In March 2020, the world shifted in response to the pandemic. In-person learning programs that had been scheduled for a year or more were cancelled. Deloitte, along with every other organization, had to pivot. To help bridge the gap created by COVID, we accelerated the rollout of our global learning experience platform, Cura.
More than 330,000 people at Deloitte, across 170 countries, have access to Cura, which aggregates learning content from both internal and external sources and personalizes learning based on the user’s defined skills and interests. Cura enables individual discovery of learning but also allows users to follow prescribed pathways as well as the opportunity to create content.
While rewarding and worthwhile, launching this platform was not easy. Our journey on this project yielded so many lessons that we want to share some insights for those who are seeking what’s next for their learning strategies.
Getting started
The first step was a deep dive into our strategy to create a technology roadmap. The No. 1 priority identified was a learning experience platform. Deloitte has access to terabytes of data and produces millions of hours of learning. The problem was how to curate all this content for our people, enable personalization of the content to their specific work and needs, and deliver it to them in the flow of their day. At the same time, we were looking to drive behavioral shifts with a tool that would promote a digital lifelong learner mindset. The idea of such a capability was exciting, but we discovered that this technology was still in its infancy and not many vendors had exactly what we required.
Accepting the unknown
How do you build a business case and gain support and funding for a solution that is unproven? We had to create a business case and bring sponsors along the journey of visualizing the art of the possible and embracing the risk of failure and possibly no ROI.
A few key tips for getting an innovative project off the ground:
1. Be clear about the business imperative. Ensure that the business case articulates how the proposed solution is a must and the benefits are clear.
2. Conduct due diligence. Has your solution ever been tried before? What worked, and what failed? Why? Speak to experts and business leaders for their insights and expertise. Don’t leave any stone unturned.
3. Find tenacious, risk-tolerant sponsors. The importance of building trust, having one-on-one conversations and just doing the work of bringing leaders along on the journey cannot be overstated. Leaders who can embrace the unknown are needed the most. There is also the question of being personally ready for the heavy lift ahead. Finding the right project manager and leadership team to come along on the journey can set you up for the long haul.
4. Establish your governance process early. Every organization requires checks and balances. Striving for innovation doesn’t mean you can be careless or ignore risk management. Identify key stakeholders across your organization to guide, challenge and advocate.
5. Identify few but mighty vendors. Do your research and be judicious with who you engage in the RFP process. Spend time vetting the vendor before you invite them to the RFP party. The RFP process is so complex and time-consuming that having too many mediocre vendors exhausts the situation.
6. Find the money. In our case, we started with seed money from the learning organization. But as the project grew, it was clear we needed a more formalized budget. Because we had built trust and belief in our project, (see No. 2 above), learning leaders across the businesses pooled funding to assist us in this effort.
7. Attract early pioneers. While building the case, find a small core team to stand up the project, to conceive and think “How might we … ?” all in an effort to establish the long-term team needed to deliver against the requirements.
8. Be ready to abandon perfection. Perfection is futile, and you and your teams need to be comfortable to iterate and apply human-centered design to conceive a product that fits the users and their preferences.
9. Adopt a “How might we … ?” mindset. Innovation comes with setbacks, obstacles and disappointment. Ensuring your leaders, stakeholders and sponsors all adopt and ask, “How might we … ?” enables the team to think outside of the box and motivates them to dream and conceive.
Is Cura the perfect learning experience platform? Of course not. But it has been enormously impactful. It has enabled our organization to have transparency, access and reach of content and community, reducing redundancy and accelerating the learning process.
As the future of work becomes more remote and hybrid, digital L&D platforms will play an increasingly important role in the workplace — wherever it may be. My best piece of advice for anyone seeking to launch an L&D platform at their organization is to embrace the process as its own learning and development experience.
Our Learning Technology Lessons from the Frontlines series on LinkedIn shares more takeaways from our experience.
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July 06, 2021 at 09:48PM
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Learning technology lessons from the front lines - Chief Learning Officer - Chief Learning Officer
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