The Opportunity:

Our client is one of the world’s largest private international humanitarian organizations, committed to helping families in poor communities improve their lives and achieve lasting victories over poverty.

Engagement Scope:

The client engaged Innovar to bring a distributed team of business and technology owners together to develop the business and technical requirements of a Learning Management System (LMS.) The LMS project was a strategic initiative to organize, track and deploy global training, which ranged from classroom to online training.

Prior to Innovar involvement, the client implemented a pilot LMS, which received positive feedback and was deemed a success. The employees with Internet access were able to login and take classes online. Those without access were shipped training materials for self-study. The decision on the table was, “Does the pilot system have the capability to transform into a production system or does the organization need to implement a new production LMS?”

The following lists the many obstacles the client faced to LMS deployment:

• Internet Access – Client deployed a computerized Internet system to areas with limited or no Internet access. Thus, processes needed to be developed and/or improved for the parts of the organization with limited or no Internet access.
• Support – Processes and resources implemented in the pilot were not scalable for future growth of the LMS.
• Ownership – Since the project was initially a pilot system, roles and responsibilities for the system were not clearly defined.
• Timing – Client needed the system to deploy training rapidly.
• Training – Resources that were supporting the system on a parttime basis were not sufficiently trained on the use of the software.

Results:

Based on the analysis, Innovar provided an action plan for closing the gaps between the current system and the desired future state. The client’s initial assumption was to implement a new system. Actual results showed that the existing system would meet business requirements. The investment needed was not additional hardware and software, but additional resources and training to support the expanded requirements of the production system.

Innovar Differentiators:

Process Driven Approach – Innovar leveraged a proven process driven approach to capture an accurate representation of current state, develop the desired future state and translate the gaps into clear business requirements. This approach ultimately led to the identification that the existing system would meet the client’s needs.

Professional Integrity – Innovar will not sell clients unneeded technology or professional services. If the right answer is to “do nothing” or “tweak” the existing solution, that will be our recommendation regardless of the impact to our engagement scope.

Cost Effectiveness – Innovar fees were significantly less than traditional advisory firms while providing a more experienced team.