CHAPTER 10

Operating Your LMS With Standards and Governance

Your organization may be about to spend, or may have already spent, a lot of time, effort, resources, and money on acquiring and implementing (or updating) an LMS. It is important to protect this investment by establishing the necessary operations and governance measures to ensure that your system continues to be easy to use and provides highly relevant content to your end users. By putting these critical pieces into place, you are much more likely to get optimum value from your LMS.

Too often, organizations operate their LMS for several years without adequate standards, policies, processes, and governance. The result is a giant L-M-Mess. Just recently, I worked with an organization whose LMS contained hundreds of unused courses, including one on how to use Windows 98. Don’t let this happen to you! Make sure you have established standards, in this case a content life-cycle policy and review process.

After you first install your LMS, you can expect it to grow and change. Your organization’s needs will evolve, more content will be added, users and administrators will come and go, new groups of users may become engaged, new features will be enabled, and some features you think will be useful now may never be used.

I have worked with too many organizations whose legacy LMS contains outdated courses, a haphazard organizing structure, duplicate user accounts, catalog dead ends, a lack of accountability or course ownership, inconsistent naming and numbering conventions, reporting anomalies, a lack of distinction in course titles and descriptions, unused features, and spam-like email notifications. Does any of this sound familiar? If you think you may be heading this way or you’re already there, this chapter is for you.

If your organization is implementing a brand-new LMS for the first time, then now is a good idea to take steps to avoid these problems.

If your organization is planning to migrate to a new LMS or undertake a major upgrade of your current product, you can take advantage of this opportunity to clean up and optimize your content and then, while the organization is still mobilized around the LMS project, take steps to ensure your new system doesn’t end up in the same state as your old one.

Even if you are planning to stick with your existing product for the next few years, there are steps you can take to clean things up and manage LMS operations better going forward.

How to Optimize the Operation and Governance of Your LMS

As shown in Figure 10-1, there five major areas you must address. Don’t think of these areas as sequential steps. You can start anywhere, as long as you attend to all five, which are equally important. If you do this, your organization will gain the most benefit from its LMS.

Standards

If your company website had no standards, its logos and layouts might vary from page to page, its many fonts and colors might resemble a ransom note, and its indecipherable mix of current and outdated information might cause considerable confusion. Customers would quickly decide not to do business with this disorganized company. The same is true of your LMS.

LMS standards include policies, procedures, guidelines, conventions, and consistent use of course properties and structures. These standards ensure that all administrators and stakeholders are using the LMS in the same fundamental way, which in turn makes it easier to use and manage.

Following are several standards to consider. Some examples are included, but they are not intended for you to cut and paste into your organization’s implementation documentation. You will need to define standards that are unique and appropriate to the way you manage learning.

Policies

Policies provide a set of rules that all LMS administrators and stakeholders must follow. Your organization may define any number of policies. As a starting point, you should consider four common LMS policies: content inclusion, content ownership, content life cycle, and training data retention.

Content Inclusion Policy

A content inclusion policy defines what content should reside in the LMS and what content should not. I once worked with an organization that started out using its LMS for training. But, when other departments discovered the system’s scheduling capabilities, they started using it to reserve conference rooms and schedule meetings. Then, as they discovered its tracking and reporting capabilities, they started using the LMS to deliver corporate communications. They would run reports to see who had accessed memos and who had not. Eventually, a search for a course on a given topic would return so many meetings and memos that users might scroll or page through hundreds of items before finding the course. This became a real problem for the organization. People gave up trying to use the LMS to find and register for courses. Help desk calls went up and enrollments went down. This problem could have been avoided with a content inclusion policy.

Content Ownership Policy

One of the chief complaints from organizations with outdated content in their LMS is that, after the content is published, no one is responsible for it. These organizations lack a content ownership policy.

A content ownership policy defines the requirements for establishing and tracking ownership of each learning activity in the LMS. It ensures that every active learning program has an owner. It defines the responsibilities that content owners have, how ownership should be passed from person to person, and what will happen to learning activities that have no owner.

Surprisingly, most of the organizations with which I have worked started out with no idea who owned the content in their LMS. No one was making sure the content was still up-to-date, relevant, accurate, and useful to the organization. Can you see the problem? Courses live in the LMS indefinitely. People might spend valuable time choosing a classroom course that sounds interesting, trying to register, and finding that there have been no offerings of this course in years. Even worse, people might spend hours completing an outdated self-paced course and learn all about old procedures that are no longer in use, information on products that no longer exist, or systems that don’t work that way anymore. Misled customers, errors and omissions in work outputs, incorrectly performed tasks that must be redone, and mistakes that may never be discovered, but have a negative effect on productivity, liability, or employee and customer relations—who knows what additional harm this causes?

Content Life-Cycle Policy

A content life-cycle policy defines how often content should be reviewed and what criteria should be used for removing content from circulation.

Without such a content life-cycle policy, it is unlikely that people in your organization will review, update, and archive content when appropriate. This can result in outdated content remaining active in the LMS, introducing a risk that people may take an older version of the course, learn inaccurate information, or miss out on important updates. The presence of outdated courses in the course catalog and search results also makes it more difficult for users to find the most up-to-date and relevant content.

Given that many organizations don’t keep track of who owns LMS content, there is typically no one who is responsible for managing the shelf life of the content. I have seen LMS implementations that contained self-paced courses as much as 20 years old. Alarmingly, people were occasionally taking those courses. Deactivating outdated courses makes the remaining content easier to find, increases people’s trust in the system and its content, and ensures that you aren’t distributing “bad” information.

Training Data Retention Policy

A training data retention policy defines how long you will retain learner transcript data. If the LMS contains transcript data that are older than other nontraining data in your enterprise, you may not have established, implemented, or acted on your policy.

Most organizations have a broad-based enterprise information retention policy, which can provide guidance on how long you should retain training data. It may be shorter than you think. To find out more about your organization’s information retention policy, check with your legal and IT departments.

Keep in mind that storing more data than called for by your information retention policy is not necessarily a bad thing. It does not usually affect LMS performance on the network or vendor hosting costs. Periodically clearing out your old data that are no longer needed is simply a good practice and sometimes makes reports easier to run, like clearing old files out of your filing cabinet.

Procedures

Without a clearly defined and documented set of procedures, your users may not know how to initiate a request, and your LMS administrators will be responding to every request separately. This can lead to a good deal of confusion, inefficiency, and inconsistency in how things are accomplished in the system. Procedures provide a clear path for users and administrators to follow as they work together to get things done with the LMS.

Procedures outline the steps administrators and content owners should follow when interacting with the LMS. Procedures may be supported by online request forms, documented workflows, roles and responsibilities, step-by-step instructions, and information to set expectations such as turnaround times, confirmations, and other communications.

Your organization may define any number of procedures. Some common ones include requesting a new learning program, updating or deactivating an existing learning program, adding or removing a training location, requesting a custom report, and requesting administrator permissions.

Think about all the things people will need from the LMS. How would you like them to interact with the system?

Guidelines

Guidelines provide a benchmark for administrators to use when entering information into the LMS. For example, you may provide guidelines related to creating titles and descriptions for learning programs. Think of this as a style guide, similar to one your organization may have for internal and external communications related to marketing, websites, and publications. In fact, you might even adopt this style guide and apply it to your LMS guidelines.

A clearly defined and documented set of guidelines, when used appropriately by administrators, makes the system easier to use. Names, titles, labels, icons, and other fields entered by administrators become more consistent and uniform. This improves the LMS user experience for everyone: learners and administrators.

Conventions

Conventions are used to ensure the consistent application of data entered by administrators, such as course numbers and course icons.

A course number, for instance, can be useful in sorting report and search results in some systems. It is sometimes helpful to create a convention that embeds keys to the nature of the course within the course number.

For example, in Table 10-1, a basic classroom course offered in French by the sales and marketing organization in Canada titled Introduction to Solution Selling would be assigned the course number SM.ISS.101cnf:

• SM represents the department sponsoring the course: sales and marketing.
• ISS represents the initials of the title, Introduction to Solution Selling.
• 101 indicates that it is a basic level course.
• c indicates that the format is classroom.
• n indicates that the course is offered in the North America region.
• f indicates that the course is delivered in the French language.

Some organizations go a step further than the course number to design a collection of icons whose symbols and colors indicate to users, at a glance, a course’s delivery mode, whether it is free or has a cost associated with it, and other course properties. While these types of conventions are not necessary, they can add valuable cues that save people time and effort as they use the LMS.

Consistent Use of Course Properties

Every LMS contains a set of configurable course properties. Some course properties, such as title and description, are consistent for all types of courses. Other course properties vary based on the type of course. For example, an online course has a launch method and URL, while an instructor-led course has an instructor, location, start date and time, and end date and time.

When considering your organization’s needs, you may decide to standardize some course property settings. Let’s say you charge a registration fee for a course. People who withdraw from the course at the last minute cause you to lose money that has already been spent to reserve a classroom, hire an instructor, and furnish course materials. In this case, you might want to establish a cutoff date for withdrawing from the course. People who withdraw before the cutoff date receive a full refund. People who withdraw after the cutoff date receive only a partial refund, or no refund at all.

It’s important to document these standards and communicate them to LMS administrators. Adherence to these standards will ensure consistency in how courses are configured in the system, which will improve your reports and make the system easier to administer. Standards do not need to be communicated to users explicitly. They will simply make the LMS easy to understand and use.

Consistent Use of Course Structures

Many LMS products offer a variety of modules or learning activity types that can be assembled in different combinations. Administrators use these modules to create courses in the system.

Course structures may contain various activities like classes, self-paced modules, and surveys. Activities may be arranged in an enforced sequence or at the user’s option. A higher-level curriculum or learning path structure may contain several courses, each containing its own learning activities.

For example, Course A may consist of a webinar followed by a test and survey. An administrator would assemble the course structure for Course A using a webinar module, test module, and survey module. The administrator may configure the course structure so that the survey cannot be started until the test is completed and the test cannot be started until the webinar has taken place.

Course B may consist of three online, self-paced courses and a survey. An administrator would assemble the course structure for Course B using three online modules and a survey module. The administrator may configure this course structure so that the three online modules can be taken in any order, but all three must be completed before the survey can be accessed.

Because many LMS products offer a variety of ways to accomplish the same result, it is important that you define, document, and communicate standards for how your organization’s learning programs should be structured. When courses of a similar nature are structured consistently, learners taking those courses become more familiar with how to access and complete them.

Communicating and Enforcing Standards

Once you have established all your standards, it is important to communicate them through administrator training, job aids, and guides.

I have seen organizations enforce their standards in a variety of ways. Some organizations assign a super-administrator, who spot-checks the work of other administrators to ensure they are applying the standards appropriately. When problems are found, the super-administrator provides coaching and follows up with more frequent spot-checks until the issue is resolved. Other organizations train their LMS administrators and then get them started with extra supervision and mentoring until they demonstrate that they can perform all their responsibilities and apply the standards appropriately. At that point, they become “certified” and no longer require supervision. Certified administrators later become mentors to new administrators, and the cycle continues.

Every organization is different, but all should establish, communicate, and enforce standards.

Taxonomy

It’s been said that we spend anywhere between 15 and 35 percent of our time searching for content (Feldman 2004), and that was in the early days of the Internet, when the amount of available information was smaller by several magnitudes of order. The better you organize and tag content, the easier it is to find. In the LMS, courses are organized in several ways. Administrators will place courses in your catalog menu structure, tag them with metadata, and associate them with audiences that have been defined from profile data. Together, these features make up your LMS taxonomy.

There may be several instances throughout the lifetime of your LMS when you need to update the taxonomy to reflect changes in your subject matter and learning program offerings.

Taxonomy Design

When designing your taxonomy, it is important to design through the eyes of those who will use the catalog to find courses and consider how the course is tagged with metadata to evaluate whether the courses they have found meet their needs. Try to maintain a consistent level of detail in your taxonomy design so that items in your catalog menus are categorically similar. Avoid ambiguity by ensuring that metadata items are distinct so that administrators will know how to tag content. Balance hierarchical structures so that menus are kept to a reasonable number of items and can be taken in at a glance. Table 10-2 shows good and poor examples of course catalog menus.

Usability Testing

Chapter 9 described the LMS implementation process of user acceptance testing. That process was about checking the system’s functionality to make sure it was working properly and ready to go live. Although usability testing may sound like a similar process, it is very different. Usability testing is focused on determining how easy the system is for people to use. It answers the questions: Can people navigate the system intuitively? Is there a clear path to action? And can people accomplish what they are trying to do quickly and directly?

It’s always good to test your taxonomy’s usability with learners and administrators, especially if you have little experience with creating taxonomies. Testing is easy to do, doesn’t take long, and provides valuable feedback that you can use to tweak your taxonomy before you implement it.

To do this, establish five to seven goals for the test subject to attempt by using the taxonomy. An example of a goal is, “Find a course that can help you manage your time.” Invite three to five people, who are representative of your end users, to participate as test subjects.

Conduct the test with each person, individually. Ask each test subject to attempt to accomplish the goals you have identified. Do not interfere. If the subject hesitates or gets stuck, ask them to verbalize their thoughts. Observe, take notes, or make a video recording of the test.

Once the usability test has been completed with all test subjects, review your notes and recordings. List the findings from all test subjects. Analyze the findings and use them to refine your taxonomy. Repeat the usability test if needed. An iterative approach to taxonomy design and testing can yield great results.

Implementing the Taxonomy

Once you have finalized your taxonomy design, you will need to implement it in your LMS. For a new implementation, this is just a matter of configuring the system. If you are changing the taxonomy of a live system, you will need to proceed carefully.

First, configure the taxonomy in a staging server environment—that is, an installation of your LMS that is not accessible to end users but mirrors your production (user-facing) system. Document the steps you take to implement the taxonomy in the staging environment so that you can repeat the same steps later, in production.

Devise an implementation plan that minimizes disruption to your end users. Engage administrators and content owners to assist in retagging content with the new metadata and moving courses to the right location in the new catalog structure. Work with your IT organization and LMS vendor to explore whether part or all of the transition to the new taxonomy can be automated and performed during off-peak hours. Communicate the change to your users to set expectations around the period of potential disruption, and assure them of the new taxonomy’s ultimate benefits. If you have done usability testing, you can communicate the customer-focused message that users were involved in designing the new taxonomy.

Configuration Management

I have worked with many organizations in which no one really knows how the LMS is configured or whether it is working properly. The people who made the original configuration decisions are long gone and did not leave any documentation. But then tags break, courses disappear from the catalog, credits are not issued properly, reports stop working, or any number of other things that can go wrong happen. And no one knows how to fix them.

Note the same is true for systems integrations. Since the LMS was first integrated, your organization may have updated or changed the LMS configuration or that of another system. These changes may cause working parts to break. Resulting data problems may go undetected.

For this reason, it is important to document your configuration decisions and keep the documentation up-to-date whenever changes are made. The LMS configuration settings you should document include, at a minimum, access and authentication, data feeds, user account and profile settings, security roles and permissions, audience rules, catalog and metadata taxonomies, transcripts and certificates, active notifications, and look and feel settings. Maintaining LMS configuration documentation enables you to plan and make changes to the configuration more easily, understand the impact of the changes on other settings, and provide clear direction to your vendor or IT department. You may want to consult your vendor or IT department for a template or guidance on how to best document your configuration. I use a variety of text document or spreadsheet formats, based on the LMS product, client configuration, or client IT standards.

Housekeeping

When your workspace becomes messy and things are not in their proper place, you have difficulty finding what you need when you need it. The same thing happens in your LMS. Over time, some of your courses may be tagged or placed in the catalog improperly, administrators may have deviated from standards, duplicate user accounts may exist along with accounts for people who left the organization long ago, and so on. These and other problems will eventually make your data unreliable.

The best time to clean up your data is when you migrate to a new LMS product or perform a major upgrade to an existing LMS. At these times, it is less challenging to identify cleanup requirements and tasks and build them into your project plan, leveraging the resources that are already assigned to the implementation.

If you cannot take advantage of a system upgrade or migration, you can still clean up your data. But you may need to establish the LMS cleanup as a formal project to assign the necessary resources, time, and effort to make it happen.

In either case, your main goal is to bring your LMS data up to the standards your organization has defined. Here are the steps you should take:

Governance

System governance ensures that the LMS implementation aligns with the goals and needs of the organization. Governance establishes appropriate representation from all stakeholder groups and provides a structure for decision making. Without adequate governance, you may not have the authority to establish and enforce standards.

While each organization may establish its own unique governance structure, there is a basic governance model that can be helpful. The groups within this structure interact to ensure that LMS issues are managed at the appropriate level and any unresolved or systemic issues are escalated. Figure 10-2 depicts a sample governance structure comprising four main parts: a governing board representing executive leadership, an LMS steering team representing management, LMS working groups that represent key stakeholders who use the LMS directly, and LMS operations.

Governing Board

A governing board consists of key stakeholders at the executive leadership level. The board represents the organization’s strategic goals. The governing board is not focused on technology behind the LMS. Its mission is to provide direction to ensure linkage between organizational strategy and learning strategy. The governing board may convene one or two times per year.

LMS Steering Team

The LMS steering team consists of key stakeholders at the management level. Each team member represents one or more user groups that rely on the LMS. This could include learners, managers, and faculty in different functional areas or departments. The LMS steering team’s mission is to establish learning management practices and policies. The team may convene quarterly.

LMS Working Groups

LMS working groups consist of key stakeholders who use the LMS directly. Each group represents a special area of focus, such as taxonomy or standards. The mission of the working groups is to plan and execute activities related to LMS usability and operations. Groups may convene six times a year, and more often during special initiatives.

LMS Operations

The LMS operations structure itself typically consists of four groups: the group that manages LMS operations, content owners, administrators, and technical support.

LMS Operations Management

The LMS operations management team is responsible for ensuring that the LMS operates reliably, is managed in conformance with standards, and meets the needs of the organization. The operations management team works closely with the working groups and steering team, helping to surface issues that need attention.

Content Owners

LMS content owners are responsible for the quality of the learning programs they own—that is, their accuracy, relevance, and timeliness. Content owners must provide appropriate information about the learning program to enable LMS administrators to configure the learning program based on the LMS standards. Content owners must be vigilant in monitoring utilization by the learning program’s target audience and ensuring that the program is kept up-to-date.

LMS Administrators

LMS administrators are responsible for the accuracy and thoroughness of the way in which content is configured in the LMS. They must provide a timely response to requests from content owners. LMS administrators must consistently implement LMS standards, conventions, policies, and processes.

Technical Support

LMS technical support may consist of some combination of training, IT, and vendor staff. Technical support groups may include your help desk, e-learning content developers, developers of custom reports, server support, database and application managers, IT security, and network support. Together, these technical support groups are responsible for keeping the LMS up and running, resolving end-user issues, ensuring that any web-based programs work properly, developing custom reports, managing any changes to the system configuration, and installing patches and updates.

* * *

Although it would be nice, it is extremely unlikely that you can simply buy an LMS, install it, and just let it do its thing. Remember, it’s not just about acquiring the technology; it’s also about how well the technology is used. LMS implementation can be challenging, but the payoff is huge. Taking steps to establish and maintain standards, taxonomy, configuration management, housekeeping, and governance will help ensure that your LMS remains easy to use and operate for years to come.

Key Takeaways

This chapter focused on how to get the most from your LMS with effective standards, taxonomy, housekeeping, configuration management, and governance. The key takeaways are:

• Standards are a critical ingredient in making an LMS easy to use and administer, yet too many organizations operate without them.
• At a minimum, you need four key policies: content inclusion, content ownership, content life-cycle management, and training data retention.
• Clearly documented and communicated administrative procedures help ensure that learning is managed in a methodical way, consistent with the standards and policies.
• Guidelines and conventions for course titles and course numbers make it easier for people to find relevant content, by avoiding inconsistency, redundancy, and ambiguity.
• With multiple administrators, a common set of standards for configuring learning programs makes the LMS easier to use.
• The LMS taxonomy organizes the content and includes the course catalog menu structure, course metadata tags that enhance searching and reporting, and user profile data used to create course audiences.
• It is important to document your current LMS configuration, along with reasons for your configuration decisions, and keep it up-to-date to inform future changes.
• Implementing a major LMS upgrade or new LMS presents opportunities to clean up your data.
• Governance is critical to your ongoing LMS operations. There is a general model for a governance structure that you can use as a starting point in establishing your own.

This concludes part 2 of the book, which was focused on LMS implementation and operation. Part 3 explores future trends and the role of the LMS in a broader learning and performance ecosystem.