Global Quality Training Governance Model
2024 Brandon Hall Gold Award, Excellence in Learning — Best Learning Governance
A multi-billion-dollar global healthcare company is transforming scientific innovation into healthcare solutions around the globe. Dedicated to supporting people through their health challenges, the Company employs more than 100,000 people to provide healthcare solutions in 176 countries.
Situation
Due to a recent organizational restructure, the Company’s Head of Global Quality Training, Culture, and Communication identified the need to streamline and harmonize Quality training across the organization. An initial survey of the Company’s 34 Quality Training Libraries revealed more than 10,000 global training courses, just in e-learning, workshop, and video delivery methods — many of which were redundant. Additionally, approximately 40% of these courses had not been completed in the preceding two years.
At the local level, approximately 100,000 “trainable documents” existed, including on-the-job training materials and “Read and Understand” documents, leading to significant document redundancy across sites. This uncoordinated training approach resulted in high maintenance costs — more than $500 per course and document per year in training staff time. Additionally, money and staff time was being wasted on unnecessary development and translations of solutions by the various library owners because there was no effective means for these library owners to identify already existing solutions. There also was no governance for when to develop new training.
The Company also found that employees were assigned an excessive amount of training, resulting in unnecessary costs and increased time for employees to qualify for their roles. The excessive amount of training also resulted in a higher likelihood of employees not understanding what training to complete in what sequence.
In sum, the Company was wasting money and time, seeing increased risks of regulatory noncompliance, and facing decreased employee engagement because training was not harmonized and there was no effective governance. To address this, the Company partnered with Innovative Learning Group (ILG) to analyze the existing training libraries and to develop a Quality Training Governance Model that would provide the direction, processes, and tools to streamline and harmonize training across the organization, ensuring both compliance and local learning needs are met.
Solution
ILG conducted a quantitative analysis of three large and separate Quality training libraries. The goals of this analysis were to look at the last two years of training library data and identify:
- The extent to which there were redundant courses across the libraries
- The extent to which the libraries included active courses with low or no usage
- Which languages courses were translated into and how many users there were for each language
In addition to this quantitative analysis, ILG also performed a qualitative analysis of a small sample of courses that were redundant across three libraries. In this analysis, ILG reviewed the courses, assessed their instructional integrity and use of appropriate learning delivery methods, and made recommendations on the disposition (retain, revise, retire) of each. The purpose of this assessment was to gain initial insights on the likely effectiveness of the existing training.
Working with ILG, the Head of Global Quality Training, Culture, and Communication developed a business case based on these analyses for the governance initiative and won approval from the Global Quality Leadership Team. The approval for the governance model came with expanded scope to include all 34 Quality Training Libraries.
Governance Model Pillars
At the global level, to address the issues discovered during the analysis, ILG and Global Quality Training developed a governance model consisting of four pillars of effort:
Pillar 1, Content Development Strategy: Aims at implementing processes and tools through which learning professionals will select learning delivery methods more effectively and will not always assume developing a course from scratch is necessary.
Pillar 2, Global Quality Library Governance: Establishes a framework for regular review and maintenance of the unified Global Quality Library to ensure it remains relevant and efficient.
Pillar 3, Libraries Cleaning to One Library: Focuses on consolidating the various libraries by identifying and removing unnecessary courses.
Pillar 4, Translation Approach: Sets criteria for translating training materials into languages that are essential for employees, avoiding unnecessary translations. This approach will be applied retroactively and proactively for all new materials.
At the local level, the Head of Quality Management Systems led site training leaders to apply the governance model to trainable documents. They assessed existing documents, established necessary categories, and developed a plan to streamline these materials.
Results
Through implementation of the governance model, the Company will deliver effective, efficient, and fit-to-purpose learning to its employees at both the global and local levels, which will result in better performance. At the global level, the one Global Quality Library makes it easier to assign appropriate learning solutions, so learners will no longer take unnecessary training. This will improve time to job qualification, reduce risks of compliance issues related to training, and increase employee engagement. Further, Global Quality Training will have fewer courses to maintain, fewer languages to translate to, resulting in reduced maintenance costs. Development costs are also lower, as new development is centralized, resulting in the reduction of new courses being created.
Specific to the local level, there are fewer trainable documents for the sites to maintain and fewer documents added. In addition, training of site employees is resourced from the one Global Quality Library leading to more consistent learning across the company.
Overall, the implementation of one Global Quality Library is estimated to save approximately $1.7 million annually through reduced course maintenance, translation costs, and decreased need for new training development.
To learn more about how Innovative Learning Group can create custom learning solutions to help improve business results, contact us at info@innovativeLG.com.
