LMS project synopsis 6sigma

1. Departmental Professional Development System (PDS)

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Up to 2010 each Departmental business unit independently organised and managed professional

development opportunities for the Department's 32,000 employees using systems and processes

created and managed in isolation from the rest of the Department. A prime example was the

Pathlore(TM) learning management system (LMS), a server based system used by the enterprise

Registered Training Organisation (RTO) and the Health and Safety Services team for Occupational

Health and Safety (OHS) training.

From 2011–2012 one of my responsibilities has been as the Project Manager to implement a more

effective solution to managing training across the Department. The result is the Departmental PDS, a

web-based learning management suite accessible to all the Department's professional development

providers and participants including all the existing and desired functionality raised by stakeholders

across the Department I engaged in the project.

I began the project by creating a project plan clearly identifying the objectives of the project and a

list of stakeholders from across the Department sampling a wide range of needs from complex

training management, to simple events management, to reporting needs. I identified realisable

benefits including savings from enabling participants to enter and manage their own user profile

data to increase accuracy and remove duplication of data entry across the Department, as well as

enabling the solution to automatically provide regular reporting to other systems like the AVEMTISS

fortnightly national data report straight into the STELA data system which was previously being

manually data entered by an administration officer. I also mapped the relationships and inter-

dependencies between the high level user groups of a Department-wide LMS in the flowchart below.

MS Visio flowchart

I created a communications plan to engage and hear the voice of each stakeholder independently as

I was aware that a solution to combine each stakeholders' individual requirements was possible

using access control lists (ACL) to ensure templates, data and reports could be made accessible only

1. Departmental Professional Development System (PDS)

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to specific users and reusable thereby enabling each stakeholder to use the solution's functions their

own way without impacting other users but still providing the Department with a highly effective

single data sourcing and reporting system.

Commercial LMS solutions (and the final PDS) provide high level functionality including:

• training management—managing registrations, training content, achievement record

• learning management—individual participant's access to own profile

• online learning delivery—individual participant's access to training content online

• talent management—organisation-wide reporting of achievement records

Using the Pareto Principle, through stakeholder consultation I determined that initially the greatest

realisable benefits from the solution for the Department would come from focusing the solution on

improving existing training management processes over the access to new functionality by the

system.

With this communications method I was also able to determine the solution attributes of most

importance to each stakeholder as my customers. The Kano model describes these attributes as

basic/expected (eg the ability to record attendance), performance (eg the ability to record

attendance independently for specific sessions, days or modules within an overall course), and

attractive (eg the ability for the system to automatically provide the participant with a certificate of

attendance independently for specific session, day or module attendance/completion).

I developed a detailed process map for the solution using the effective precursor functionality

provided by MS Project's Gantt charting function to demonstrate the critical path of activity through

the solution. I used this process map to assist the application vendor understand how the

Department's system users would seek to use the system to manage their training or events.

1. Departmental Professional Development System (PDS)

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I built a prototype LMS in MS Access to collate functional requirements that was used to throughout

2010–12 by the enterprise RTO and 2 other business units to calculate savings realised from single

sourcing participant profiles and registration/achievement records for reporting.

I engaged administration/data entry staff to benchmark work effort involved in entering participant

profile information their existing systems. These results ranged from 5–15 minutes per participant

depending on the number of systems the business unit manually entered the participant's data into.

This improvement alone suggested a realisable 10,000 hour saving per annum administrative effort

saving across the Department. I also benchmarked the time and resources needed to create a simple

event and a complex training course.

From the beginning: over 12 months in 2010, I prepared a broad 159 page design specification for

the solution with functional examples, process maps and detailed stakeholder requirements; and

from that created a refined business requirements document which I used to create the tender

documentation. In 2011 I managed the 6 month tender and procurement process to purchase a

commercial LMS to the Departments business requirements. In the second half of 2011, I worked

closely with the successful vendor's project and development team (referee available) to customise

the commercial platform to the Department's wording and organisational design. Finally at the end

of 2011 to March 2012, I managed user acceptance testing (UAT), server hosting, and final testing of

the deployed system. The solution has started its go-live and is now being managed independently

by its system administrators.

I created user documentation for the solution including a User Guide, Facilitators Guide, and System

Administrators Manual with a detailed change management process including risk analysis with a

template Ishikawa cause and effect map.

1. Departmental Professional Development System (PDS)

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Realisable benefits being achieved through my project management to implement the PDS solution

now include:

• reporting—single data source and reporting templates enabling dynamic reports to be

created at click of a button saving gathering, cleansing and calculations previously

performed

4 hours saving per report @ASO5 ($41 per hour) = $164 per report

• reporting AVETMISS—1 full day per fortnight manual data entry into STELA system replaced

by single click download of zip file from system which is then Browse > Upload into STELA

(PDS is AVETMISS reporting compliant, previous system was not)

7.5 hours saving per fortnight @ASO2 ($29 per hour) = $5655 per annum

• content—previous many business units creating independent equivalent content replaced

with single content management system (CMS) for training content and learning aids (eg

Centra virtual classroom training, at least 4 known business units independently managing

own instructional content for this now replaced with a single content and training course

accessible by all clients of all business units)

6 hours document management per annum per business unit saving 18 hours per annum

@ASO5 ($41 per hour) for one course = $738 saving per annum for this one course with

many other courses, training content and learning aids to be investigated for similar savings

across Department

• user profile management—previous manual data entry from 1000 paper enrolment forms

per annum (within WD; estimated 125,000 enrolments across Dept per annum) replaced

with users entering and managing own user profile data (with system prompting users to

update their profile with every enrolment request)

5 minutes per enrolment = 83 hours @ASO2 ($29 per hour) = $2407 per annum for

Workforce Development business unit (estimated 10,000 hours across whole Dept saving

full 5.0 ASO2 FTE = $290,000 per annum with no negative impact, plus expected positive

improvement in data quality (to be measured))

• achieving a lean system administration and support system—I designed the PDS to provide

help to users at every level of access including just-in-time help for users in the middle of

system activity, written and online accessible PDF user guides, online community groups for

shared knowledge including forums and chat rooms, access to FAQs enabling facilitators to

support participants and other facilitators directly, feedback and monitoring functionality

enabling system administrators to quickly react and respond to potential issues to all

relevant users of the system

• economy of scale saving—previously $23,000 per annum hardware and software cost for 20

RTO and Health and Safety Services users = ~$1150 per user; replaced with $55,000 annual

hardware and software costs for 40,000 users across the whole Department = $1.38 per

user achieved through effective negotiation with vendors to achieve best possible result for

organisation (well below standard commercial rates)