:: Highmark Experiences Benefits, Overcomes Hurdles with Learning Shared Services Group ::

In early 2007 Chris Skerlong, Chief Learning Officer for Highmark – a leading Pennsylvania-based health insurance firm – found that the volume of e-learning her team produced might warrant a new organization structure.

“Many of our staff performed multiple roles as performance consultants, course designers and instructors,” Skerlong said.  “Because our programs were receiving high marks from the business units, we began to see a significant increase in the volume of programs we were being asked to deliver.”

Corporate University Xchange (CorpU) prepared a presentation to show how maturing L&D functions are changing.  For example, Intel – finding that the proliferation of their training courses had grown to nearly 10,000, and that numerous unique L&D teams were operating in each business unit – consolidated its L&D team under 3 new groups. Similarly, Caterpillar shifted more of its e-Learning design and development to offshore partners and began refocusing internal skill sets around performance consulting. 

Based on the presentation and other discussions and analysis, Skerlong and her team of managers decided to implement a new shared services function. The new structure now includes a team responsible for performance consulting, a team responsible for training delivery, a third group responsible for design, delivery, technology infrastructure, and Research & Development (R&D).

Kathy Rucinsky, Manager of Integrated Learning Solutions, now leads the design, delivery and technology group.  She noted that after five months, there are many indications that the change was the right way to go.

“We’ve been able to build a series of templates to estimate our cost and time to create learning internally in order to compare it with using external providers,” Rucinsky said.  “We can now compare our actual time spent from analysis throughout evaluation against external costs.  For us, it makes sense to develop our internal skills for high-end integration of technology and learning versus outsourcing.  Our data shows us that outsourcing projects – such as compliance training – where we can turn over complete story boards to an outside partner costs about the same as if we were to produce the deliverables internally ourselves.”

That allows more time for Rucinsky’s team to build what she calls the “whiz bang” content.  She says developing the ‘whiz-bang” content not only gives her team much more enthusiasm and self-reward, but also gives Highmark total ownership of the content. 

The move to shared services gave the group concern that it could become a bottleneck slowing down the volume of content produced.  So far, that hasn’t been the case. 

“We’ve had one occasion where a project fell through the cracks and we’ve had a learning curve as performance consultants and course designers learn how to communicate about performance requirements and course objectives,” she noted.  “But we’ve been able to do a better job formalizing the processes around the consulting, design and approval from the customer.”

To overcome the early communication challenges, Skerlong and her team decided to let performance consultants and designers go together to conduct needs analysis with their corporate clients, and to agree after their interviews on the nature of performance issues and the required course objectives.  A few things the group did not anticipate before the consolidation were the new systems and tools they needed to allow performance consultants, designers, developers, and instructors to collaborate.

“When each person was doing all of the roles, their files resided on their desktops,” Rucinsky said.  “We needed to create a file system that would allow the groups to share files and to coordinate their edits and revisions.” 

Rucinsky has augmented her design and development team with a few IT staff.  The team is now building the file management system and has become skilled at doing some of the highly technical work of coding course structures using XML and more sophisticated simulation work. “My development team is really loving this work,” she said.  

The notion of sharing files also introduced new complexities of version control, time stamping, and when to retire programs.  “We’re also wrestling with the issues around instructors using only a few modules of a single course,” she noted.  “We want to be sure that there is still integrity within a program if an instructor uses only two modules of a seven module course.”

One key sign that the group’s new structure is on target is feedback from the learning community.  “We’re getting comments back from our delivery teams that the customers really learned from the courses we’re building,” she said.  Skerlong plans to meet with her four direct reports next week to conduct a comprehensive review of how the new change is working out.  So far, all signs look positive.  We will keep you posted.