Are you ready to bring the power of an online learning platform into your organisation? That’s fantastic news! Perhaps your decision is all that is required and you can immediately request a demo from Tribal Habits and get going.
Alternatively, while you may be ready to go, your organisation may require you to demonstrate the business case for this proposed online learning platform. You may need to bring other decision-makers or stakeholders into the loop and obtain their approval. Alternatively, you may want to simply take yourself through a process to ensure your selected online learning platform is a good choice.
In either case, what you need is a business case for an online learning platform. In this series of articles, we will help you write a business case for a new online learning platform in a way which is both efficient and persuasive. The three articles in this series provide you with two key parts to the process.
- The first part is a 6-step instructional guide designed to help you build your business case and get internal approval for an online learning platform.
- The second part is an example of how a fictional company, ACME Co., put this framework to use to get approval for an online learning platform to optimise the organisation’s induction processes. The purpose of part two is to show you the framework in action, but feel free copy and paste any of the wording into your business case if it serves your needs.
In each article, we will review two steps in the process, along with the example from ACME Co.
- The first article examines step 1 (Define the problem) and step 2 (Explore potential solutions).
- The second article looks at step 3 (Recommend a preferred solution) and step 4 (Explain the pricing).
- The third article reviews step 5 (Describe the implementation) and step 6 (Provide your impression).
You can also download a guidebook of all three articles (including the consolidated ACME Co example) in a single business case template for a learning platform.
Step 5 – Describe the implementation of the preferred solution
As part of the due diligence process, your management team needs to understand how your new solution will be implemented in the organisation.
There is a lot of variation between technology platforms here – from simple plug and play solutions (like Tribal Habits), to more extensive enterprise solutions that require significant integration and IT support to enable their rollout.
An excellent way to approach this is to provide a timeline of events and milestones. This way, your management team has visibility of what to expect and when to expect it. It also pays to highlight risks and potential disruptions at this stage.
Similar to the pricing stage, your management team will likely want to drill into this part of your proposal. So you need to know the details. Examples of the question you should have answers for include:
- What training will be required by Admins and general staff?
- Do we need new hires to manage the platform?
- Who will be responsible for administering the system? Who is the ‘product owner’?
- What impact will this project have on other projects underway and the day-to-day running of our organisation?
Step 6 – Provide your impression of the preferred solution
It’s time to get personal!
By now, you will have conducted a trial of the platform you are recommending. If you haven’t, stop writing this business case and start your trial! This section is an opportunity for you to provide details of your personal experience with the platform, how you think it fits into your organisation and specifically, how it solves the identified business problem.
Try to provide real-world evidence of your experience in the platform as this will help bring it life for your management team. Some areas to focus on could be:
- Your interactions with the support team
- Ease of use
- Setup time
- Training requirements
- Ability to leverage current training assets
- The ease with which training can be created
- Reporting capabilities
To close your business case, succinctly summarise your key points and provide your final recommendation on how the proposed solutions will solve the identified business problem.
Need help?
If you require any assistance with creating a business case to help support your organisation in its consideration of Tribal Habits, please reach to us at [email protected]. We’d be happy to help discuss your objectives, develop optimised solutions and pricing ideas, and ensure that your organisation is ready for a successful launch of its new learning platform.
Example: ACME Co: Moving to online learning
Implementing Tribal Habits
I have completed a 14-day trial period of Tribal Habits. Should we elected to go ahead with this solution, our trial portal will become our live portal. This means most of the initial setup work for our portal is already complete. In fact, the workload to implement Tribal Habits is far less than other online platforms and can be completed in minutes.
We can import (and update) our users via spreadsheet or enabled single-sign-on to auto-create new users. In either case, establishing initial users takes minutes. Most of the work will be in preparing a spreadsheet of our users to upload.
Importing topics from our libraries and establishing initial pathways or enrolments takes minutes. Topics are imported in seconds, and it takes less than a minute to activate due dates, notifications and reminders of each topic.
When it comes to creating our own online training, Tribal Habits will be faster than any other alternative. The platform has template topics, guided processes, pre-formatted content, built-in feedback and free human reviews. We’ll be able to shortcut our paper-training into interactive online modules in hours or days – not weeks or months.
Experience with Tribal Habits
I was able to speak with Jordan from Tribal Habits during my trial and get a rundown of the product.
I have been able to play with the platform through a free trial offered by Tribal Habits and have begun looking to set up training. It is an easy to use platform and does not take any longer to create than it would to develop traditional training through PowerPoint or Prezi. There are many options to choose from to make training interactive, and it tracks much more data than what we can monitor ourselves right now offline. I have created numerous induction training topics already in Tribal Habits, and I have no previous experience in online training creation. The topics are engaging, interactive and have been well received by those I’ve shared them with internally.
Having a good quality, Australian-owned platform where all support is provided within Australia, allows us to add more tools to our practice development strategy. It also lets us spend more time working practically with teams and staff to develop practices, behaviour and attitudes, while they are still able to access the knowledge.
Competence in practice comes from three elements: knowledge, behaviour and attitudes. Traditional training methods focus on knowledge, and mean that we have less time to spend on behaviour and attitude, which is the key in actually changing practices. Often we just hope by providing knowledge, people will automatically adjust their practice, but this is not the case. Being able to have access to that same knowledge, online and interactively, and then utilising the practice team to work with teams and staff will enable us to have the time to build and enable change in practice.
I recommend that ACME Co. invests in an online training tool, with the preference being for Tribal Habits. I believe it is critical to improving we induct new starters and to our ultimate success as a business.