How to get the most from your new LMS/LXP

By now, you’ll have done a thorough needs assessment to figure out what you’re looking for. You’ll have gone through a systematic selection process to find the solution that addresses those needs. Now, you need a strategic implementation plan and a long-term vision of how to use your LMS/LXP, so that you and your employees can reap the benefits.

The groundwork you’ve done so far can inform your planning here. You know you’ve got a Learning Management System (LMS) or Learning Experience Platform (LXP) that fits your business priorities and your employee needs. You’ve secured buy-in from C-suite¹ and initiated a partnership with the vendor. Now it’s time to put your plan into action.  

There are a number of significant factors that will determine whether your new solution is a success.  

• What are the key features to get started with, to achieve your initial priorities? 

• How can you engage the whole business in the launch to ensure ongoing engagement with the LMS/LXP? 

• What measurements for success should you put in place to track and demonstrate the impact of the LMS/LXP? 

It’s vital to make your launch a success, to get – and keep – the business on-side. Having secured your buy-in to invest in your LMS/LXP, you want to be able to show its positive impacts straight away. This will make it easier to maintain that commitment and engagement going forward.  

Below, we’ll take you step-by step through an implementation and readiness plan that makes the most of your new LMS/LXP and sets you up for early success. We’ll also look at how to engage your employees and build sustained, productive use of the LMS/LXP. And we’ll show you how to evaluate the impact, so that you can demonstrate the return on investment.

1. Design an implementation strategy

As soon as you’ve settled on your chosen vendor and LMS/LXP, start preparing to put it in place. With a comprehensive and strategic implementation plan, you’ll cover all your bases, anticipate any teething problems and keep everything running smoothly all the way to launch and beyond. Follow these steps: 

• Establish your implementation team

  • In your pre-planning, you’ll have decided who will take ownership of the new LMS/LXP. Include representatives from across the company, including HR, IT and key teams to input and act as champions.

  • Decide who will be responsible for what aspects of the roll-out and management of the LMS/LXP.

  • Fully lean into the resources and expertise of your new vendor partner to learn as much as you can from them and maximised their support.

• Devise your implementation plan and timeline

  • Work with the vendor to decide on key stages of implementation.

  • Ensure all dependencies or obstacles have been taken into account.

  • Set target dates for each stage and communicate these to the relevant stakeholders.

  • Secure resource and timetabling sessions as soon as possible. 

  • Make sure your projected timeline takes account of any individual, team or company plans, so that you can avoid any disruption.

• Agree a migration plan

  • Decide on what learning data and content should be moved over to the LMS/LXP. Only migrate data or content that is necessary, or that will still be useful to your users. 

  • Ensure that any data that needs to be kept but that is not needed on the LMS/LXP is properly archived.

  • Make sure to time the migration efficiently, to avoid disruption to ongoing workflows and the launch.

• Trial the LMS/LXP and set up training

  • Get user testing in place and refine before launch. For example, choose employees from each team or department to trial features and report on functionality and any bugs. These should include both learners and administrators. 

  • Keep stakeholders and employees fully informed about the implementation plan and rollout. 

  • Schedule communications, demos and training sessions well in advance for maximum involvement and impact.

  • Promote these with your teams and emphasise the benefits to their specific needs.

  • Avoid presenting training as compulsory, and avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. 

• Go live with the new LMS/LXP 

  • Decide on a roll-out plan. Consider how the launch will happen, either as a phased roll-out or as a full company launch. 

  • Schedule and promote a launch event and inform all stakeholders of when and how the launch will happen.

  • Make it fun, create a buzz and develop a plan that lasts a few weeks, not just the day of launch.

• Assess the effectiveness of the LMS/LXP 

  • Throughout the implementation process, be sure to document wins and learnings: share what went well, and identify any problems or glitches to solve. 

  • Set a specific retro period, after which you will undertake an assessment of the process so far. 

  • Schedule periodic assessments and reports to monitor the effectiveness of the LMS/LXP.

  • Once you have launched, move on to think about how to land and expand the LMS/LXP offering.

Get actionable insights around Employee Experience and People Development

2. Focus areas to drive engagement

It’s vital for the success of your new LMS/LXP that users recognise its value—both for their learning and for their roles. Follow these steps to make sure your LMS/LXP becomes a central part of your employee experience.  

• Choose the right content 

  • Curate content that addresses and appeals to all areas of the business.  

  • Make use of integrations and plug-ins from specialist learning content providers like Knowbly, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, and Anders Pink.

• Create learning pathways

  • Ensure learners have a clear and logical picture of their journey and can track their progress towards their learning goals. Consider associating courses with CPD/CPE points.

• Focus on the learner experience

   

• • Build a simple, intuitive and attractive UX/UI design that makes content appealing to users and makes the learning experience easy and enjoyable.

• Encourage self-guided learning

  • Empower employees to create and curate their own learning, so that it fits in with their own learning and career objectives.

  • Enable content authoring tools or video creators, so that subject matter experts in your staff can create learning content that is relevant to their colleagues.

• Encourage social learning

  • Employees will engage more readily if they learn together².

  • Enable social learning tools and approaches such as:

    • personal online profiles a la LinkedIn

    • gamification and leader boards

    • content sharing so that employees can direct their colleagues to useful or interesting learning content.

• Recognise achievement

  • Acknowledge employees as subject matter experts and encourage peer learning and sharing.

  • Use badges or certificates to display learning achievements on the LMS/LXP with.

  • Recognise and celebrate applied learning when employees make use of learning in their working practices – especially when this drives improved performance.

• Build the vendor partnership

  • Keep the communication with your vendor partner flowing.

  • Ascertain their future plans for the LMS/LXP.

  • Find out what updates and developments are in the pipeline and how they will improve the UX.

3. Demonstrate the impact
Ultimately, you want to be able to show the value and impact of your new LMS/LXP to the company. Follow these steps to illustrate the ROI of your new LMS/LXP:

• Assess solution's effectiveness

  • Look back at your original problem assessment and re-assess.

  • Make sure you have closed the gaps you identified in your L&D set-up and offering.

  • Document how your new LMS/LXP has addressed those pain points.

• Gauge the user experience

  • Use pulse surveys or comments to collect feedback from the LMS/LXP users – both learners and administrators.

  • Conduct user interviews with a variety of stakeholders to get deeper levels of feedback and ideas for improvements.

• Track performance and productivity

  • Schedule one-to-ones with your staff. Alternatively, set up digital check-ins or pulse surveys to track performance and any upward trends since the launch.

  • Use your LMS/LXP to generate custom reports and relevant insights on metrics such as content engagement, user performance or even employee satisfaction. Correlate these to the impact of the LMS/LXP.

• Track your employee lifetime value³

  • An employee’s lifetime value (ELV) can be thought of as the net benefit they bring during their time with the company, against the costs of onboarding, training and retaining them⁴.

  • Measure the savings in time and money for onboarding and training.

  • Track any improvements in employee retention.

  • Improvements in these two metrics go a long way to increasing the ELV of your employees.

The ROI of investing in your employee experience
Being strategic in how you select and implement a new LMS/LXP is key to its success – and to the employee experience you can offer.

No LMS/LXP is a silver bullet. Whatever the features, tools and functions it boasts will only pay off if put to good use. Investing in a new LMS/LXP requires you to be invested in making the best use of it.

Learn Amp offer a best in breed learning and talent development suite with great learner experience, while offering expert partnership support and demonstrable ROI.

Resources

[1] https://www.talentinternational.us/blog/2021/04/employee-engagement-how-to-get-buy-in-from-your-c-suite

[2] https://hbr.org/2018/11/how-to-help-your-employees-learn-from-each-other

[3] https://elearningindustry.com/employee-lifetime-value-critical-metric-to-measure?utm_content=134485929&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-398138556

[4] https://trainingindustry.com/articles/learning-technologies/how-the-right-ld-platform-strategy-can-improve-your-employee-retention/