Deliverable: Operating procedures
When rolling out global training, how do you account for the special needs of each country while also making sure that global standards are being met? That was the challenge facing a major multinational organization with a robust pipeline churning out new products every several years.
Leaving it to the countries wasn’t working
The company had long used a decentralized approach to getting the workforce ready to bring new products to market. Each country created its own training resources to meet both their commercial and manufacturing needs. Some countries had L&D staff who led these efforts, while in other cases, many training materials were created by people with no background in L&D.
While this approach simplified things for HQ, it had begun to create problems that could no longer be ignored. While countries were working independently, none knew what the others were doing. This lead to substantial redundancy of cost and effort. Because the learning materials were sometimes created by functional area experts, they sometimes lack the rigor and effectiveness needed. Most critically, these practices had led to errors in quality control and compliance in some countries.
A consensus driven approach
The company hired BCL to help the organization find an answer to these problems. To do that, we brought country leaders from local markets together for an working session to define the best way to partner with limited resources. The overarching goal was to find the areas where global standardization are practical and helpful and those where local control are required. These would then form the basis of a set of standard operating practices for the training related to the global rollout of new products.
Global standards – local flexibility
During the workshop, the group aligned around a governance process and set of standard procedures. It was agreed that standards for content creation and elevating learning effectiveness would be set by global HQ. Countries would work with their local subject matter experts to build learning assets according to the global standards. Then they would send them to global HQ for a quality review, after which, the materials were returned for local implementation. In addition, standing advisory boards were created to collaborate with and gain feedback from countries related to their learning resource needs. Finally, it was agreed that global HQ would run an ongoing webinar Q&A series where they would answer questions from countries related to instructional design and learning effectiveness.
The procedures and governance mechanisms are now being used by the organization as standard practice in all of its new product introductions.
