With the wide variety of potential business applications for training and the individual context of the organisational culture that you work within, a standard template for conducting needs analysis will be of limited value. You need to adapt to meet the needs of the business and the constraints that exist around conducting needs analysis.
Having understood the three priorities that will drive your analysis you now proceed with the analysis itself. Irrespective of the business application and constraints that may exist around the needs analysis phase, you need to identify:
To answer these questions you need to carry out research, engage stakeholders in discussion and decision making and consider logistics and the wider business issues that will affect success.
Needs assessment starts with defining business outcomes and success measures that will enable you to create learning outcomes for your programme. The difference between these three elements is illustrated in the following example.
The last year has been a tough one for your business, a provider of hi-tech solutions to large organisations. Your sales are static and profit margins are eroding. You have a great sales team who have always done well by engaging with the technical buyers who have a business problem to solve and in aligning your solution with their needs. They have built good relationships with these buyers so they can understand the buying process and have always presented well. So, what’s the problem? The business wants to see a 5% increase in revenues over the next year and a similar improvement in profit margin.
The business has specific metrics as outcomes. Your sales director has been talking to the sales team and to existing and prospective customers. She has identified that customers are much more knowledgeable than they were: they have researched the market, considered their needs and have key criteria defined to help them make their choice of supplier before you get invited in to speak to them. The sales people are now having conversations about how they can fulfil a customer’s needs rather than helping the customer define those needs and building the trusted adviser relationship that worked so well in the past.
To achieve the revenue and margin increases the sales team need to:
This combination of metric and behaviour/skill-based requirements form the business outcome. Achieving these outcomes directly affects the business’s success.
Business outcomes must be defined early in your needs analysis. You need to have business (not training) conversations with senior stakeholders to define these outcomes, challenge for clarity and ensure alignment.
The focus of your business outcome conversations will be:
How will you know you have achieved the business outcomes? In terms of the metrics this is easy to see but you are not in control of the metrics. You are part of a wider market and economy so you have to focus on success measures that you can control. You need to look at the behaviours you want and define the evidence that these behaviours are being applied in the work environment.
In our example, answering the question ‘How will you know when you have achieved this outcome?’ might lead us to come up with the following success measures:
Of these success measures, you identify that a training solution could contribute to addressing all but the definition of a target customer profile, which will be created by the sales director.
Success measures are defined by focusing on what is in your control that will contribute to achieving the business outcome that you want to see.
The focus of your success measures conversations will be:
Learning outcomes will define what participants will get from attending the training that will support achieving the success measures. These outcomes will directly inform the content covered in the training and the methods you adopt.
In our example, the following learning outcomes were defined:
There might be additional learning outcomes – especially if we are seeking to ensure effective presentations of a proposal to a new type of prospect.
Learning outcomes must be active. They are likely to include words such as ‘be able to’, ‘understand’ and ‘apply’. The focus of your learning outcomes’ thinking and questions will be:
Your research must be objective and focused on what is needed to achieve the business outcomes. Some research may be needed before you define the success measures and learning outcomes. You must look at the whole system within which the participants operate.
Your research should cover:
This research can assist in engaging participants at the start of your training. If they can understand why the training is so important, see that the training is based on objective research and agree that it addresses the real issues then they are more likely to take it seriously. (The topic of research is covered in detail in the next chapter.)
As a performance expert, you must consider risk as part of the needs analysis. The analysis of risk will be wider than just focusing on the training event itself.
Risk analysis needs to answer three key questions:
The better you understand a risk and its impact, the more prepared you are to manage it. Your research will have identified some of the key risk areas and your knowledge of the organisation and what is being asked of the programme are likely to highlight more.
Your subsequent analysis and assessment of these risks will enable you to:
Key questions in a risk assessment include:
Here are three steps to complete a simple risk analysis and assessment.
The threats to success may be many and varied. We have summarised some of these in the table in the previous chapter. You should look at threats to success arising from:
In recent research by the Kite Foundation, one respondent to its survey on learning transfer commented:
The ownership of the creation of the learning event is often relatively clear. The involvement of wider stakeholders before the event is less so and the post-event attention paid by this group is almost always negligible due to a lack of skills, unclear responsibilities and, to a far lesser extent, time. Managers and directors see this function as the trainers’ and HR’s role but have little idea how this is supposed to happen. As a result training is often more de-motivating than effective as it demonstrates corporate incompetence, lack of connectivity and neglect.
Be proactive in identifying threats to success where stakeholders other than the trainer and HR have responsibilities.
This aspect of risk analysis is likely to require you to use judgement rather than objective evidence to reach your conclusions. You need to look at each threat that you have identified and assess the likelihood of it occurring. You will take account of your knowledge of the business, the organisational culture, the personalities and pressures that exist in the work environment and your knowledge of the importance of management support to the success of any programme.
Seek to arrive at a probability factor that you can justify to stakeholders. Your judgement and your ability to articulate your reasoning for the probability is what will add weight to your assessment.
You can work out a risk value for each of the threats based on your assessment. This can add strength to your argument around the need to manage these risks.
Risk value = probability of risk event occurring × cost to the business of this event occurring
The probability figure is your considered judgement and the cost element should ideally be the cost to the business if there is a direct link between the event and achieving the business outcomes.
For the risks with the greatest potential impact to the project’s success and the highest chance of occurring, you need to make specific suggestions to manage them.
The key question to ask at this stage of your analysis is:
Your suggestions can then be incorporated as part of the proposal for the training event.
One of the business outcomes identified earlier was:
Be able to create new relationships with a different set of stakeholders in target organisations – those people who bring about change rather than those who simply give us information to help us build a proposal and quotation.
In analysing the risks associated with achieving this outcome we might identify the following threats:
Our analysis of the threats determines that the major threats to the success of the programme in achieving the business outcome are:
Whilst this analysis is based on our view rather than objective data, we are prepared and able to justify our thinking and conclusions. We know that this programme’s success is directly linked to achieving a 5% increase in revenues and profitability and so we can estimate the approximate cost of failure. If a 5% revenue (top line) increase equates to £3 million and we assess the overall probability of these three threats occurring as being 65% then the risk value is £1.95 million. Whilst not ‘hard science’ the analysis of threats and the application of an approximate value to the risk certainly concentrates the mind of stakeholders and helps focus on what else needs to happen to maximise the chance of success. It makes a compelling case for action in this example.
Based on the likelihood of the three risks occurring, from our assessment we could make a number of suggestions to avoid them.
Having considered the risks and arrived at some specific suggestions we can incorporate these into our proposal in addition to the training event itself. The considered approach and analysis will increase our chances of having a dialogue with sponsors around these critical issues.
Anyone familiar with change programmes and project management will understand the role and importance of creating a clear scope prior to the start of any project. In business training a clear scope defined as part of the needs analysis will:
Looking at our example again, we might come up with the following scope:
In the example above the scope is written from the perspective of the L&D/training department and focuses on ‘in scope’ items within its control. You can define the scope to include ‘in scope’ items for all parties responsible for the success of the programme. This is especially relevant if support and assistance is required from a number of stakeholders within the business.
Finally, a word on gaining the maximum return for your efforts. You are in an environment where any investment in training should be put under the microscope to ensure it delivers results for the business. When you have limited resources available you need to make tough decisions on how to utilise them to maximum benefit.
The Pareto principle is a mathematical formula that applies to many aspects of business. Developed by an Italian economist to describe the unequal distribution of wealth in his country, it postulates the 80:20 rule. In Pareto’s original context, 20% of the people controlled 80% of the wealth.
In business training the Pareto principle means that you should focus your efforts on the 20% of causes that are responsible for 80% of the impact. You can fall into the trap of letting ‘perfect be the enemy of good’: by trying to identify all of the things that need to change, you miss the key point that a few of them are likely to have a disproportionately large impact. For example, in a customer service environment where a training need has been identified to improve how incoming calls are handled, this might mean that we identify six different types of incoming call that operators handle. Of these six, however, two types of call have the biggest impact on revenues. If you focus the training on addressing these two types of call, you have the biggest impact and, therefore, ROI. This should drive your decision making when choices need to be made about what to include and what to exclude from the training. Do a great job addressing the 20% of causes that are responsible for 80% of the problems.
Your needs analysis is a great opportunity to bring objectivity and alignment at the start of a business training programme. Ensure that your needs analysis: