Running a Lean Learning Function

“The ROI on that is nearly 100 percent immediately because they’re more productive,” he said. “They’ll complete projects and improve processes that will drive more customer value. When they spend time with this, they’ll see the immediate payback because they’ll perform better.”

Lean also influences the ways learning programs are delivered. Because of its strong emphasis on saving time and money, much of lean education tends to be provided to learners while they’re on the job — the content is often short, digestible and dispensed virtually. Additionally, it’s typically just-in-time and just-for-you, designed to support employees at the point of execution.

Obstacles to Lean Learning in Organizations
Why do learning professionals have such a difficult time educating organizational leaders about how lean works in enterprise education? Partly because executives just want them to solve problems, and partly because they don’t always agree on how to operate learning and development functions within an organization.

Here are some of the common challenges that hinder lean learning functions in companies:

Arguments over centralization and decentralization

Lack of subject-matter experts

Conflicts between technical and educational departments

Depth and scale of content

These issues, whether they’re brought up inside or outside of the learning organization, come up often, but they can be dealt with by customizing the system according to the needs of the enterprise.

Despite the apparent strictness of lean, it’s very flexible — there are many different approaches, and learning professionals should weigh the pros and cons of each. Tom Kelly, NetApp University (Network Appliance) vice president, said this means asking “the hard questions” and considering the answers.

Examples include:

What if the training group focuses on subject-matter competence (general areas of broad understanding instead of expertise)? They could cover more products with fewer training resources, and communication with subject-matter experts becomes more efficient than it would be with pure designers.

What if you don’t own the search or the registration process or even the learning management system (LMS)? What if you think of those things as services that can and should be provided by IT? That might work wonders on reducing upgrades and repetitive customization of internally supported applications, tools and systems, as well as head count in both IT and learning.

What if you acknowledge almost any enterprise will ship a certain amount of products with errors, bugs and omissions? What if you similarly recognize any learning (especially in the classroom) should hold the workforce to a higher standard than that? What is a realistic bar to set?