We’ve talked about performance support for a long time. We’ve tried to get our arms around it, but found that it clashed with notions of what we were supposed to do – training and eLearning. Somehow, it was never on the critical path of what we were all about. Until now! Performance support unifies our thinking about mobile, social and informal learning, the explosion of “apps” that make work easier, and our recent realization that most learning takes place in the workplace and not in the classroom. We need a solid performance-support strategy and ways to convey its value to senior leaders. We are not replacing learning; we are augmenting it – significantly.

In this session, you’ll learn the key components of a sustainable performance-support strategy and the implementation barriers you are likely to face. Investing in performance support is not just smart learning strategy, it’s smart business strategy.

Five years ago Sprint faced outside-agency ratings of dead last in the industry in customer service and was shedding over a million customers per quarter to their competitors. What happens when your product complexity exceeds the capability of your workforce to know and retain what they need to know to provide good customer support?

Now first in customer satisfaction, Sprint turned itself around by integrating performance support tools, knowledge bases, and workflows into the entire employee and product lifecycle and duplicating tools for multiple task-level processes. Session participants will learn about leveraging common content across multiple channels, creating partnerships between business, IT, and a performer support team, the power of automating the creation of performer support tools, and solving the problem of selling and serving a product so complex it’s impossible to learn everything an agent needs to know.

To become part of the fabric of how work is performed on the job requires constant self-assessment and re-invention, and, most importantly, adopting a comprehensive learning-analytics strategy. The Defense Acquisition University (DAU) constantly measures all its learning products and services, including classroom training, distance learning courses, continuous learning courses, mission assistance activities, and knowledge sharing assets. DAU analyzes the results from an effectiveness, efficiency, and outcome perspective including multi-year trends and projections to the future – their usage, relevancy, quality, cost, and job impact. When gaps and/or deficiencies are found, it rapidly moves to meet the need or requirement.

Participants in this session will explore DAU’s award-winning performance-learning strategy and business alignment, examine the importance of measuring formal and informal learning assets, and look at measurement tools the DAU uses, the DAU’s existing learning-analytics program, and the DAU’s steps to the future.

Our IT partners have spent years helping us install systems to support training. Now we want to bring in another system (performance support) that could reduce or in some cases eliminate training? Rightfully, IT’s first reaction to performance support often does not meet our hopes or expectations. Few performance support efforts fail because of lack of business need or potential impact, but many fail because of IT’s resistance. Without any intervention, our IT partners represent, by default, an obstacle to transforming a formal learning organization into a performance support organization.

Since performance support was introduced more than 20 years ago, there have been success stories where organizations have made this significant shift. In this session, you will learn strategies derived from these case studies to demonstrate how you can transform your IT partners from obstacles to enablers, adopters, and, ultimately, champions for performance support.

How can you ensure that the organization sees you as a valued contributor? The best way is for you to understand and support it in reaching its goals. Performance support is one of the few organizational processes with an opportunity to align individual performance with the strategic goals of the business. How do you align with and successfully translate these goals into the actions necessary to meet them?

Session participants will learn how to become proficient at translating performance support language like ”on-demand” and “moment of need” into the language of your business, such as “productivity gains,” “increased customer satisfaction,” and “reduction in costs.” You must help the business understand when PS is appropriate, and, perhaps even more importantly, when it is not the answer. You’ll learn how to ensure that you and your stakeholders are speaking the same language and supporting the same goals.

Performance support (PS) solutions used to take months to build and sometimes thousands of dollars to develop, but new technologies and approaches have drastically reduced time and cost. Reduced costs and development are two of the reasons driving the growing interest in performance support. However, while interest in PS is growing in many organizations, to many people, actually making it operational in specific contexts remains a challenge, if not a mystery.

Through this interactive session, you will learn ways to operationalize performance support. Ontuitive’s performance support system “LearningGuide Manager” is the basis for these demonstrations, serving as a sample technology you can use to develop PS. You’ll see live PS development using participant-generated information resulting in a PS prototype demonstration.

Implementing performance support (PS) requires a shift in management strategy that includes changes from leadership, training, and performers. Leadership needs to think differently about how they expect their colleagues to perform, training needs to think differently about how and what they deliver, and colleagues need to think and behave differently when they need support on the job.

In this session you will learn how preparing leadership and training for the change can help colleagues move through the change process more quickly. You will examine how changing expectations, communicating the changes, and modeling and practicing the new behavior can make your PS launch a success.

Mobile is everywhere, but what does that mean, exactly? You know the devices are in hand, so how do you take advantage of them? Here’s a hint: mLearning is not about courses on a phone. Mobile may feel like it’s too hard to tackle, with the different platforms and form factors, but people are getting real value out of the opportunity. You certainly want to support your people even when they’re not tethered to a desktop, so how do you get started?

Performance support is mobile’s natural niche, and you should be taking advantage of it. In this session, you’ll begin by understanding the fundamental change that is “mobile,” and what that means to the employee and the organization. Then you’ll explore the different ways mobile goes “beyond the course,” as a prelude to considering what’s involved in getting started. Finally, you’ll explore the organizational issues and get answers to your questions. Mobilize your performers!

According to learninggovernance.com, more than 70 percent of organizations do not have an enterprise-wide plan for learning nor an effective learning governance system in place. As a result, these organizations tend to demonstrate “low-impact training” while wasting 20 to 30 percent of their training budget due to uncoordinated training efforts.

Developing a learning and performance support (L&PS) governance model is within reach of any organization. Session participants will explore the value a governance structure brings to implementing learning and performance support; the four key decisions that govern the use of learning and performance support; who should make those decisions; how to make those decisions; and the resulting conceptual model used as the foundation for guiding the governance strategy implementation.

Social media tools are already in your enterprise. Are you enabling or hindering their use? The problems in using these tools aren’t the typical problems … they’re human issues, and they need human solutions. These tools can make a demonstrable difference in your organization’s performance, and there are real “opportunity costs” of not using these tools.

This session will explore how social media tools can improve performance, and how they will change your culture to a more open one. Learn how to be an excellent guide while staying sufficiently out of the way, and how to leverage the skills and abilities of your whole organization to break down problems to solvable chunks. This session will focus on integrating social media tools into your existing learning program, mixing them into your blend of options, and using them to complement ILT and formal instruction for maximum impact on performance.

The old adage, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” certainly applies to performance support. If you don’t measure it effectively you will most likely under-invest or over-invest in it; you won’t know what adjustments to make to it to drive higher performance. If your competitors are analyzing it and you aren’t, you are likely at a competitive disadvantage. Slight improvements to performance support solutions can often result in huge productivity gains.

This session will examine performance support analytics and explain how they fit into your overall learning analytics. Participants will learn how to implement a comprehensive yet cost-effective measurement solution for performance support. You will find out what you should measure, what you should do with the data, and how measurement can improve your strategic program impact.

Yum! Brands needed the ability to house all of its restaurant standards in a single tool with the intent to drive reusability and consistency. They also needed to provide the most up-to-date standards in real time.

The problem was solved by leveraging an LCMS to house all of the standards across the organization using a single-source publishing and design approach. The result was the ability to decrease or completely eliminate the need to print and ship materials. Users see only the content that is relevant to them in a way that works for them – training card, PDF, WBT. Now the company is realigning content based on job role and process and making it available at the point of need. Participants will learn how, by thinking of it by role and by process, they can more quickly identify who requires which piece of knowledge, and align it more closely to their day-to-day responsibilities.