Consulting Services:
Organizing for Learning and
Development
We frequently encounter the
following situations:
- A new director of learning and development
inherits a dysfunctional organization
- A merger or acquisition results in duplicate
training departments
- Multiple training departments in the same
company have overlaps and gaps in responsibility, coverage, and
approach
- Training or learning and development has grown,
shrunk, or changed, but the organization has not kept up with the
changes
- The company has been reorganized, and the Learning and
Development Organization must realign with the new
structure
- Everything seems to be working, but there is a
nagging feeling that there may be a better way
- Line management is complaining that the
training department is too big and bureaucratic and is unresponsive to
their needs
Left unattended to, the
consequences to the company may be a loss of learning effectiveness
leading to performance shortfalls. The consequence to the learning and
development group may be downsizing or marginalization due to lack of
management confidence. If you are facing one or more of these
situations, it may be time to reassess the way your learning and
development function is organized.
Our approach to designing the
learning and development (or training) function is to work with an
internal Design Team to
- Develop a set of requirements based on both the
needs of the business and best practices in learning and development.
- Review alternative high-level organizational
designs that meet the requirements, and select the one that is most
acceptable to key stakeholders; high-level designs include
- Processes
- Structure (including teams and jobs)
- Results metrics
- Information infrastructure
- Links to the business
- Design the components such as
specific processes, teams, jobs, and results metrics.
- Develop an implementation
plan.
- Support the
implementation.
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