862: ACTION SATURDAY (systems implementation in 10 steps w/ Petra Mayer)

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Hey, what is up?

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Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs all over the world, it's Brian Lofermento here, host of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast, and this is an Action Saturday episode that I am telling you is really going to spark a ton of action inside of you, because we are welcoming back the incredible Petra Mayer.

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Petra was our guest in Monday's episode, episode 860, where she brought the heat to talk about learning management systems, transforming our company culture.

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She brought so many good things to us correction in Wednesday's episode.

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So Petra is a brilliant business mind and in today's Action Saturday episode she's going to help us navigate systems implementations, which is just a part of her zone of genius.

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Her other zone of genius is helping you to actually take action, step by step.

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You'll see the way she does it in today's episode.

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Just to tell you a little bit about Petra, she's the founder and lead consultant at Petra Mayer and Associates Consulting, based in British Columbia, Canada.

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She builds on her 30 plus years of experience of working in corporations of all sizes in four countries on three continents to help her clients create engaging training programs for their team members.

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She prides herself in building partnerships with the organization she serves and the associates that she brings on board and I'm telling you today's episode.

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She lays out 10 steps for us to take action, and that's what these episodes are all about.

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So I'm excited for all of us to learn from her.

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Take it away, Petra.

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Thanks, Brian, so glad to be here again.

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Well, today's Action Saturday episode is all about how to move forward with a system implementation project that might be appearing a bit overwhelming to you and to your business might be appearing a bit overwhelming to you and to your business.

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I will use the example of identifying a suitable learning management system for your organization, but you can use this process for any other system implementation.

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And don't worry, at the end of this short audio, I will also share with you some resources that you can download that will help you with all this process, because there's multiple steps that I'm talking about here.

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Now I'm going to start with a little bit of a story of a client of mine.

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A client that I have been working with contacted me for exactly this challenge.

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They knew that they were outgrowing their existing learning management system and they contacted a reputable vendor.

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In total, they had four demos and meetings with the vendor, which left them totally and utterly confused.

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After these meetings, they were even less knowledgeable and had no idea how to move forward.

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This is when they reached out to us and when we brought in our successful process for a project of this nature.

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So let me take you through this step by step.

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Let's say you're representing an organization's group to identify a learning platform that helps you achieve your objectives.

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How would you go about it?

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So here's a 10-step process that I recommend for you to do.

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First step you need to identify your audience.

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Now it seems something that you think like why would I need to do that?

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Of course, I know my audience, but we want you to go really deeper into that.

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As an organization, you might have an internal learner audience, such as your staff, or you might have external learners.

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Those could be your clients if you are selling training programs, or they could be maybe clients who are buying into a software that you have and they need to learn how to use the software, or they could be a distribution channel for you that uses your systems and your products.

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So you need to identify these audiences.

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I usually create user persona stories about them so that we really know them very deeply.

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Then you may need to write some user stories, so these are the actual stories of how these various users will use the system.

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Now, again, you need to look internally and to end users.

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Internally, you might have some administrative users, or you will have administrative users the users that are administrating the learning management system content creators, trainers, somebody who is enrolling the learners and managing enrollment processes, maybe a financial department that manages the financial and the e-commerce side of the system.

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So you identify the different users and write stories about how they use this.

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Then, of course, you also want to write some user stories about your end users.

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Again, if you have internal and external users, their stories may differ and you want to write them down individually.

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It could be your learners, but it may also be managers, department managers who are managing a group of learners.

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And the same could happen if you have multiple client organizations.

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Whoever is the training manager in the client organization might be one of those users, and the actual learner is a different one.

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Now, in step three, you want to get really clear on your requirements.

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Now this is your user requirements business requirements, technical requirements, functional requirements in order to achieve the learning process that you want, and also non-functional requirements.

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This may be, to be honest, hundreds of different requirements that you're identifying and documenting, which is step four documenting these requirements.

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And I recommend that you document them in a document that allows for vendor comparison, because you don't want to have maybe 10, 20 different proposals from vendors, each one being in a different format, which makes it really difficult to compare them.

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So I recommend to put all your requirements into a spreadsheet, identify them there could be hundreds of lines and you put them into different buckets.

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Now you also need to identify what is a mandatory requirement you really can't do without that or what might be a nice to have, or an optional.

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Describe it in a way that the vendor will understand what you're talking about for each one of those requirements.

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In step five, you identify suitable vendors based on their public information.

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Now you might have some vendors who've been in touch with you trying to propose you to look at their system, some that you've heard about.

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You might research some and you come up with a list of different systems.

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Check out their websites, especially the pages that identify their different functionality, watch the videos available and check the information against your highest priority requirements.

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Only consider those vendors that tick the boxes for those high priority items and to those.

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In step six, you can issue your requirements document and the user stories that you've created.

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They come back with their requirements and they need to identify which ones are your top priority requirements, and you basically identify a person to submit the requirements document to you, start an interaction with them and they will send the requirements document completed back to you.

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This is where really the work happens.

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You now need to analyze these documentations and the fit across these different vendors.

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You need to come up with a process that makes it comparable.

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Now we use a scale of zero to five for each one of these requirements to identify the fit, but you can come up with your own rubric, as long as you try and be as objective as possible in your assessment.

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Step eight identify the top vendors and invite them for demos.

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Now in this exercise you will look at the requirements documentation they've sent back to you.

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You could identify them by overall fit for all the requirements or you just look at the weighted fit for the must-have and important features.

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You look at their approximate cost and maybe you also create a risk mitigation score for this.

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Now in our project we identified four vendors, four demos.

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Then we need to go through the demos in step nine.

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So we invite the vendor for demos.

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We give them a clear instruction of what we're expecting from them and, like the analysis of the requirements, you want to try and be as objective as possible, Identify what's important to you and rate the demos accordingly.

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If you have multiple people attending the demo, you might want to provide them with scoring sheets and then create average sheets so that you can become really objective.

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Now here's step 10.

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Once you have gone through the demos and potential further negotiation and contracting documentation, you should be able to identify the vendor which is the best fit.

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Now I don't want to lie.

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This can be an extensive process that is time-consuming, and often companies don't have the sufficient resources or expertise in-house or patience.

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We often hear that customers are trying to do this themselves, but reality is that they cut corners and rush to the results because they want to get the project started as soon as possible.

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Nobody really owns the overall process, and that is often a dangerous situation to be in.

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This can lead to contracting systems that don't really meet your goals, or, alternatively, it may be that you deprioritize other work that normally would go ahead in order to put more resources onto this project, which can lead to loss in revenue or increase in costs in other areas.

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These are opportunity costs that are often overlooked.

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Another way you could do this is to bring in a short-term contractor or to outsource this project to organizations who are knowledgeable and experienced and who have previous experience of having gone through this for other clients in this area, and that will benefit your project as well.

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They've already spoken to maybe dozens of different system vendors, and they might already have a pre-qualified list available to you, so this is something that you should definitely consider as an alternative to doing this in-house.

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So that's today's Action Saturday episode.

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So now it's time to take action.

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If you want to learn more about the process of sourcing or implementing a learning management system or developing engaging training, visit my website, petromayoconsultingcom, and navigate to the free resources available there.

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We look forward to seeing you there.