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Phase 1: Courtship
In this opening phase, LMS vendors immerse themselves in your world: your culture, what is at stake for you, your technology ecosystem, your brand or brands. Each one sets out the strengths of its tool and its view of training, and does its best to meet the functional and technical requirements you have expressed. Everyone puts their best foot forward. But bear in mind that no suitor can be blamed for failing to anticipate every one of your needs. That is why involving the business, IT and, where useful, an outside adviser to draw up a thorough and demanding specification helps you spot the potential sticking points and articulate what you actually need.
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Phase 2: The honeymoon
The pre-sales stage is over and everything looks good. The teams tie the knot in consensual workshops. You learn to live together, to converge; everything is new and the teams are there to walk clients through it step by step. This is the build phase — and when you think back to what you had before, you tell yourself real progress has been made. This phase is decisive for aligning the learning strategy, the business objectives and the new training ecosystem. Companies sometimes agree to adjust certain processes at the margins, and that convergence is often a good sign at this point in the relationship. An outside, neutral view, one that holds to good practice, can be a valuable help here.
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Phase 3: The spell breaks — everyday life sets in
The relationship shifts… and here we are: small errors and shortcomings that seemed minor at first become major obstacles. A page that isn’t clear, learners and administrators resisting change, a reporting system that is incomplete or ill-suited to the way the company is structured. What was first seen as a minor annoyance and a matter for compromise gradually becomes a serious irritant, affecting the analysis of learner performance and strategic decision-making. It could have been picked up in the specification or covered in a demonstration during the selection process — but there was already so much to look at…
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Phase 4: Push-back and attempts at education
This is the time of small battles and painful compromises. Load times on certain pages that cause problems, the sheer number of clicks it takes to open a learning pathway, that page that still isn’t very clear despite the training and the tutorials. Your LMS provider is a software vendor, with its own constraints, resources and road map. At times it can seem to lack a listening ear, or an understanding of your business and its specifics. That can lead to misalignment. An LMS vendor has to answer the needs of the many: an industrial company for which short, self-service technical courses are critical, and a financial services firm for which annually renewed regulatory training relayed by managers is a condition of doing business at all. So you have to make yourself heard and speak the vendor’s language. User groups and integrators are good channels for influencing vendor road maps or, failing that, for converging on workarounds.
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Phase 5: Commitment, knowledge and acceptance
This phase marks a turning point, where both sides learn to accept and work with each other’s strengths and weaknesses. It is the moment when the company can decide to commit fully to the LMS it has, or to look at other options on the market. It is a pivot point.
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Phase 6: Trust and security
The relationship has been through many stages. The storms have passed, and the trust and security in the relationship allow the collaboration to continue and new options to be explored. If the company’s needs have outgrown what the current LMS can do, it may be sensible to look at systems that fit better, or to co-build your partner’s product road map.
