Case Study 2: ITMS Selection – Mapping Talent Requirements to Technology

Don’t map your strategy to the technology; map it to your talent strategy.

Business Need / Problem

BJC Healthcare was unhappy with their current LMS. They were having to do many workarounds to get the functionality they needed, and with 36,000 employees this was an enormous cost. Compliance and certifications are mandatory in healthcare; manual workarounds exposed to much risk. 

Key goals included:

• Development of staff members
• ITMS that integrates and is adaptable/scalable 
• Integrating disparate processes
• Ensuring compliance:  Internal & external certification & verifying credentials
• Audit-ready, accurate reporting
• Provide a path to workforce planning
• Develop employee potential in line with business requirements
• Reduce risk & impact of loss

Some key problems included:

• Manual succession planning and tracking
• 3-year development plans were owned by employees and not tied to performance
• Inability to search internal talent
• Manual tracking of cohort groups, development programs
• No integration for goals, Performance, and Succession 
• Inability to conduct Level 3 Evaluation
• No integration for goals, Performance, and Succession 
• Inability to link behavioral competencies to learning content

The Challenge

The Challenge

BJC hired Bluewater Learning to assess talent and learning requirements, translate into technical requirements, and turn those into Use Cases that were used to evaluate vendor demos. 

BJC had many unique requirements not typically handled by an LMS / ITMS including:

• Required Level 3 evaluation (observation) to be conducted by rotating coaches (NOT the direct manager; most LMS systems can’t do this)
• Credential and certification tracking was critical and included:
  • Tracking custom credential expiration dates (rolling, yearly, every 2 years, etc.)
  • Tracking of external CEUs and certifications
• Role-based and position-based learning paths 

My Role

I was lead consultant on the project. I conducted Discovery (assessment) to understand their talent and learning needs and processes, wrote requirements, presented Finding & Recommendations, facilitated the demos, recapped and scored vendors and ultimately recommended one vendor.

Solution

I conducted a comprehensive learning needs assessment across several hospital systems, defined requirements, and facilitated demos and scoring.

Notes

• Integration with internal & external systems for tracking certifications
• Vendor agreed to build custom capabilities to allow Level 3 and Observation Checklist deployment and tracking
• Created Skills Matrix to track role-based (not position-based) learning
• Custom talent indicators to identify participants in development program.

Results

The requirements were well-documented so we were able to eliminate multiple vendors before demos. We invited 3 finalists in for demos. 

We were able to surface shortcomings in the each platform, and negotiate before the sale for custom configurations to meet BJC’s extensive requirements.

BJC went with the system we recommended and were quite satisfied with the result.

Artifacts

Requirements and Use Cases

Findings and Recommendations

Used weighted scoring from demos. BJC really like the add of the wordcloud with their comments from evaluations.