About Governance

LearningGovernance.com

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Why Governance?

There has been much talk of late about Learning Governance – What is it? How can we implement it? How will it help our organization succeed?

What is it? That’s pretty straightforward. Governance is a discipline that comes out of change management strategy. It’s is a system of decision-making structures, processes, practices and values that enable an organization to make good and actionable decisions about all things learning.

How can we implement it? This gets more complex. Historically, learning teams have not been a driving force behind major change management initiatives. This is where the Learning Governance Lifecycle™ model and methodology come in. It’s designed to help learning teams become effective change agents. First, making sure that alignment, consensus and a workable decision-making framework is in place. Then, providing templates, guidelines, tools and working examples to help teams adopt ‘best practices’ and optimize business processes to better serve many more users. (For a list of specific governance service offerings look further down this page.)

How will it help our organization? Effective governance is critical if learning organizations are going to grow out their historic silos and help the enterprise become more adaptive, flexible, and competitive. The need for governance may be precipitated by several circumstances; an expanded charter for learning; new systems upgrade; a merger or acquisition (M&A) – sometimes a combination of the above.

Exploring Governance can also help drive an expansion in charter, gain support behind new system or resource investments and generally raise the visibility and strategic value the learning team overall. The process adds value by showcasing the team’s ability to align resources, build consensus and optimize process flows – all which help save time and money, avoid delays and improve performance impact.

Why LearningGovernance.com?

Let’s face it, everybody has a ‘day job.’ Time is always a factor and building an effective governance model with supporting processes that are widely adopted is not simply for the asking.

That’s where we come in. The Learning Governance Lifecycle model is proven change management methodology tailored specifically to help learning teams build consensus and support for more rapid adoption of learning processes across the company. The methodology is based on viewing learning operations through the eyes of stakeholders – as if they were your 'customers' – across a lifecycle of learning processes needed to plan and implement learning on an enterprise scale, as illustrated below.

Illustration – Sample Five Stage Learning Governance Lifecycle model

Our Services

For an update on our services, please see www.razorlearning.com. We help facilitate the process by working with you to review current structures or processes, refine critical roles and responsibilities, share tools, templates, guidelines and examples of ‘best practices’ that have worked in other organizations and help you create a governance framework that will work best for you and your organization. Below are some examples that may fit your needs.

One-day Onsite ‘Mini’ Governance Workshop – This service is intended to introduce ‘best practices’ for learning governance with members of your learning organization and/or other company stakeholders who need to work effectively with the learning team. We look at the issues that affect governance in organizations – using an established governance framework we have developed for this purpose – and study processes and ‘best practices’ that work as well as examine where things typically go awry.

Establishing ‘Best Practices’ and Optimizing Governance Processes – This is a focused learning governance workshop and service engagement designed to have the greatest impact with a diverse group of stakeholders. We work with you to identify issues and opportunities in your organization then plan and facilitate a 1.5 – 2-day workshop with a group of stakeholders to elicit their input and gain their commitment. We use the Learning Governance Lifecycle™ model and methodology to systematically work through each stage of the lifecycle process, review the activities that need to get accomplished for each stage, identify issues and respond to questions (sharing examples of ‘best practices’ for highly effective and efficient learning processes used in other organizations as needed), and gain agreement on how roles, responsibilities and process flows could be refined to work best for your organization.

A key deliverable for this engagement is a Learning Governance Management Guide tailored specific to your organization. It outlines the agreed to plan and includes updated workflow processes, supporting tools, guidelines and checklists and other ‘best practices’ that help stakeholders complete each lifecycle stage so that learning operations go much more smoothly. The guide becomes an ongoing ‘living’ document to share with other stakeholders and be updated over time as new capabilities, resources or technologies are added.

Building the Governance Organization and Charter – This type of engagement is designed to help you set up or improve the decision-making framework and overall governance model for your organization before drilling down more deeply on process improvement (as outlined above in the ‘Governance Process’ service). Here, we focus on the ‘make-up’ of the governance body and identify appropriate representation among learning stakeholder domains. We analyze how current learning decisions are made, how and where resources are allocated, and review the relative role and make-up of a Learning Council if one is already in place. We then identify potential organizational ‘risks’ that could thwart effective governance and offer recommendations for improvement or expansion in charter.