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:

• What is driving the training request? (See ‘six situations that drive training requests’ in the previous chapter.)
• What is the root cause of the issue behind the training request?
• What are the opportunities we see for developing greater performance (training is not only to resolve issues)?
• What are the success measures and business outcomes that must be achieved?
• Who is the target population for the training?
• What is the risk involved? Why may the learning not be applied by participants?
• What is preventing the business outcomes being achieved now? What is required (in addition to the training) to guarantee success?
• What’s in scope and what’s out of scope?
• Who needs to be involved and what are their roles?
• What do we need participants to be able to do, commit to, apply or understand as a result of the training?

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.

Business outcomes, success measures and learning outcomes

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.

Business outcomes

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:

• be objective in choosing who to target and approach only those prospects with a real pressure to change and financial stability;
• find organisations to sell to who are in a state of change rather than stable – they have not yet identified the problem we can solve and will be more open to our ability to help them define needs;
• 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;
• focus on giving creative ideas and insights that challenge the buyers’ existing thinking enabling us to form strong partnerships to co-create a solution to their business need.

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:

• What are the business results that are needed?
• What is the nature of the request (using the six signals)?
• How will we know when we have achieved the result?
• What is the risk of this not working (to build a strong senior level motivation for success)?

Success measures

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:

• define a target customer profile that sales people use to define new prospects and ensure they meet our criteria;
• all new prospects in the sales pipeline to meet this target customer profile;
• achieve a minimum 55% of first meetings with a ‘C-suite’ director responsible for company strategy in our prospect (as a measure of forming relationships with new stakeholders responsible for bringing about change);
• to have access to at least two board directors as we create the proposal and prior to presenting our solution (as further evidence of stakeholder relationships and partnering to co-create a solution to their business need).

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:

• What do we need to do differently to achieve our business outcomes?
• What is preventing us achieving our business outcomes now?
• What are we in control of?
• What are we not in control of?
• What will prevent the new behaviours, knowledge, skills or awareness being applied in the work environment and what success measures will ensure we focus on overcoming these?

Learning outcomes

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:

• What do we need to develop or change to achieve the success measures (knowledge, skills, behaviours, attitudes)?
• What is the root cause of a presenting issue that the training must address?
• What are the team or individual results needed to contribute to achieving the business goals?
• What are the measures of success in the application of learning in the workplace – what do we want to see people doing differently?
• What gets in their way? (This will focus especially on habits, beliefs and abilities.)

Practical research

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.

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.)

Risk analysis and assessment

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:

1. What is the impact if this project fails? Failure in the context of business training is not achieving successful transfer of the learning into the work environment.
2. What are the specific risks that might cause this project to fail – the barriers to success?
3. What do you recommend in order to address these risks and maximise the chance of learning transfer?

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:

• make better quality recommendations;
• ensure a shared understanding of the risks to success;
• engage in dialogue with business leaders and stakeholders about the risks and what needs to happen to mitigate or avoid them;
• take into consideration non-training related factors including culture, habits and management support;
• increase the chance of successful learning transfer to the work environment.

Key questions in a risk assessment include:

• Will participants’ old habits be a barrier?
• Will participants lack the confidence to undertake the project?
• Will participants avoid undertaking the project?

Here are three steps to complete a simple risk analysis and assessment.

Step 1: Identify the threats

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:

• the working environment;
• the selection of participants: are you targeting people who are most likely to provide a positive return on the investment?
• the habits and motivations of learners;
• the line managers (around support, role modelling and general commitment to supporting the change);
• the business itself in terms of competing commitments, priorities or political considerations.

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.

Step 2: Assess the likelihood of each threat occurring

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.

Step 3: Make suggestions about how to manage the risk

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:

• What can we do to avoid, limit, counteract or provide a contingency for this risk?

Your suggestions can then be incorporated as part of the proposal for the training event.

Scope

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:

• define what you will deliver as part of the programme – your responsibilities;
• define what is not included in the programme – this might be things that will contribute to success but are outside of your control or responsibility or things that have not yet been agreed by all stakeholders;
• help prevent ‘scope creep’ – the expansion of the programme to include other elements or responsibilities;
• provide an opportunity for further discussion to assign additional tasks and responsibilities.

Training and the Pareto principle

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.

Summary

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:

• states the business outcomes that the training is in service of;
• is clear on the success measures – both the metrics and the behaviours required;
• specifies learning outcomes for the training that are active and specific;
• is based on sound and objective practical research;
• summarises the main risks to achieving the business outcomes, the likelihood of these risks occurring and your suggestions on how to address them;
• has a clear scope detailing what is included in the programme and what is excluded;
• focuses on the 20% of causes responsible for 80% of the impact.