Because our leadership doesn't feel we have enough on our plates (what with the never-ending, ever-delayed project, and those 40 hour support jobs we had prior to the additional project work) they have decided they need a flashy cost saving project.
Several years ago - KP implemented a teaching methodology culled from The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning: How to Turn Training and Development Into Business Results
The 6D's - as they are called - can be explained in the handy image
The trickiest D's are the 4th and 5th D - follow through and support. With our leadership training, particularly Facilitative Leadership we instituted a 10 week goal setting/achievement process. The process has the training participant setting goals at the end of the class and working in partnership with his/her manager, coach and instructor to track and document the progress and success of these goals. The success measurements can be boiled down to training ROI - the holy grail of development metrics.
KP bought this tool from a pricey vendor that claimed to automate and mine data from the process, creating nifty dashboards. Fort Hill was a niche company specializing in 6D methodology. The ResultsEngine was a hosted service with a low level of "hands on" support and maintenance of the program. The tool was complex, time-intensive to maintain, and the cost per user was not scalable. Moreover, the ResultsEngine, which we branded "Friday 5's" did not measure the right metrics (only the easy to capture transactional metrics, but Leadership didn't mind, they wanted "numbers".)
Eager to save "low hanging fruit" dollars, "Friday 5's" was slated for replacement. My boss and myself were given the task to propose a no-cost system/low-cost resource solution. And we were given 2 weeks to do it.
Quickly, we sprung into action. My manager began polling existing users about the Friday 5's tool: what they liked and disliked, what was critical to keep and what could slide with out too much issue. I took the growing list and created a business requirements document.
What I found, proposed and what happened to our project along the way will be in later posts. This revised charter reflects some of the surprises and solutions, so I hope I do not spoil the surprise.
