As organisations adapt to the innovation and disruption caused by technology, Learning and Development (L&D) teams are looking to adopt technologies such as Learning Management Systems (LMS) to better manage, deliver and track training at their organisation.

Today, the LMS market is proliferating with multiple options that keep emerging from time-to-time. Implementing the right LMS can substantially reduce the training cost, streamline the training operations, and deliver value and insight to the L&D and HR teams at the organisation.

So how do you find the perfect LMS for your company? It’s simple! Ask yourself these 3 simple questions.

1. Why do I need an LMS for my business?
2. What do I need from my LMS?
3. How do I evaluate my LMS?

Why do I need an LMS for my business?

It is important to articulate the purpose and the business needs or challenges that require the organisations to look for an LMS.

• What are the L&D objectives that you want to achieve?
• What are the gaps or challenges in the current training workflow?
  
  

These questions will give you a clearer picture on understanding the “why LMS” question. The aim is to identify the need and objectives that will help you define what the LMS should support, and how you can measure the success of the LMS implementation.

What do I need from my LMS?

Once it is clear why the LMS is needed, it is important to prioritize the needs, and look for an LMS that can meet your key priority requirements. It is good to document these key priorities and functional requirements so that the LMS evaluation can be objectively conducted. Rate the objectives/functional requirements with a 1 (Must have), 2 (Highly Desirable), and 3 (Good to have).

If your key objective is to deliver training content online, then the focus needs to be finding an LMS that makes it easy to access and deliver rich multimedia content, however, if the objective is to drive engagement in the training process, then you need an LMS that can enable collaboration and gamification.

If your organisation is geographically distributed, or most of your workforce is not desk-bound, then mobile access and delivery becomes critical, and you need an LMS that can effectively deliver over mobile, and have native Mobile Apps, instead of a responsive web view.

How do I evaluate my LMS?

It is recommended to build a rubric or a set of criteria based on which you will assess the different LMS options. Typically, the considerations are Functional & Technical Requirements Fit, Support & Service, and Pricing.

If you’ve prioritized your functional requirements and can find an LMS provider that can meet all/most of your must-haves and highly desirable functional requirements, then you look for their service and support structure. This is as critical as having a good product. The flexibility of the LMS provider to build integrations or customise the workflows can help reduce the problem of “Fitting the process to the technology” and instead “make the technology fit the process”. The service and support to not just implement, but also rollout and sustain adoption is key for the organisation.

The final check is the pricing of the LMS platform. While evaluating LMS platforms, it is important to ensure that the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) across LMS vendors is appropriately measured and compared. Look out for hidden costs such as Storage, Feature-based pricing, Separate Support Agreements, Infrastructure (if not a SaaS LMS), etc.

At the end of the day an LMS is an investment that can help in improving the productivity of your organization, and making the training effort and impact visible. The right LMS can provide you a wide array of options to enhance the training programs and reduce your time spent on training operations.

Planning to roll out LMS to enhance learning pedagogy?

Download this white paper that includes 24 Best Practices for implementing an LMS.