came here for; the successful implementation of an LMS and all these ways in which you can make your workforce learn and stay updated, as well as ensure your business is a lot more profit-friendly.
How To Profitably Implement A Learning Management System In Your Organization
There is one thing that you should know before we get into the conversation of how you can implement an LMS into your business: the importance of putting the right team up for it.
Irrespective of whether you are adding a new LMS or you are upgrading your present system, doing it without the help of the right resources would be next to impossible. There can be several nitty-gritty details you will have to look into, such as integrations and connections that you will have to make, etc. So, take the help of a team of LMS consultants to hand-hold you through the entire implementation process and then help you in maintaining the system as and when required.
Now having stated the importance of a successful LMS implementation, let us look 6 ways in which you can implement the system successfully below:
1. Planning Stage
Planning is very crucial, not only at the time of introducing the LMS to your business but completely throughout.
As and when the project moves, unaccounted for challenges and needs are bound to emerge, which would require you to refine and expand your plan.
The detailing of the plan should be related to the requirements of your business. A stage where vendors can come in very handy. You can ask them for a template of the project plan which includes everything that the vendor has to attend to for implementing the LMS. You can not only look at the details mentioned there to get an idea of the items but also add your own points which are not necessarily vendor related, communication planning, data cleanup, user acceptance, end users support, change management plan, etc.
2. LMS Configuration
While at this stage too, vendors tend to extend a helping hand in easing the configuration process, it would nonetheless be impossible for them to help you throughout. There will be a number of decisions that you will have to make after getting a very detailed insight into operations and data, system functionality, data fields, and capabilities.
Other factors that you will have to keep in mind when taking important configuration decisions include:
- User profile: Demographic data like job function, contact information, employment status, education level, etc.
- Audiences and domains
- Administrator security roles
- Course metadata and catalog
3. Course Structure
The course should include a variety of activities like pretesting, reading the assignment, classroom and webinar attendance, survey, and a self-paced module, amongst other things. The curriculum, on the other hand, will include the number of courses that will be added in the sequence.
While it is difficult to configure the structures until you have finished migration of the course data from legacy to new LMS, you can put in placeholder courses to lay down the course structure.
There are multiple things that can be added in a curriculum or course structure:
- Assessments and evaluations
- Competency model
- Notification system
- Reports
4. Data And Course Migration
In case you are transferring custom LMS to an off-shelf product, you will have to move courses and training data from the legacy system to the new LMS. Being one of the most complex tasks of the whole implementation process, you will have to handle it in particular sequence and should address the incompatibilities in the way courses and data were stored earlier in the legacy system and now in the new LMS.
Now, it goes without saying that you should perform the course, user, and transcript migration in three different stages if your aim is to avoid any instance of data loss.
The first stage would be to migrate a small portion of the course or data to check if migration works properly, and the second step is to migrate every data to date in order to enhance the course setups through configuration. The third step is to transfer the data which was changed or added since the migration you performed in stage two.
5. User Acceptance Testing
This is the stage where you test the LMS in order to ensure that the vendor has given a bug-free, fully operational system. You will also be testing to see if the courses, configurations, and data are present in the system as you expect.
The aim of user acceptance testing is to conduct detailed testing of each part of the system. You would want to identify and correct all the bugs before going live so that the users don’t get a bad first impression.
To do this, you should first list out all the different elements which have to be tested and then go on to creating a team that would attend to those. You would also want to create a spreadsheet for monitoring the whole testing process.
6. Go Live
The last step of the whole LMS implementation process is about going live. It is advised you meet with the core team and brainstorm contingency plans for all the risks that might come up.
To lower the disruption to the end users, you would want to schedule final tasks to happen on the weekend, to check if everything works as planned and developed when you go live.
The implementation of an LMS is considered to be a resource-intensive and rigorous process. It would rarely happen that the LMS would fit all your needs. You will have to work to make it fit in your organization.
Ultimately, with the help of the right resources, you can avoid a number of misfortunes and delays in the first place, thus cutting down on wasted time to a huge extent.