Reason #2: No Metrics - Why Your Training Project Is Doomed to Fail… and How You Can Make It a Success Instead

Welcome to what I plan to write as a regular column over the next few months. Shockingly, over 70% of all business projects fail. Fortunately for me, I have a lot of material for this column because there are more than enough reasons why a training project can fail, which means that not only are the odds stacked against you, but the challenges are numerous and sometimes not so apparent. The purpose of this column is to identify these issues and challenges and offer concrete solutions to mitigate the risks associated with each.

Feel free to check out prior posts in the series:

Reason #1: It's not a training problem

Reason #2: No Metrics

I know of so many training projects where the success or failure of a project was arbitrary. Why? Because they had no metrics tied to their project. So often projects are started because there is a perceived need or it a “good idea”, but they don’t attach a number to it. Clients tell me, for example, they want a decrease in support calls or an increase in user adaption, but when I ask them to assign it a number, they suddenly get very quiet. Just because metrics are often overlooked, it doesn’t mean it’s not important. I have often heard people say that in business if you can’t measure it, why do it? You need to be able to prove your project was a success, and that will be measured according to the metrics you assign to it from the outset.

The two most common challenges in creating metrics is either a lack of clarity on what to measure or a lack of data to measure your results with any degree of accuracy.

With regard to lack of clarity, ask yourself these basic questions and expand it from there:

·        Why are you undertaking this project to begin with?

·        What are the consequences of doing nothing?

·        What are your goals for the project?

·        What are the stakeholders’ goals for the project?

Hopefully by answering these questions you will gain some sense of the general area or concept that you want to measure. You then need to assign a number to it. If you don’t have that at your fingertips, check with your stakeholders. Just because you don’t have access to the data, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist within your organization. If it doesn’t exist, determine what you can measure going forward. If you have no baseline perhaps you can start capturing data now. Some data you can easily extract through analysis include:

·        Learner surveys

·        Learner test scores

·        Learner performance

·        Increases in sales or gained efficiencies

Yes, these are fairly broad, but the questions in the first part should help narrow your focus. Defining your metrics will help to define your success, and that perhaps more than anything is a key ingredient to succeed, because you cannot succeed at something you cannot define.

If you still have a lack of clarity, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]