How do you determine what training your company should provide? Courses that are popular with employees? Those that get high registrations? Courses that your competitors and peer companies offer? Or is it training that an engineering manager requests for her/his employees? What factors are the most important in making these decisions? And how would you use these to evaluate if your current portfolio has the right programs? These are all important business questions which involve funding and resource allocation.
Conventional thinking would say that good instructional system design (ISD) methodologies answer these questions. But I believe ISD is much better at telling us how to design effective instruction. ISD assumes a business decision has already been made that training is needed. So the higher order question we need to address is how do we know if the training is necessary, and if we should offer the training at all?
Well the business decision is what I wanted to address when creating the Portfolio Rationalization Quadrant. The concept for the model originated in 1999 in a late night meeting where several of my peer training managers Nortel had spent dozens of hours sorting through hundreds of courses offered all around the globe, trying to figure out how we could take millions of dollars out of the training budget. My dear friend, Maureen Towaij, suggested we look at how Gartner uses a quadrant to evaluate companies in an industry segment.
We knew we should evaluate training on what we believed
were two very important business factors for training; first, how strategic is the training to the company; and second, how much proprietary information is contained in the training. During the next few days, we evaluated every course on these two factors, scoring each on a 10 point scale, and seeing what quadrant each fell into.
We then learned that we had many courses that we couldn't affirmatively answer if they had any strategic benefit to the company. These courses became a target for elimination and allowed us to save millions of dollars in the first year. Thanks to Maureen, the Portfolio Rationalization Quadrant was born. And it has helped me to help many other Fortune 1000 companies in determining how to reduce the amount of unnecessary spend on training that does not benefit the company. And it has helped in finding dollars to re-appropriate for other training that has much more value to the company without having to increase the total training budget.
If you would like to learn more about the Portfolio Rationalization Quadrant, please go to the full article by clicking on the chart model above. And if you would like a copy of the quadrant for use in your company, please send me an email at dharward@trainingindustry.com.
