One of the many challenges for IT services providers is to convince buyers of ROI, or Return on Investment, and in difficult economic times, the question is ALWAYS asked when establishing the business case for any new project. Nowhere does this apply more than in measuring ROI in Training.
Gone are the days when CEOs justified training by saying “It’s good for our people.” Today they’re saying “Show me the return.” So since ROI is particularly “squishy” when it comes to training, we’ve come up with a few ideas on how to effectively measure the ROI. Let’s use the example of a SharePoint implementation here:
Three keys in measuring the ROI from a SharePoint project (or any project, for that matter) are:
- Getting the most accurate possible picture of the “before” state. If you can’t accurately assess where you started relative to your goals for the implementation, you’ll never know how far you’ve progressed later.
- Determining what you’re going to measure. SharePoint is a broad application platform and making sure that your metrics are consistent with your business objectives is essential.
- Leaving room to grow. SharePoint tends to be adopted in unforeseen, sometimes “viral” ways. Make sure you monitor how users actually use the solution you deploy – you may find yourself surprised!
For example, if you plan to implement SharePoint as an Extranet platform for collaboration with external business partners, consider surveying your users, or prospective users, before your implementation with questions like:
Please rate (on a 1-10 scale):
- Your ability to securely share data with your counterpart(s) at XYZ Co.
- Your ability to find data when you need it
- Your ability to track version or revision history
You can also ask for additional self-assessment measures such as how long key functions currently take, or perform your own external measures, such as how much storage e-mail takes (multiple versions of attached documents, etc.)
We advocate updating this survey/assessment a few times:
a. Immediately following initial training (literally, at the end of the class or on-line training)
b. Approximately 60-90 days after going live with the solution
c. Approximately a year after going live to assess success/failures and to map additional training requirements
These steps to measuring ROI do not need to be overly complicated, but they do need to be consistent, specific to your objectives for your implementation, and updated so that you can understand (and present to the business stakeholders funding your project) the distance you’ve covered. The critical thing is to start that measurement before the project commences so that you have an accurate picture of the baseline and a clear path to fully realizing your investment.