Customer Reviews

Return on Learning: Training for High Performance at Accenture

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It's always challenging to bridge the gap between high-level theory in Human Resources, and the confusing mire of on-the-ground action. It's all very well to `know' that you need your HR and training practices to align with and support your business strategy. But how is this accomplished? When you're faced with convincing executives, with other priorities and little time, to support what are often costly initiatives in Content Management and Corporate Training, and trying to make a good fit between what vendors offer and what your organization needs, when your budget has been cut and your employees have high-standards- it can seem as if you've been asked to juggle cats.

Return on Learning is the story of how one organization, Accenture, managed to successfully align training with business strategy, working on a budget that was cut in half, while maintaining extremely high-standards for the learning delivered to employees. The story is delivered from an in-the-trenches perspective for HR and Training professionals. There are no pat and `easy' answers here, but there are several ideas and innovations about `how' they did it that make this book worth it's weight in gold. Among these innovations are the V-Model (that guides training from goal through design and delivery to measurement), and an award-winning, innovative methodology for measuring the ROI of training that takes you out of the realm of estimates and into the promised land of hard data. Accenture manages to run training like a business, and not just as a catch-phrase. If you want to see how it's done, when it's really done well, this is a good place to start.

I'm guessing that "Ed" and I (see other review) might have been at the same conference together where we received a copy of this book. I can second much of what he says, and also add that when it comes to one of my personal measures of a book's value--"number of significant ideas per page"--this book scores very high. I liked the "phenomenal learning" stuff in particular, and I also liked the discussion of Accenture's decision support capabilities that it developed as part of its learning management system.

I'd have to classify myself as one of those getting somewhat disillusioned by the big discrepancy between what a company's leaders say about their workforce ("People are our most important asset, yadda yadda yadda") and where they really invest their money. (Guess what budgets get cut first when things get tight?) I don't know enough about Accenture's inner workings from an employee's perspective to know if it's business really rises above that, but it is clear they are wrestling with it, and that certain core leaders really do "get" it.

There are practical ideas in this book and there are some "big vision" kinds of ideas -- something for about everyone.

I finished this book on a cross-country flight this week (the book is admirably short and punchy) and I'm still shaking my head over it. The book is incredibly honest about how business change and a down economy had apparently temporarily weakened Accenture's commitment to its workforce to provide training and development opportunities. (Actual quote from the book, when Accenture's Chief Learning Officer is trying to convince his executives that something had to be done: "The deal we have made with our people has been broken.")

But then the book proceeds to tell an entirely believable story of how they turned things around. Sure, there is the ocasional bit of consulting-speak in here, but most of what you get are practical ideas about how to plan, how to get your executives on board (please give this book to your local CEO/COO/CFO), how to use outsourcing in a smart way, how to use technology, ect., ect. And its not filled with theory but practical experiences of real people. For those with the background/interest, there is also a chapter on the number-crunching. Doubt it if you want to, but these guys proved that Accenture gets a 353 percent return on every dollar it spends on training. From what I can tell by reading that chapter, the real number probably is even higher since the ROI model they created only used a few parameters that they were absolutely sure they could quantify.

The book is really targeted at executives, but there is also a lot of good stuff for learning and HR professionals. One thing I really liked: Accenture's admission that in previous years they're training people had gotten lots of awards for training courses but weren't as good when it came to delivering projects on time and on budget. This new team got the respect of senior executives by saying, "Yeah, we're still going to deliver great training, but we're also going to do it by being good stewards of your investment dollars."

Not everyone is going to have the money Accenture has to throw at problems like this, but they, too, learned to do a lot with a much smaller budget -- and I can't think of a single thing here that another CEO or HR/learning executive like myself couldn't apply in some way to his or her organization.

On top of it all, the book is written in a totally compelling way. Other writers of business books, take note: it's written such that the authors are actually characters in a story. As a reader, your brought along as if you were reading a novel. Even if learning or HR isn't your thing, take a read to see how you can plan any kind of reinvention business program.

A really well done book, and worth the time it took for me to write a few words saying, "Way to go."

To the best of my knowledge, this book offers the single best source for information and counsel on how to design a high-impact learning program that can be implemented and then sustained (with continuous improvement) at all levels and within all areas of the given organization. Better yet, as the contributors to this book (members of Accenture's Capability Development team) explain, the ROI of such a program can be both quantified and verified.

In 2001, Accenture faced a number of major challenges that are best revealed and discussed within the narrative, in context. The fact remains that, led by Donald Vanthournout, Accenture's Capability Development team began a "journey" that had to take those challenges into full account. What they learned provides the most valuable material in this book. The story of their journey is a business story: about how one company - Accenture - advanced toward high performance through learning, knowledge management and the transformation of its workforce. By extension, however, it is about how other organizations can do the same."

In recent years, senior-level executives have been much more interested in knowing how to increase and improve the nature and extent of employee engagement: "how can they best tap into the collective intelligence of their people and engage them in their work, for their benefit and the benefit of he entire enterprise?" Vanthournout and the members of his team shared a business-centric perspective. They were determined to link human capital investments to business benefits, both for Accenture and for each of its clients; to put in place the governance and leadership structures that increase a learning program's chances of success; to ensure that the actual classroom and electrinic training create what the team characterized as "phenomenal" learning experiences; and to maximize the operational efficiency of learning. According to Vanthournout, he selected members to comprise a team that "was more of a team focused more on corporate education than it was an education team trying to have a business impact."

Here are some of the key lessons that members of the Accenture team learned during their "journey,"each of which is supported by hard data rather than by firm (albeit sincere) convictions:

1. Enterprise learning must be driven with the end in mind: the business results to be achieved.

2. An enterprise should build a learning strategy founded on the core values of the organization, as well as its primary leadership values.

3. Through metrics and ROI analysis, learning investments can be linked to business performance outcomes.

4. When conducting an ROI analysis, organizations should focus on how learning improved a person's performance on the job.

5. According to Kurt Olson, a team member, "Although it may be an overused phrase now, phenomenal earning was truly the `secret sauce' for many of the outcomes we have accomplished with the learning transformation initiative at Accenture. Phenomenal learning was how all good planning and design came to life. It's how the `thinking' and the `doing' all came together to produce phenomenal results."

6. To address the increasing emphasis on business outcomes, today's learning professionals must have strong business skills.

7. Because the lifespan of learning content is shrinking as the marketplace changes more rapidly, Accenture must develop the means for faster, continuous, and more efficient content production or revision.

8. A global learning infrastructure can integrate vital decision-support functionalities that help increase the impact of learning and keep it aligned with the most important business needs.

9. Companies should focus on differentiating their workforces, creating deep skills in people that can be brought to bear anywhere around the organization.

10. Increasing the engagement of employees is important not only to retaining them and improving productivity. It is important to growth and innovation by tapping into the collective intelligence of value workers.

It is worth noting that, as a result of the efforts of the Capability Development team, working closely with senior management and countless other associates throughout the firm, "for every dollar Accenture invests in learning, the company receives that dollar back plus an additional $3.25 in measurable value to its bottom line. - in other words, a 353 percent return on learning." Literally, ROL = ROI. To repeat, Return on Learning is also about "how other organizations can do the same." Or how they can at least "use learning programs for major business impact, and can run learning as a business."

Those who share my high regard for it are urged to check out any book written by Peter Senge (notably The Fifth Discipline The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization and The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (co-authored with Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, and George Roth as well as James O'Toole's Leading Change: The Argument for Values-Based Leadership, Corporate Agility: A Revolutionary Model for Competing in a Flat World co-authored by Charles E. Grantham, James P. Ware, and Cory Williamson, Dean R. Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, and Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution co-authored by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson.

Governance
- Align learning strategy with business strategy
- Carefully manage the number of training vendors
- Communicate convincing proof of business benefits to senior executives
- Build a steering committee comprised of all senior stakeholders
- Prioritize learning investments to first address the skill gaps with the largest business impact
- Outsource non-strategic learning functions

Curriculum planning
- Centralize curriculum planning to standardize content
- Build training with a common core curriculum and separate specialized capability curricula
-> Core: strategy; leadership; selling; project management; communication; problem solving; culture; brand; etc.
-> Tune training by organizational level and line-of-business
- Optimize the mix of classroom and electronic learning based on budget, performance need
-> Electronic best for individual skill building with objective, stable curriculum where speed and scale are critical
-> Business performance simulation
- Designate executive sponsors for each course in the curriculum
- Design courses with pre-work, training, and post-work
- Integrate storytelling and personal narratives
- Manage the lifecycle of training assets with continuous feedback on quality and business impact

Delivery & Operations
- Maximize the use of current senior managers as teaching faculty (support them with learning coaches)
- Apply a consistent training brand identity matched to the corporate identity
- Initiate training when employees start their jobs (including new roles)
- Engineer the total training experience (learning, networking, logistics) to delight both in class and out of class
- Build in opportunities for personal coaching and mentoring
- Build in adequate downtime for peer networking, relaxation, and fun
- Where possible, run sessions with a global attendee mix
- Strive to deliver training just-in-time with business need

Performance measurement
- Centralize and standardize learning outcome , survey, and data management and integrate with HRIS
- Measure the return on learning of all programs
-> Revenue: recruiting, retention, and performance
-> Cost: training program fixed & variable costs + trainee opportunity cost
- Focus on cumulative effect of training on individuals

Knowledge Management
- Assemble steering committee of senior leaders
- Leverage existing packaged software and only customize when absolutely necessary to support a critical business need
- Assign knowledge managers to harvest experiences
- Construct as a social platform that combines access to knowledge with a peer skill directory to facilitate live networking
- Develop a topic based taxonomy
- Manage the lifecycle of knowledge assets

This concise, clearly written book describes how Accenture went from being a company that put its entire workforce through a standard suite of courses to becoming a company with a knowledge-sharing culture. Accenture's employees now embody its knowledge and service capability. Even though your company is probably different from Accenture, your workforce is still the engine that allows it to grow and compete. A company can thrive only if its people have the opportunity to constantly renew their skills. If that level of knowledge management is part of your goals, getAbstract recommends this case study of how to create a high-performance learning culture.

A great book. I'm sorry that I haven't seen it reviewed in major publications. There's a real wisdom at the heart of this book. Lots of ideas about how to deliver great training that has an impact on the business. Personal reflections from the people who work for the training organization at Accenture, all spun as a story. And then some really provocative, forward-looking ideas. Reading the book is like bringing a Trojan horse of ideas into your company.