By Sue Iannone

Famous general and former President, Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  When it comes to life sciences plan of action (POA) meetings, I’d say I definitely agree with the second part of that statement.  Good planning is quite indispensable.

In part I of this series, we covered the need for a governance process to help ensure that POA meetings run smoothly and achieve business objectives.  Assuming you’re optimizing your POA process in a linear fashion, dealing with the general approach to planning comes right on the heels of establishing a governance process.  In this installment, we review some best practices for POA meeting planning.

Planning is Important but Easy to Overlook

Every POA cycle needs planning.  Unfortunately, this is where a lot of organizations fall short.  When you think about it, Marketing is busy creating tactics and building materials.  They’re not always thinking about “the meeting.”  L&D is usually busy with what seems like a million different projects, and it’s easy to lose focus on the next POA meeting.

However, that date is going to come and go regardless, so you’ve got to be ready for it.  In part I, we mentioned that preparing for a POA meeting is a lot like running a baton race.  Each “runner” (Marketing, Legal, L&D, whoever) must typically get their part done before handing it off to the next.  Delays at any point in the chain can cause problems.

L&D is usually the last runner in the baton race, so they often take the brunt of those problems.  This is why it’s very important that L&D spearhead efforts to ensure timely, effective planning for every POA cycle.

Some POA Planning Best Practices

As you work to develop and implement a strong process for planning POA meetings, here are a few tips to keep in mind.

1. Don’t delay getting started.

It should go without saying that you need to give yourself enough runway to get everything done.  Perhaps that’s 90 days, maybe it’s 120 days.  It’s definitely not 60 days, though I’ve seen that (and less) on multiple occasions.  In your specific company, you know how long it takes to get things through Medical, Regulatory, and Legal (MRL) review, so be sure to plan for it.  The exact amount of time needed will vary by company, but don’t forget to start with the end in mind, and then work your timelines backwards from there.

2. Do a Needs Assessment and know what you need to build.

It’s critical to work with your key stakeholders to perform a needs assessment up front.  This will help you define the business objectives, behavioral objectives, and the resultant learning objectives for the meeting.  That, in turn, will help determine what needs to be developed for the meeting.  It sounds like common sense to say it, but it’s best to approach a POA in the same way you’d approach developing any L&D curriculum.

The needs assessment and resulting training don’t need to be super-complicated. And, if you’ve adopted a strategic mindset towards POA and established governance, you certainly need not begin this from scratch.  By attending business reviews and other key stakeholder meetings, you may already have a good idea of the needs of the business.  If your organization has not taken a strategic approach to POAs, you can still move forward in an effective way.  What you need to build stems from the focus of the meeting.

What do we mean by this? If it’s a “POA-lite” situation, meaning if a meeting only needs to share a refresh of existing materials and/or only involves one business unit or product, then simple may be the best way to go.  In contrast, if a POA will encompass a new selling model, new data, a launch, multiple teams, and so on, then it’s going to get complicated.  That will also affect timelines, so it pays to conduct the needs assessment far enough in advance to allow for either type of scenario.

3. Line up your resources.

Once you know what you need to build for the meeting, you need to ask yourself a critical question:  Do we have the resources we need to do all this effectively?

If you do, then that’s great!  If not, then you may need to outsource some aspects of the work, and you’ll need to determine what those are.  Alternatively, you might be able to get other company personnel to help out.  For example, perhaps a Field Trainer or a District Manager could contribute as an “extra set of hands” as part of a special project.

Or, if funding is the issue, it may be necessary to ask Marketing to kick in some extra dollars to help get the job done.  The point is, you’ll need to systematically compare the resources you need with what you have, then determine the best way to plug any gaps.

4. Don’t wait on Marketing for final materials.

In general, it’s OK to start working on your training programs before Marketing has finalized the core materials.  Draft materials will typically suffice, at least at the outset.  This will help you get a head-start, or at least minimize the effects of any delays that Marketing or other stakeholders experience.  With only a few weeks left before a POA meeting, it’s much easier to tweak a strawman workshop that is “80% right”, than to wait to the last minute and build an entire workshop from scratch.  A solid and effective workshop, that is!

For any last-minute requests or changes, have a contingency plan (which might include saying “no” if the request is unreasonable, unrealistic, or “nice to have”).  L&D professionals who oblige these last-minute changes run the risk of having poorly executed solutions and are ultimately seen as order-takers versus strategic partners.

5. Scale best practices beyond a single POA event.

It’s best to deploy best practices across POAs in general, and not treat every POA as a unique, siloed event.  Once you have determined your POA planning process, and the best practices that go along with it, be sure to document and institutionalize them as the way to approach all POA planning efforts.  Given the transitory nature of many personnel in the L&D department, you will want to make sure that your best practices outlive any single meeting…and the tenure of any single team member.

What’s Next?

So, we’ve covered best practices for POA governance and for POA planning.  In the next installment, the “rubber will meet the road” and we’ll look at best practices for POA execution.

The post Avoiding POA Chaos, Part II: Planning Best Practices appeared first on Bull City Blue.

By Sue Iannone

According to Dictionary.com, “chaos” is defined as “a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organization or order.” Any L&D professional who’s been involved in planning a pharmaceutical company Plan of Action (POA) meeting knows about chaos first-hand.  In fairness, “chaos” is probably too strong a term for describing the POA experience.  But, most L&D people will agree that it’s not entirely inappropriate, either.  When I reflect on my collective POA experiences during my 27-year career, I have memories of both extremes—the awesome POA successes, and the POA disasters I’d like to forget.

In this 3-part series, we’ll explore a framework for taking the chaos out of POA planning and implementation.  We’ll cover ideas and best practices related to

1. POA Governance Process
2. Planning Best Practices
3. Execution Best Practices

Today, we’ll outline the overall challenge and cover POA governance.

The Problem with POA Meetings

Pharmaceutical companies typically hold POA meetings once or twice per year.  They offer the best opportunities for Marketing and company leaders to get face-time with the field selling teams.  They’re the primary vehicle for rolling out new strategies, messages, data, selling tools, and training programs to the field forces.

They’re also extremely expensive.  Time out of the field is costly in two ways.  First, there are the direct operational costs such as airfare, hotel bills, food costs, entertainment expenses, and so on.  Then, there are the less-obvious indirect costs of the customer-facing teams not being in front of their customers selling, educating, or solving reimbursement problems.  Both types of costs are significant to the organization.  As such, it’s clear that a company needs to realize the maximum return from those significant investments.

Unfortunately, the ROI of POAs often suffers due to poor planning and governance.  The worst of the challenge often falls on L&D.

Think about this:  For a typical POA meeting, the L&D team is often tasked with developing training around new messages, selling tools, or any other tactics critical to brand or portfolio strategy.  However, L&D can’t develop that training until Marketing (or whoever) develops the core materials.  Marketing will often experience delays (it happens to the best of us) and create core materials much later than originally intended.  Add to that the need to clear Medical, Regulatory, and Legal (MRL) review, and the delays are compounded.

Because non-L&D people often underestimate the time and effort required to create good training, L&D is often left having to scramble at the last minute to get things done.  Too many times, L&D comes in “just under the wire.”

This is akin to a baton race.  The way to win is to ensure that your team’s runner is ready, launches off the blocks at the right time, holds on tight to the baton, and delivers a smooth handoff to the next runner.  If all goes well, the team wins the race.  If the first runner gets a slow start, drops the baton, or if any runners on the team stumble, the team loses valuable time and puts winning  (or placing) at risk.

L&D is often the last runner on the last leg of the baton race.  Time lost by any of the other runners can negatively impact training effectiveness.  This can harm business results, as well as L&D team morale.  It doesn’t have to be this way!  In fact, the L&D team can set in motion changes that can dramatically improve the whole POA process.

Good Governance is Critical

In our experience, the state of affairs described above is worse in companies that don’t have a good POA governance process.  A good governance process helps ensure that all stakeholder groups are on the same page, understand what’s expected of them and when, and have established processes for conflict resolution.  These stakeholders usually include:

• Marketing
• Sales
• Market Access
• Sales Operations
• Medical Affairs
• Legal / Regulatory
• L&D
• Meeting Planning

L&D typically doesn’t have the authority to establish and “enforce” a POA governance process, but it can act as the catalyst in helping to establish one.  Below are a few pointers in making that happen.  L&D should do these things as a dedicated initiative, not just in advance of a specific POA meeting.  Fixing a “broken” process deserves some dedicated time and attention:

1. Speak with Individual Stakeholders – L&D should sit down individually with the leaders of key stakeholder groups. Call on them to learn what they want to accomplish via POA meetings in general and ask them to define success from their point of view. Get their input on how the POA planning process could go more smoothly.
2. Establish a Governance Committee – L&D can advocate for the idea of a POA Governance Committee. This would be a group of senior leaders from the stakeholder groups listed earlier.  The committee is not supposed to get “down in the weeds.”  However, it will need to help determine the overall business objectives for individual POA meetings, set guiding principles for POA planning, establish dispute resolution processes, designate people to serve on the POA team (below), and so on.
3. Establish a POA Team – This team will include “doers” who get into the details. For any given POA meeting, this cross-functional team must outline the POA plan:  Objectives, deliverables, responsible/accountable personnel, deadlines, and so on.  A RACI matrix is often used for capturing all this.

A strong governance process is critical for aligning expectations and resources.  Basically, it helps get everyone pulling in the same direction at the same time.  In the next installment, we’ll cover some best practices for POA planning.

The post Avoiding POA Chaos, Part I appeared first on Bull City Blue.

By Sue Iannone

Imagine this:  You are a training manager in the L&D Department of a biotech company, supporting the leading brand.  The sales leader of the team comes to you and states, “Our sales reps are struggling with closing the call with their customers.  We need to teach these reps how to close.  Can you do some training to fix this?  Maybe you guys can do something on it at the POA meeting coming up in a couple of months.”

Well, now.  In this little scenario, you have come to a pivotal moment.  Which route do you take?

1. You say, “Absolutely, we can knock that out of the park. I’ll get right on it.” Or…
2. You start asking the sales leader some questions to better understand the problem and determine whether more training is needed or if some other intervention is more appropriate.

Hopefully, you’d choose option B.  Someone who chooses option A is more than likely filling the role of an “order taker” whereas a true performance consultant would choose option B.  As a professional in the learning and development field, your role is the latter.  Unfortunately, a lot of training managers are either uncomfortable choosing option B or lack a clear approach for carrying it out.

In this article, we’ll provide some guidance to help you be a successful performance consultant.  While it may seem a little uncomfortable to “challenge” a sales or commercial leader, it’s actually the right thing to do.  After all, you’re both on the same side and are ultimately pursuing the same goals.  Over time, an L&D team will be a lot more impactful if its team members are recognized as performance consultants who deploy resources in the most effective ways possible.

Choosing the Right Option:  Step by Step

When confronted with a request like the one above, a performance consultant can use a five-step process to understand the problem and identify the solution:

1. Identify the performance issue
2. Diagnose the root cause
3. Determine if a training need exists
4. Articulate the business objective(s)
5. Recommend the right solution and make the case for it

In most cases, step one is take care of by the requestor.  In our example above, the sales leader has identified a performance issue:  Sales reps aren’t closing.  Now, it’s up to the performance consultant to lead steps two through five.

Diagnose the Root Cause

To begin diagnosing the root cause, the performance consultant should start asking the sales leader some questions.  For example, a good starter question might be, “What’s pointing you toward closing skills as the core issue?  What indicators are helping you form that hypothesis?”

The sales leader might have a great and detailed answer.  Then again, maybe not.  If his or her hypothesis relies on sweeping generalizations or just one or two data points, then it probably warrants further investigation.  At that point, a performance consultant might probe a bit more, then politely say, “I think we can definitely help you. Let me do a little bit of digging and then come back to you with a plan of action.”

That extra digging might include discussions with Market Research or reviews of ATU data to see if they yield any insights.  It could also include conversations with Marketing, formal or informal surveys of the field force or field managers, and possibly even ride-alongs with sales reps.  The level of rigor that goes into this diagnostic process is related to the complexity and importance of the problem.  It’s best to use your discretion and not go overboard.  That would be a waste of resources.  The point is to do enough to credibly diagnose the root cause and back up your conclusion.

Determine if a Training Need Exists

Sometimes, lackluster performance in the field can’t be fixed by additional training.  This is why “order takers” sometimes implement training requests, only to find out later that their efforts made no difference.

To determine if a training need exists, the performance consultant in a life sciences L&D team can use a modified version of Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model (BEM).  Our firm has taken Gilbert’s model and adapted it for use in life sciences companies.  At a high level, performance challenges can be due to factors at any of three levels:

1. Organizational Level
   1. Performance Management
   2. Tools and Resources
   3. Incentives
   4. Culture
2. Individual Level
   1. Knowledge, Skills, and Behaviors
   2. Right Person, Right Job
   3. Motives
3. Environmental Level
   1. Therapeutic Area Events (i.e. new competitors, competitive actions, etc.)
   2. Market Access Issues

By using this framework to analyze the situation, a performance consultant can determine whether the poor field performance is most likely due to knowledge, skills and behaviors at the individual level (which would require training to address) or something else (which would require some other intervention besides training).  If the performance issue is due to something that cannot be fixed by training, then the training manager must explain the findings to their internal client and “punt.”

Articulate the Business Objective(s)

Assuming a training need does exist, the performance consultant must now articulate the business objectives that the training must achieve.  What new or improved behavior must the field force be trained to implement?  Is the answer better closing skills, as the sales leader hypothesized?  Or, could it be that reps need to improve their objection handling, message delivery, data presentation, competitive knowledge, or some other skill?  It’s up to the performance consultant to figure it out.

Recommend the Right Solution and Make the Case for It

At this point in the process, the performance consultant has identified the performance issue, systematically diagnosed the root cause, determined that training need exists, and articulated the business objective(s) that must be met.  Now, it’s time to decide what type of training intervention is needed and make the business case for it.

In the business case, the performance consultant should succinctly lay out his or her findings through each of the steps above.  It’s important to back up conclusions with the information collected during the diagnostic process.  It’s also important to clearly layout the proposed solution, how long it will take, what it would cost, and what it would be expected to achieve.

A Word for Senior Training Leaders

Training Leaders should be able to use the process above.  They should also teach their staff how to use this process effectively.  Training Leaders should act as guides and “sounding boards” as the training managers work their way through the steps.  In addition, Directors should be willing to pressure-test Managers’ work and push back when necessary.  In some cases when it might be too sensitive of an issue, or when politics may trump logic, you may want to consider going into the lion’s den yourself, versus sending in one of the soldiers.  Or, consider going in as a team—this shows support for your team member, and highlights the importance of the request from the stakeholder.

Overall, if L&D teams adopt more of a consulting approach, they will realize a series of benefits.  First, their work will be more impactful and deliver more value to the company.  Second, they’ll earn even more respect from their internal clients and the company, in general.  Finally, each member of the team will develop themselves professionally.  And that’s always a good thing.

The post Are You a Performance Consultant…or an Order Taker? appeared first on Bull City Blue.

By Sue Iannone

In life sciences, business reviews are conducted frequently in the commercial areas, especially sales, marketing, and market access.   During these business reviews, leaders from different areas provide updates on what they’ve been doing, how well they’ve been doing it, and what’s next on the horizon.

When does the Learning & Development (L&D) function get included?  It’s less common for L&D to undergo a standalone business review (apart from cross-functional commercial peer groups), and more common for training to be included as part of a larger, multi-department franchise update, product launch status review, or other large commercial initiative.

Most learning leaders are aware that gone are the days when it was acceptable to report on some rudimentary metrics.  Historically, L&D teams could pull together their reports—and related performance metrics—on an ad hoc basis in preparation for these Training Business Reviews (TBRs).  They got away with providing a range of activity-based metrics (e.g. Number of new hires through training; Average scores in training; Number of classes run), as well as some “softer” data points for TBRs.  Generally, if the throughput was within range, the trainers were funny, and the cookies were great, it was all good.

Such metrics were mainly useful for getting a baseline sense of overall satisfaction and for annual budgeting.  Now, we are moving into an era in which those types of metrics will no longer cut it, and L&D Leaders are being held more accountable as contributors for performance and business success.

L&D teams must begin to proactively collect metrics that more directly relate to core business objectives.  In addition, those metrics must be collected in an objective, disciplined, and ongoing manner…not in an ad hoc way to prepare for an upcoming TBR.

Below, we take a look at what those metrics should be.  We also explore the key components of a useful and valuable TBR.

Defining the Right Metrics

To truly be a strategic partner, L&D must manage to metrics that go far beyond the basic ones mentioned above.  There is value in those basic metrics…It’s just that they don’t go far enough.  Higher-order metrics should relate directly to core business objectives of the company.

While the specific nature of those metrics can vary, it helps to consider them as being organized or aligned to Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation, graphically represented in Figure 1.

Level 1 metrics are the most basic.  These metrics are derived by surveying the learners themselves to measure basic levels of satisfaction.  One important key is to measure how relevant the learners think each training program is to their jobs.  If surveys consistently tell you that learners think your training programs are irrelevant to their work, then that would indicate a problem.

At Level 2, we begin to measure the extent to which learners retain the trained information.  These metrics can include average test scores, the average number of attempts to pass, the first-time pass rate, and so on.

Level 3 metrics go beyond measuring knowledge retention.  They measure whether—and how—the learners are applying learnings in the field.  There can be a number of ways to measure this.  When the learners are sales reps, for example, collecting District Manager (DM) input is quite helpful.  In such a case, DMs are tasked with observing rep actions during sales call ride-alongs.  The L&D team can then interview the DMs, asking them to rate each rep’s performance, with particular attention to how reps applied learnings in the field, as well as the skill they demonstrated in doing so.

Level 4 metrics help L&D begin to measure the impacts that training efforts ultimately deliver the business.  These impacts should relate directly to business goals, and they’re very close to the whole reason for investing in training in the first place.  L&D doesn’t spend money so that reps can know more…or even so they can be more professional in the field.  Those are simply means to an end.  The desired end-result for any training investment is the positive business impact that it ultimately delivers, however that impact is defined.

The metrics used at Level 4 can vary significantly, depending on the business goals at hand.  In some cases, collecting these metrics can involve surveying or interviewing customers to see whether they have heard and retained desired messages, or the extent to which their prescribing behavior has changed based on the reps communicating new messages and applying their training in the field.  ATU (Awareness, Trial, and Usage) studies have long been a staple means of collecting data from customers, and they can be extremely helpful in tracking Level 4 metrics.

If you haven’t seen ATU data in your organization, it might be a good idea to ask around—it could be a valuable data source in demonstrating the alignment, or misalignment between “what was trained” and “what customers heard.”  If it’s aligned, then pat yourself on the back and congratulate your team for a job well done.  If it’s not aligned, its time to move into performance consultant mode and try to diagnose the root cause of the gap.

Powerful Training Business Reviews

Assuming L&D has been collecting the proper range of value-added metrics in an ongoing and disciplined manner, it will be in a great position when TBR time comes around.  So, how should L&D leaders organize their report and/or presentation for the TBR?  In part, that depends on the degree of latitude that corporate leaders allow in the TBR process.  However, below we’ll explore the components that L&D should work to include in any TBR presentation.

The key elements of any TBR should include:

1. Goals and Objectives – This section should outline the core goals that L&D is working to help the business achieve. It can also address department-specific goals for L&D.
2. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – In this section, L&D should outline the metrics that it will use to evaluate its performance and value. As we’ve covered above, these metrics should relate to the core business goals, and can be arranged in Levels 1-4.  This section should define each metric, link it to a goal, explain how the metric is measured, and set a performance standard for the metric.
3. Performance – In this section, L&D objectively evaluates its performance against the KPIs.
4. Strengths, Weaknesses, and Gaps – The name of this section pretty much explains it. Given L&D’s performance on the KPIs, the team’s leaders should be able to determine where its performance is strongest, where it needs improvement, and if there are any obvious capabilities gaps that need to be filled.
5. Recommendations – The final section is the “so what?” Here, leaders outline their action plan for moving forward.  This can include new business goals, plans for addressing weaknesses or plugging performance gaps, as well as the likely resources required.

Done right, TBRs can become extremely valuable inputs for departmental strategic planning and budgeting.  A well-constructed TBR will help an L&D department move beyond being seen as a cost-center that conducts on-boarding training, and instead be recognized for the strategic business driver that it is.  And that will get your team the proverbial “seat at the table.”  Now, go knock their socks off!

How about you?  Have you been recently asked to develop a TBR?  What components did you include?  Does your department have a lot of flexibility in formulating TBRs or are all departments forced into a templatized process?  We’d love to hear from you.

The post Proving Your Worth: Training Business Reviews appeared first on Bull City Blue.

By Nathan Pienkowski

Should a Learning and Development (L&D) organization deliver above and beyond the call of duty, going “all in” to apply the latest in instructional design to every single project?  That’s an interesting question and, like most interesting questions, it defies a simple yes or no answer.

Sometimes, the answer is yes.  However, in a world of limited resources for L&D, department leaders would be wise to “dial it back” sometimes.  In this article, we’ll consider the circumstances in which it might make sense to do a little less and conserve precious resources for other initiatives.  It all comes down to the business objectives at play.

Keeping Business Objectives in Mind

In L&D, much thought is given to the learning objectives behind a training initiative.  Those objectives drive curriculum and instructional design decisions, and L&D teams take great care to clearly articulate them at the outset of a project.

In most cases, L&D teams are rightfully proud of their expertise in curriculum and instructional design, and in their knowledge of learning science.  They’ll work to apply that expertise and knowledge in full measure to deliver on learning initiatives for their internal clients.

However, there are times when L&D leaders should remember that their departments are powerful tools.  In most cases, they can be wielded to teach learners new knowledge and skills.  But, they can also serve other valid purposes.

For example, L&D teams can be used to demonstrate regulatory compliance or to provide management leverage.  In these cases, the L&D team might want to remember the business objectives at play, and act accordingly by keeping the initiative simple.  Let’s explore this idea a bit more with a hypothetical example.

A Hypothetical Example

Assume for a moment that a company has developed a new policy or procedure.  The policy or procedure itself is not complex and complying with it doesn’t require development of any new skills.  However, it’s very important to management that everyone comply.  So, L&D is asked to develop a training initiative related to it.

Before spending a lot of time articulating the learning objectives for the training initiative, L&D needs to consider the business objectives behind it.  What does management really want to achieve?  Remember that the policy is simple and easy to understand, so the key business objectives are most likely to:

1. Demonstrate that management is serious about compliance
2. Provide a mechanism for managing compliance later (for example, non-compliant employees will have no excuse, because training will have been provided, making corrective action much easier)

In this hypothetical example, the L&D team should most likely conserve its dollars and personnel resources, and just develop a simple training program that achieves the business objectives without going overboard from a curriculum or instructional design standpoint.  In short, L&D should “check the box,” achieve the business objectives, and move on.

A Real-World Example

Here’s a real-world example that’s a bit more nuanced, but that illustrates the same principle.  Our team was tasked with training a range of healthcare professionals in third world countries to vaccinate large portions of their local populations.  Administering the various vaccinations involved a range of different syringes and techniques.

The learners included not only the health workers who would administer vaccinations, but also district public health officials who would oversee and evaluate the health workers.  Obviously, the health workers needed to receive complex hands-on training, administering simulated injections with all the various types of syringe.

The public health officials also needed to understand the injection techniques and when they needed to be used, even though they wouldn’t administer any injections.  We could have trained them in the same manner as the health workers, as that would have satisfied the learning objectives for the initiative.

However, we adopted a different and lower-cost approach.  Rather than giving the public health officials hands-on training, we had them watch the different injection techniques and educated them on when certain techniques were required vs. others.  This saved the client’s resources, and still fully equipped the public health officials to do their jobs effectively.

Keeping Learners in Mind

The point of this article has been this:  In a world of limited L&D resources, remember the business objectives behind a training initiative, and deploy the resources needed to achieve those objectives.  Don’t go overboard.  There’s only so much time, budget dollars, and personnel resources to go around.

However, there’s another way to look at resources, too.  Your learners’ time and attention are also resources, and the L&D team needs to make the most of them.  It’s best to avoid overloading learners with a high-powered learning program if something a lot simpler will achieve the underlying business objectives.

The post When Business Objectives Trump Learning Objectives appeared first on Bull City Blue.

By Sue Iannone

We all…well, maybe some of us…remember the chorus lyrics from a famous Rolling Stones song:

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need

It’s tough to argue with that.  It holds true in everyday life, and it holds true for leaders of Learning & Development (L&D) organizations in pharmaceutical and biotech companies.  The fact is, L&D organizations aren’t always given the resources they need to deliver the results expected of them.  However, your chances of getting the resources you need are much greater if you know how to make a compelling case for them.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to build a business case that can help an L&D team secure the resources it needs for a project or initiative.  Specifically, we’ll answer the following questions:

• What is a business case?
• When is a business case needed?
• How do you build a business case?
• What are some best practices for building a business case?

Let’s get started.

What is a Business Case?

Simply put, a business case is a document that makes the argument—or outlines the rationale—for investing in an initiative or a related group of initiatives.  Business cases can range from simple to highly complex.

A simple business case can be as basic as a conversational e-mail with some supporting data that gets sent to the relevant stakeholders.  A complex business case might be a lengthy, sophisticated, and formal document that’s chock full of charts, graphs, and data from primary and secondary research that must be presented to a committee of decision makers.

Whether a situation calls for a simple or complex business case really depends on two things:

1. Who’s making the investment decision
2. What resources—and how much resources—are being requested

If, for example, you’re making the case to your boss, with whom you have a great working relationship—and you’re only asking for a relatively small amount of money for a project—then the business case should be simple.  On the other hand, a more complex business case is typically justified if:

• Multiple departments or functions can be affected by the decision to move forward
• Multiple high-level decision makers must be involved
• Large sums of money will be required
• Additional headcount will be required

Any time larger amounts of money and headcount are required, a robust business case is going to be essential to getting approval.  To move forward absent a well-documented rationale and plan would be irresponsible.

When Is a Business Case Needed?

Typically, any time the L&D team needs to secure additional resources, a business case will be needed on some level.  Consider a new product launch.  A pharmaceutical company is going to make a range of resources available for something as important as a launch.  However, budgeting decision makers don’t always understand the nuances of every component of a launch and may under-resource the learning needs.

The L&D organization should be proactive in identifying the things it needs to help facilitate a successful launch.  It must then make the case for them.

Here’s a real-world example.  We have worked with two different clients in the past few years that had robust development pipelines with significant numbers of global launches coming up over a multi-year period.  The companies were budgeting for the launches and providing some resources for L&D to support them.

However, there were some unmet needs that decision-makers didn’t seem to notice.  In both cases, the companies lacked clear processes, tools, and guidelines for curriculum and content development related to global launch.  Absent these things, efficiency would suffer, costs would rise, and the L&D teams would have to “reinvent the wheel” for each launch.

We worked with the L&D organizations to build business cases for developing global launch processes and tools.  Ultimately, those business cases were successful, and we moved forward with the initiatives.

Business cases are often required before adopting new technologies.  For example, an L&D team might need to make a business case for adopting a new virtual classroom tool, particularly if the company already uses a virtual meeting tool.  Such decisions often have impacts beyond the L&D team, affecting the Information Technology department, Human Resources, etc.

How Do You Build a Business Case?

As we’ve established, business cases can range from simple to complex.  Here, we outline the key components in a more complex business case, but the principles apply to simple ones, as well.

Executive Summary

Be sure to include an executive summary up front that summarizes the need, why it’s important, the expected benefits, and what’s requested.  It should be a “micro” version of the larger business case.  Often, key decision makers are busy, and they won’t read further than the executive summary.

Background and Current Situation

In this section, review the current state of affairs, focusing special attention on the needs that must be addressed, the gaps that must be filled, or the risks that must be avoided.  Explain why the status quo is unsustainable or sub-optimal, and why it must be changed.  Use data and research to make the case as appropriate.

Objectives

Clearly outline the objectives of the initiative you want to pursue.  Presumably, the initiative would solve the problems or close the gaps highlighted in the Background and Current Situation.  Articulate specific goals and objectives related to doing that.

Initiative Overview

In this section, define the initiative.  Describe what it is and how it would work.  This is where you will provide a high-level overview of what is needed in terms of dollars, headcount, and so on.

Benefit / Risk Assessment

It’s important to spell out the initiative’s expected benefits.  If you’re asking the company to invest time and dollars in software, tools, personnel, and more, then it’s critical to explain what the company will get in return for those investments.  Benefits can be qualitative or quantitative, but it’s usually better to thoughtfully outline benefits in a quantitative manner when possible.

It’s also important to outline the risks associated with not pursuing the initiative.  In addition, moving forward with an initiative can bring risks of its own in some cases.  Outline those, as well, but include suggestions for mitigating those risks.

Detailed Plan of Action

This section should clearly spell out how the initiative would be implemented.  In particular, it should include:

• Key deliverables and who’s responsible for them
• Delivery timelines
• Budget and headcount needs
• Key stakeholders and required champions or sponsors

Conclusion

The conclusion should reinforce the overall business case.  It’s a concise restatement of the need, the initiative, the investment required, and the expected benefits.

What Are Some Best Practices for Building a Business Case?

There are a lot of best practices for building a business case.  However, we’ll relate just a few here.  These are the best practices that have served our team well over the years.

1. Align the initiative with the company’s strategic imperatives or business objectives – This is paramount. If the initiative is not related to the company’s overall strategy or business goals, then it’s probably not worth doing.
2. Tell a story – Be engaging and compelling when you make your case. This is particularly important when outlining the status quo and why it needs to change, as well as when describing the expected benefits. Use real-world examples or case studies to illustrate why the status quo is bad.  Use similar techniques when outlining benefits.  Creatively connect the initiative to better business results.
3. Make it pristine – Do not turn in a document (even if it’s just an e-mail) with spelling, grammatical, or math errors in it. Formatting is also important.  If you’re using PowerPoint, make sure its layout is attractive, neat, and consistent.  Use good charts and attractive graphics.  Poorly constructed documents reflect negatively on the L&D team in general, and will hinder your case.
4. Get feedback – Share your business case with some “friendlies” before delivering it. Ask them to provide feedback and let you know whether the:
   1. Case makes sense and is easy to follow
   2. Arguments are compelling and rational
   3. Graphics are easy to understand and help the document do its job

So, there you have it:  A quick overview of how to make a business case.  Let us know about your success stories in making the case for resources!

The post Get What You Need: How to Build a Business Case appeared first on Bull City Blue.

By Sue Iannone

Let’s start this article by establishing one fact up front:  That old cliché about how we all should “do more with less” is bogus.  Perhaps not it all cases, but it’s definitely bogus when it comes to leading a Learning and Development (L&D) organization in a biopharma company.

Training organization leaders often complain about having to do more with less.  Their teams face greater demands, but are given fewer resources with which to meet them.  Often, “doing more with less” is considered evidence of a “can-do spirit” and is a source of pride.  However, there’s a considerable downside to trying to maintain—or even enhance—service levels in the face of dwindling resources.

In this article, we’ll explore the downside of doing more with less.  In addition, we’ll see how it’s usually better to get more strategic, prioritize your efforts, and focus only on the most important needs when resources get tight.  Sometimes, this means telling internal clients “No,” so we’ll also address how to do that professionally and effectively.

The Downside of Doing More with Less

While it’s tempting to always say “Yes” and try to meet the demands of your stakeholders no matter what, there are drawbacks.  As a result, doing more with less is typically not sustainable except in short bursts.

The L&D team’s customers may see heroic effort as “above and beyond the call of duty” the first time, but they can quickly come to expect such efforts as the norm.  If they do, and if L&D leaders don’t keep the situation in check, it can result in:

• Morale problems
• Team burnout
• Sub-par work
• Unhappy stakeholders

When faced with high demands and tightening resources, there are two keys to success.  The first is to make sure that the L&D team is operating as efficiently as possible.  The second is to do less with less.

Doing Less with Less:  What Does That Mean?

Doing less with less doesn’t mean "slacking off."  Instead, it means focusing resources on those things that are the highest priorities.  Doing that requires L&D leaders to have a strong understanding of business objectives and desired outcomes, an ability to prioritize requests based on their relevance to those objectives, and the skill to back up their decisions.

Figure 1 illustrates a simple approach to prioritizing programs and requests from stakeholders.  Any request should be evaluated based on its expected impact versus its ease of implementation.  In this case, “ease of implementation” is a catch-all term referring to the total resources needed, such as people, time, and dollars.

Obviously, if something is easy to do and will generate a high impact, then it should be a top priority (Quadrant 1).  Quadrant 2 initiatives should be your second priority.  They may be harder to implement, but at least they’ll be worth the effort.

In a resource-constrained environment, an L&D team should avoid Quadrant 4 like the plague.  Any time spent there would be wasted.  Quadrant 3 initiatives—those that may generate a low impact but are easy to do—might sound tempting, but it’s usually best to leave them alone.  Doing a Quadrant 3 initiative just to "check the box" is probably not the best use of resources.  Instead, focus resources on things that will help your company achieve its business objectives in a meaningful way.

One last note is important to make.  Sometimes, when conducting prioritization exercises, L&D teams will attempt to make everything a high priority.  In a truly resource-constrained situation, you can't make everything a high priority.  Force-rank requests or initiatives if needed, focusing on those things that will generate the most impact per “unit” of resource expended.  Trade-offs must be made.

Saying No to Stakeholders

When making trade-offs, invariably, some requests get pushed down to the bottom of the list.  This means that the L&D team must sometimes tell internal customers and stakeholders “No.”  It’s important to do this professionally and politely, but with sound logic backing the decision.

An L&D leader doesn’t need to build a full-blown business case to back their decision, but they should be prepared to do the following:

• Outline the core business objectives and desired outcomes
• Explain why the request is not critical to those outcomes at the current time
• Articulate the resources that would be required to fulfill the request (People, time, and dollars)
• Shed light on the bigger picture (The L&D team serves multiple brand teams, each of which mainly sees their own challenges and needs. Sometimes, a brand team needs to see what’s going on elsewhere in the organization and why—at that time—they might not be the priority for L&D.)
• Potentially offer an alternative course of action that is more reasonable, i.e. “I can’t do X, but I can do Y. Will that work?”

Sometimes, internal stakeholders don’t truly understand what it takes to get things done.  What seems like an easy thing to them might actually take a significant expenditure of resources to deliver.  Simply explaining that fact to them—and relating it to the business’s objectives—is often enough to open their eyes to the truth.

For example, a brand team might ask for a lot of things for an upcoming POA meeting, such as a workshop on selling skills, a workshop on objection handling, a user’s guide for a new sales aid, and a range of other things.  In such a case, an L&D leader might need to sit down with brand leaders and explain that incorporating so many things might overwhelm the learners while stretching resources too far.

Ideally, they would then jointly review each request, evaluating them based on their expected impact and their ease of implementation.  Involving the stakeholder in this type of prioritization exercise can be very helpful.

In another example, brand teams responsible for older products might want a range of updates for their training content catalogs.  Given those brands’ likely relevance to the company’s core business objectives, it may not make sense for the L&D team to expend resources on such activities.  In such a case, L&D leaders should work with the brand stakeholders to determine whether the updates should be made at all.  If so, then they may need to determine whether the brand team will provide additional resources to help make it happen or to hire an outsourced vendor.

For L&D leaders, the key is to stay focused on business objectives and the desired outcomes.  By focusing precious resources on the things that will truly make a difference—and by working jointly with the team’s stakeholders to prioritize efforts—the L&D team can ultimately be more effective, efficient, and strategic.

The post How to Do Less with Less appeared first on Bull City Blue.

By Sue Iannone
Part Two in a Series
In Part One, we outlined seven characteristics of the “Future Learning and Development Organization.”  Those characteristics are shared by teams that evolve beyond firefighting mode, look forward in a strategic way, and focus on achieving the company’s business objectives rather than struggling to keep up with daily demands.
What’s the first characteristic of such an organization?  It has a strategic learning leader.  Today, we outline some tips to help L&D leaders be more strategic, and avoid feeling overwhelmed by day-to-day demands.  These tips are geared toward the new department head, but can be applied at any time, regardless of how long a leader has been on the job.

1:  Get Your Bearings

If you’re new to a leadership role, it’s important to get the “lay of the land” before making any major decisions.  This will require a few rounds of meetings and a lot of listening.
Take the time to hold staff meetings and one-on-one meetings with your team members.  This gives you an opportunity to show them you’re listening and that you’re focused on trying to do the right things.  It also gives you a chance to more deeply understand their individual strengths and limitations.
One-on-one meetings with your bosses will help make their expectations clearer to you.  Meetings with your peers in other functions, such as the heads of Marketing, Sales, Medical Affairs, and Market Access are also critical.  They’ll be your internal customers, so it’s important to know what they’re thinking, as well as their business objectives.  Ask about their perspective on how training can support and accelerate the business objectives.

2:  Focus on the Wildly Important

Being strategic can be hard, as it requires a leader to dissect the business, understand and articulate business objectives, and formulate strategies for achieving them.  It can be easier for a new leader to “slip backward” and focus on things that are more in their comfort zone.
One illustrative example is New Hire Training (NHT).  It typically takes a large piece of the annual training budget and it is important.  However, even in a company with 10% attrition, only 10% of the company will participate in NHT during any given year.  That leaves 90% of the company that could probably benefit from other forms of L&D that are more closely related to strategic business goals.
Yet, learning leaders can easily get sucked into focusing on things like NHT while failing to address more important issues.  Instead, keep your focus on the strategic business objectives, and the things your team must do to achieve them.

3:  Trust Your Team, Delegate

Tip #2 above deals with where you focus your thoughts and attention.  Tip #3 deals with how you spend your time on a daily basis.  Don’t allow yourself to get sucked into spending an inordinate amount of time doing tactical things.
Now, reality sometimes dictates that learning leaders get “in the weeds” on tactical issues, and that’s OK.  However, it becomes a problem when it happens on a regular basis.  Every minute an L&D department head spends setting up a webinar is a minute taken away from more strategic issues.
It’s critical for strategic learning leaders to delegate tactical work to the team.  Give them the opportunity to succeed or fail.  For less tenured team members, however, just make sure that the cost of failure is relatively low for them and the department.  As they grow in skill and confidence, so can their level of responsibility.
For new strategic leaders, delegating is often very hard to do.  It’s very important, however.  Leaders who don’t invest enough time in developing their team members—and who don’t delegate—will continually waste time doing tactical work themselves while complaining that their team members just aren’t as competent as they should be.

4:  Clean House

This one can be uncomfortable, but it’s often necessary.  Sometimes, it becomes clear that a team member is not suited to his or her role.  Maybe their skills aren’t what they should be.  Perhaps their attitude isn’t good.  If you’ve properly assessed your team, you’ll be able to identify these types of issues quickly and take the appropriate action.  This may involve working with Human Resources to counsel the person, find another role that’s a better match, or remove them from the organization.
It’s important to note that “cleaning house” sometimes means affecting team members who are quite skilled and who have great attitudes.  The biopharmaceutical industry is dynamic and volatile.  Business circumstances, goals, and strategies change.  That means L&D organizations also must change. Sometimes, these changes require organizational shifts that impact good team members.  A strategic learning leader is very proactive in managing and guiding those shifts.

5:  Pick Your Battles with Stakeholders

“Pick your battles” is a good tip to remember for life in general.  It also applies to strategic learning leaders.  For example, your internal customers (the Head of Sales, for example) might have all kinds of ideas about what should and should not be done.  This may come as a shock, but the Head of Sales is not always right.
However, that doesn’t mean that you should resist every time a stakeholder says—or requests—something with which you disagree.  Decide what’s strategically important, and don’t be afraid to let the little things go.  This helps you avoid getting the reputation as a “Dr. No.”  But, when there is a strategically significant disagreement, be prepared to make your case professionally and articulate why your recommendation is more in line with the business’s objectives.
Hopefully, these tips will be helpful to you.  What other tips have worked for you?
In future articles, we’ll outline more ways to build the “Future Learning and Development Organization.”

The post Are You a Strategic Leader…Or Overwhelmed? appeared first on Bull City Blue.

By Sue Iannone and Garry O'Grady
Part One in a Series
The biopharmaceutical industry is not known for dull stability.  Think about it… Companies must remain on a “treadmill” of innovation, always working to replace products as they go off patent.  Regulatory and legislative changes are always being discussed, passed, or implemented.  Market dynamics are constantly fluid, as healthcare costs rise, payers become increasingly stringent, and healthcare delivery models evolve.
All this change—both market and portfolio-driven—places great burdens on Learning and Development (L&D) organizations.  Unfortunately, those burdens keep far too many L&D organizations focused on the demands of today without thinking about the needs of tomorrow.  While it’s important to respond to current demands, no organization can be a true strategic partner unless it takes the time to look down the road and prepare for the future.
In our work, we’ve had the privilege of working with a wide range of L&D organizations.  We’ve seen plenty that exist primarily in “fire-fighting” mode.  However, we’ve seen others that are much more strategically oriented.  What makes one more strategic, while others react to fire drills?  This article focuses on the seven characteristics of a strategic, future-oriented L&D organization.

The Perils of Being Stuck in Today

As mentioned, constant change places great burdens on L&D organizations.  In our experience, this often keeps those teams in a persistent state of feeling overworked and under-resourced.  L&D team members have described this situation to us in different ways over the years, but the general sentiment is usually the same.  Do any of the following statements describe the situation in your organization?

• We always seem to be running at full throttle, just to keep up with the things we’re being asked to do.
• Senior leadership views the L&D organization as a “service” rather than a strategic partner.
• We have to please a lot of different internal clients.
• I spend more time “putting out fires” than I do anything else.
• Where’s the “reset” button? We can’t seem to get on top of things!

The problem is, for L&D teams in this situation, there is no easy reset button.  Staying “stuck in today” can ultimately reduce the L&D organization’s effectiveness, diminish its status within the company, reduce morale, increase turnover, and ultimately shrink budgets.  However, by making some important changes, they can very definitely get out of that rut and experience significant improvements across the board.

Seven Characteristics of the Future L&D Organization

What’s the ‘secret sauce’ of successful L&D organizations?  Below, we outline seven characteristics that we’ve seen consistently in L&D organizations that have escaped the cycle describe above, and have positioned themselves as strategic assets in their companies.

1:  Strategic Learning Leaders

Strategic learning leaders tend to act as performance consultants to corporate leaders.  They deeply understand the business objectives, proactively identify performance drivers related to those objectives, identify issues or roadblocks, and recommend solutions.  In short, they are able to keep their teams focused on doing the right things, rather than allowing the team to get bogged down trying to fulfill whatever requests happen to be thrown its way.  Part of being a strategic learning leader involves knowing how to say “no” to internal clients, and backing it up with valid reasons.
In addition, strategic learning leaders spend time looking ahead.  They consider and anticipate changes that are coming and how demands will evolve, and then determine what technologies will be needed, what organizational changes are required, and so on.  They help their L&D organizations stay ahead of the curve.

2:  Trainers Who Consult

While strategic learning leaders need to be performance consultants at the macro level, trainers must be consultants at the micro level.  They bring learning and development expertise to the table, and should use that to help their internal clients determine the best way to achieve a desired result.  For some trainers, this will require additional confidence and a mindset change.  They must view themselves as training experts and consultants, rather than just order takers.

3:  High-Impact Resource Allocation

Strategic L&D organizations consider business objectives first, and then determine how to allocate training resources.  This involves reviewing demands based on their potential impact on business goals, and then prioritizing and allocating budget, time, and people resources accordingly.  Unfortunately, we’ve seen some L&D organizations that don’t prioritize expenditures at all—leading to misaligned budget, team burnout, and sub-par deliverables.

4:  Defined Content Strategy and Standards

Strategic L&D organizations have clear processes and standards in place for content development.  They begin by considering the business objectives for any given initiative.  Then they do the following:

• Using appropriate competency or behavioral models, apply instructional design principles to produce learning that directly impacts business objectives.
• Choose the best formats (i.e. print, digital, live) for each category of learning.
• Use the right systems and tools to deploy learning effectively.
• Develop content that works for the “Modern Learner,” who wants content that is easily accessed, easily digested, and available on an array of devices and systems.

5:  Meaningful Measurement

Measuring the impact of learning initiatives is critically important.  We’re not specifically referring to measuring return on investment (ROI), as that’s notoriously difficult to do with most learning initiatives.  However, we are referring to something akin to Kirkpatrick’s Four-Level Training Evaluation Model.  Pretty much every learning organization assesses Reaction, but very few assess Behavior change.  Strategic learning organizations work to get at least to Level 3:

1. Reaction – “They liked the training”
2. Learning – “Their knowledge increased”
3. Behavior – “They apply their learning”
4. Results – “We can measure the results of that new behavior”

6:  More Performance Support

Performance support gets talked about a lot these days.  It’s important to provide the means for learners to reinforce their learnings and to continuously apply them on the job.  Too often, though, performance support is applied in an ad hoc fashion, or only for higher-priority initiatives.  Strategic L&D organizations purposefully deploy performance support in both basic and sophisticated ways to improve sustained performance in the field after the learner leaves training.

7:  Increased Distribution Rates

Strategic L&D organizations get new learning initiatives and content out the door quickly, without allowing the Medical / Regulatory / Legal (MRL) process to derail their plans.  How is this possible, given that training organizations often view the MRL review as a burden at best, and an adversarial process at worst?  Strategic L&D organizations work closely and proactively with MRL personnel to stay within compliance, get impactful learning resources out, and transform the MRL review into a value-added process.

Coming Up in this Series

In this article, we simply outlined the seven characteristics of L&D organizations who’ve “escaped” today and can also look to tomorrow. Want to learn more? In subsequent articles, we’ll go into more detail for each characteristic.  We’ll outline a range of hints and tips that L&D organizations can use to become more strategic and improve results.

The post Getting Out of Today and Into the Future appeared first on Bull City Blue.