Why a One-Page Learning Plan? Think of it as the executive summary of the entire learning organization.
The One-Page Plan boils the bulky, complex business case down into readily digestible bullet points and basic details. It acts as a communication vehicle for the learning organization, trying together what is important to the business with how L&D is aligned to it.
The beauty of the One-Page Learning Plan is its ability to succinctly pull together several components of effective learning strategy into a single document: business alignment, performance improvement, the Maturity Model, and a learning metrics and measurement overview. The One-Page Plan incorporates all of those into a plan that can be easily shared with business stakeholders.
From an internal L&D organization perspective, the One-Page Plan aligns the team to common goals and demonstrates how each individual contributes to them. It’s common, especially in large organizations, for individuals to wonder exactly how they align to the broader goals and objectives of the organization, and this allows them to be able to see how their work drives the business forward.
Prove L&D's Value to the Business
Why is it really critical for learning organizations to demonstrate strategic business alignment? To truly be valued a business partner, L&D needs to team with business units throughout the organization to identify and solve issues that arise on a regular basis. Learning leaders who have respect, influence, and budget are the ones who have insight across the enterprise—not only from a high-level, strategic perspective, but also from a tactical level.
Crunch those longer-term objectives into attainable quarterly goals, ensuring that initiatives stay in focus and making it easier to hold people accountable, both inside the L&D organization and in the business unit. Have a performance consulting mindset—don’t just provide learning, also provide business solutions. Realize that the learning function is a strategic asset to the business, helping deliver performance improvement interventions in whatever way is optimal for a given situation.
Become actively engaged with the strategic planning process. Key stakeholders may have dozens or even hundreds of strategic initiatives from senior leadership, which those stakeholders break into goals and objectives for them and their teams. For learning leaders to be in step with the people and business units being supported, they need to work with them early in the process to understand how best to support them.
As you start to understand the key strategic issues throughout the organization, including where resources will be allocated throughout the year, you can identify how L&D ties into those. This will allow you to get in the planning conversation at the beginning, instead of being pulled in late. Just as importantly, it helps the stakeholders understand the investment that they need to make in L&D in order to reach the strategic goals and objectives.
Know the Stakeholders
The first step is to determine who your stakeholders are. Who in the leadership team do you support—the CEO? The VP of sales? Put down specific names, because you're going to want to interact with them on a regular basis to ensure that you're aligned with exactly what they see as being their strategic initiatives.
Next, list internal L&D team members you’re supporting internally; this can be the head of instructional design, director of design and development head, the LMS administrator, etc.
Finally, never lose focus of the end users. Make sure the strategic initiative ties through to the wants of your leadership team all the way to the true performance needs of the end users.
Determine Strengths and Opportunities
Bite the bullet and study up on your organization’s business case, which will provide valuable insight into the near- and long-term outlook for the company. It’s necessary intelligence for aligning and prioritizing L&D activities, and it also helps identify whether the learning organization has the personnel, resources, and expertise to support upcoming needs.
It can be a challenge to get senior leadership to share that sort of intelligence with L&D, beyond what’s available in the business case, assuming one exists. This is really reflective of a larger approach to L&D, around implementing a performance consulting mindset. Learning leaders who focus on developing a performance mindset are able to understand exactly what the business needs to achieve its objectives, ask the right questions to get that relevant information, and ultimately come back with recommendations to fix the performance issue.
Track Success with Metrics & Measurement
It's important to be able to prove the strategic value that L&D provides to the business, and that happens by providing meaningful metrics—and not the metrics that learning professionals typically think about. Understand the business metrics of the stakeholders—what do they find important—and tie learning results back to them.
There are four types of metrics and measurements—efficiency, effectiveness, outcome, and alignment. Efficiency metrics are useful to L&D, but not so much to the business; these are training activity metrics, like number of learners, number of programs delivered, cost to produce training, utilization rates, etc. Effectiveness and outcome measures, on the other hand, do have some value to the business. Effectiveness focuses on content quality, knowledge acquisition, performance application, etc. Outcome measures examine the learning’s impact on business results—revenue, cost reduction, speed performance, etc.
With the One-Page Plan, you want to focus a little on efficiency metrics, a little on effectiveness, but mainly on outcome measures.
Ask the Right Questions Up Front
Identify how L&D will support the strategic goals and initiatives up front, including understanding what it is that stakeholders are trying to accomplish.
For example, say the sales team looks to increase revenue by 15%. As a learning professional, you would sit down with the sales manager and ask, “What are the strategic initiatives you're implementing to achieve that goal?" The manager answers that a new CRM system is being put into place, some new hires are in store, an ad campaign is soon to launch, and a new incentives program is being rolled out.
Now ask the follow-up: “What percentage will each of those initiatives contribute toward achieving the revenue increase?” That's important, because as you start to consider possible performance solutions, you want to be able to tie the solutions back to those percentages—that’s how you ultimately prove L&D’s contribution to achieving the end goal.
Assess the Learning Team’s Readiness
Outline those upcoming initiatives and match them to L&D activities. Focus on the "what," not the "how,” aiming to plan resource allocation over the course of the year to ensure the learning organization has the capability to support organizational priorities. Identify your strengths and continue to invest in them, lest they become opportunities later.
Take a hard look in the mirror—what are the L&D organization’s weaknesses? What needs improvement? Is outsourcing or staff augmentation an option? Set quarterly priorities for your team’s improvement and readiness, and assess those priorities frequently to ensure that the team is active, engaged, and aligned with the aims of both the learning organization and the enterprise.
Understand the Financial Outlook
This section of the One-Page Plan pulls everything into a quick-view dashboard. Convert those percentage contributions into estimated dollar amounts, if possible—it’s more meaningful and illustrative of L&D’s impact.
The financial outlook section details the business priorities, targets, and L&D’s contribution. It allows the learning leader to say to stakeholders, "Here are the things that we’re committing to, here are the things that we will work with you on, and here are the benefits you’ll gain from engaging us early and working closely with us.”
The One-Page Learning Plan also facilitates reflection analysis post-implementation. When the results come in and the project is over, the plan acts as a guide to reflect on what went well, what could be done better next time, where the organization needs to improve, and how the stakeholder relationship could be handled better going forward. With the benefit of hindsight, if projections and goals aren’t met, reflect on why.
At a minimum, the One-Page Learning Plan should be revisited and refreshed quarterly.
The One-Page Plan puts everybody, internally and throughout the organization, on the same page regarding what L&D can contribute. It aligns L&D with business goals helps the learning team get the credit they've earned.
Topics: Learning Strategy