How to Know Where to Start? (by Bob Mosher, APPLY Synergies)

Of all the questions on performance support that Dr. Conrad Gottfredson and I answer each week, these are by far the two most common:

1. How do I get my company to buy into performance support in the first place?
2. What should we choose as our first project?

Believe it or not, the answer to each lies in both questions.

Performance support is one of those rare concepts that everyone “gets” when they first hear it, but then have a much harder time seeing it applied to their situation. There are several reasons for this. The most common is that everyone has been using “informal learning” for most of their professional lives, so why would they pay for it or dedicate resources to it?

This is why we’ve always made a distinction between informal learning and performance support. Informal learning is unstructured. Think of those free-flowing moments at work when we reach out to a neighbor with a question, read a blog article, turn to Google for a quick answer, or share a story with a colleague on the way to the car after work. It happens organically. On the other hand, performance support is a structured and intentional approach designed to optimize performance at the moment of Apply. It’s a learning discipline that warrants as many, if not more, resources and dollars than formal training. Our experience has been that if performance support is done well and integrated effectively, formal training can be reduced by up to 75% depending on the content. Performance support is that unique training “brace ring” that can actually save training dollars/resources while creating a return on instruction at a level the training industry has been asked to produce for as long as it’s existed.

So, back to the original two questions: where to start and how to gain traction? It’s all in that first project. Seeing is believing! Con and I have given thousands of “What is performance support?” presentations to every level of the enterprise, but nothing beats seeing it in action to win over an organization and send performance support into the mainstream. The most successful organizations we’ve worked with are the ones who have introduced performance support in a strategic, intentional way. That’s not to say the project was strategic; rather, the learning group’s approach was strategic! It can sometimes start in the most unsuspecting way with what appears to be a small and “under the radar” project.

Here are 5 criteria we’ve used when coaching organizations through selecting that first project:

The 5 Critical Decision Criteria When Prioritizing Your Performance Support Project:

1. Audience: It’s key to understand the learners and/or department you are about to support. We recommend you select a department that you work with frequently, and one with which you already have a strong relationship – especially with its leaders. Are they risk takers? Are they flexible if the project doesn’t go exactly as planned? Will they provide access to the learners in the workflow so you can appropriately train them on the performance support tool/approach? Will you have access to them throughout the rollout to gauge success? These are key ideal characteristics of your first audience. Then, take your testimonials and metrics with you as you begin to build momentum.
2. Scope of the Project: When you’re just starting out, you want to be careful of selecting a project with too large of a scope. Many will be watching. You want this project to be tightly defined with achievable goals and measurable success criteria. You also want the criteria to be something the lines of business actually care about (vs. something only L&D cares about). Again, limiting the scope of your first project will allow you to gain some momentum for broader follow-on projects. For now, keep it under control.
3. Amount of Existing Content: Performance support is at its best when it leverages existing learning assets/content, especially bringing to life resources that are rarely used or hard to find. Your team will have enough to juggle without being charged with creating a lot of new content. For the first project, the more you can focus on design and the brokering architecture, the better. If you can work with existing content, you can take some of the development off your plate. That will make blending easier since the existing content will typically have a credible and well-established training program already in place.
4. Timing: The release of the program can be critical to its success and sustainability. The perfect window is between 3-6 months. You don’t want to put undue pressure on yourself by setting unrealistic milestones for your first project. At the same time, you don’t want to over-engineer things and take 8-12 months to release the solution. Another part of timing relates to budgets and your project’s proximity to other key initiatives within the organization. As was mentioned in the second criteria, the proper scope of the project is a key balance to strike. You don’t want it to be a major splash, or a possibly belly flop, but at the same time you don’t want the results to go unnoticed if it’s pitted against another major initiative. So, pick something manageable in both size and time frame.
5. Context: Finally, one of the most important elements of a successful performance support project is context. Context has two meanings here. The first is the degree to which the content you’ve picked has a business context. That may sound strange, but many content areas have poor business context, meaning they haven’t been introduced or integrated. It is ideal for your first project to have a pre-existing business context and workflow. Second, will the tools and brokers you develop be contextual? The most common and successful first projects are IT related. In this case, you will need to be sure that the technology has ways of integrating your content. Do you have a strong relationship with the IT department on this project so you can get its help when integrating? Does the audience have a strong technology aptitude to handle the integration? Is technology a commonly used method of support?

We hope these criteria help! They have gone a long way in helping us build not only successful first projects, but sustainable and long-lasting performance support strategies that should be the ultimate goal of any performance support rollout.