If you’ve been searching for a learning management system (LMS), chances are all of the material you’ve been reading has been written by an LMS vendor. While they may know a lot about their specific LMS, the problem is that they’re all going to be biased toward their product. As a practitioner in the field of training and development, I have almost twenty years of experience in selecting and implementing an LMS and I know first hand the pitfalls of thinking you’ve found the perfect match only to be disappointed when the LMS doesn’t meet your needs. There are a ton of mistakes you can make when selecting and implementing an LMS. I experienced most of them through trial and error. Hopefully, you can learn from my mistakes and make your experience less painful when you pursue an LMS by taking the following steps.
Get into the nuts and bolts details of the LMS system.
In your LMS selection process you will have many demos from LMS vendors. If you run into a vendor who wants to have very orchestrated demos of their system or only allows you to have week-long demos of the system, that is not a good sign. Don’t rush the testing and demo process. You want to test out all the nuts and bolts details of the LMS system as you are going to have to live with those features everyday in the future. In other words, don’t just check off items on the requirements list if the system has the functionality; take the time to determine if the functionality is actually a good experience and efficient.
For example, you may want to use your LMS for tracking physical classroom classes and learning events. Most of the time, this comes out in an LMS requirements document as too broad in the form of a requirement like “can host physical classroom events.” I would go deeper into that requirement. Consider asking:
- Is the registration for the class easy?
- Does it require multiple steps by the end-user?
- Do they automatically get sent a registration confirmation from the system?
- Does the system automatically send the learners a calendar invite to block their schedule?
You are likely going to have your LMS for at least 3-5 years. The details do matter and you are going to spend a large amount of money and time on this system. For that reason, you want to make sure the system will meet your needs, and that means looking beyond the persuasive “features” checklist and test driving the features for yourself. Just because it can do something, doesn’t automatically mean it will do it how you want.
Focus on what the user experience end is like.
It is easy to get fixated on the needs of the system for the administrators as that is the end of the system you will most use. However, the most important part is the front-end user experience. If the user experience is bad, the adoption of your LMS outside of mandatory training is going to be low. You want your LMS to be an enjoyable experience and somewhere that people want to explore the content that is available, and not just because they are required to complete it.
I would recommend that you show the system you are exploring to users and give them tasks to complete and time them to see how long it takes them to complete (basic usability testing). Additionally, I would also ask how easy the system was to use and if they could see themselves exploring the system. Finally, consider having them rate features that are important to them so you can compare their needs with your own.
Don’t trust the LMS vendor on mobile compatibility and mobile user experience.
All of your demos with the vendor are typically well orchestrated to show you the system working flawlessly but they don’t show you the deficiencies in the system. I met with many LMS vendors who said “oh yeah we are mobile compatible.” Technically they are right, the system works on a phone, but it is a terrible experience.
For example, when on the small phone interface, you will find that the buttons are not truly designed for mobile responsiveness. You don’t want your users to have to pinch and zoom every time they make a selection. Also, what does the offline compatibility look like (if that’s even an option)? Especially with a remote sales workforce, you might need them to access things offline or while they’re traveling.
You need to check that the LMS is not only compatible on phones and tablets but that the user experience is actually designed for phones and tablets.
Don’t depend on the LMS built-in tools; create portable content.
LMS vendors will sell you on their built-in content development tools. These tools typically are things like quizzes, tests, surveys, and multimedia development. Most will actually have online course interactive development tools built into the LMS. These tools can be handy if you have people outside of the central learning team (external departments of a larger company, for example) that need to develop simple content. Although these types of built-in LMS tools are often scaled down versions of dedicated tools like Lectora, Captivate, and Storyline, they might work for some needs.
LMS vendors would love for you to become totally deep-rooted into their system but what do you do when down the line you want to leave that LMS and move to a new one? The downside of using the LMS built-in tools is you start to become entrenched into the LMS and it will make it very difficult for you to leave later on if you decide that the LMS software is not working for your future needs.
Build interactive development tools into the budget.
You are going to need eLearning content development tools such as Lectora, Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline. There are also other auxiliary software tools you may need like Camtasia Studio or Adobe Creative Cloud to develop content to put on your LMS. Since you are spending a large sum of money into your learning management system and will likely have to write a proposal to your company leadership to get approval it makes sense to bundle this cost in that proposal.
I remember forgetting to do this and having to explain to my HR Vice President I needed more money and they were confused as they thought just buying the LMS would be everything we needed. After leadership approves you don’t want to go back and have to ask for thousands of dollars on software licenses it is easier just to ask for the licenses for these tools as part of your LMS purchase.
Build e-learning development costs or libraries into the budget.
You buy this wonderful house of an LMS but you have no furniture to put into that house with content. You need to build into your budget e-learning development costs into your budget as you launch and implement your LMS. Some systems may have off-the-shelf content you can purchase from them as well. If you have a small learning team once you launch your LMS and people start to see all the cool stuff it can do the requests for new learning will start to flood into your training department. This can be more than you might be staffed to handle and you will need to fulfill with external learning and development content vendors.
Get your IT department invested in the project.
Your LMS can become your own little nightmare system island if you don’t get the IT department involved. I have made the mistake of not getting the IT department involved and pushing to launch the LMS just with the resources within the learning department. Guess what happens, you become the IT department for the support of the LMS which is exactly what you don’t want to happen.
IT departments vary on the level of interest they have in helping you on your LMS. Some of them are wonderful and eager to help others will not do anything for you until they have authority from the highest ranking people. Furthermore, I would recommend starting from the top and making the business case to your Chief IT person to get them bought into the LMS system. I would push to get them to provide at least first level support to the LMS help desk. Trust me, especially if you work for a somewhat large company you don’t want to have to support the level one issues of passwords and logins and basic user computer knowledge issues.
You also want to make sure the IT department whitelists your LMS website address and all emails coming from your LMS. A not so funny story, when I didn’t have support from the IT department at one company I worked at they implemented an email SPAM filtered that blocked all the emails sending from the LMS for course enrollments. I had to fight with them to unblock it and they were not really super motivated to help me.
I have found most IT departments don’t jump on helping you because they are supporting what they consider other higher priority systems as defined within the company. I would be sure to make the case as to why the LMS is a critical company system to the IT leadership.
Get integrated into other company systems to prove value and improve learning.
All too often, learning departments have to prove their worth. At most companies executive leadership doesn’t understand what value you are bringing with online learning. Unfortunately, CEOs and executives often view you and the learning department as a benefit not a profit center. In order to prove this worth you have to have your LMS integrated into other systems. The alternative is you will spend a great deal of time becoming an excel master exporting data out of multiple systems to prove out your ROI and improve your learning.
I remember one time I had worked really hard to develop a course to improve our field sales ability to sell the company product. I meticulously developed this course with fantastic instructional design and engaging eLearning content. I was so proud of the course but none of that mattered because I didn’t have our LMS linked into SalesForce the system we used to track the productivity of our sales department. In hindsight, I should have worked to linked the LMS into the Salesforce system so I could more easily prove out the return on investment of the content developed as sales reps completed modules.
Build in a clause for the LMS vendor raising prices in the future.
You really need to make sure you get some clause in the contract of the LMS around how prices increases will work. Like with everything, I would fully expect that prices are going to raise in the future. It is totally reasonable that the cost of living increases in the future and you can expect that your LMS is eventually going to raise their prices to keep up with inflation. Raising prices is not unreasonable and you can expect it eventually with any LMS that you choose as their prices to run their business increase and they have to pass that onto you as the customer. However, you don’t want to outlay this giant chunk of money then have to go back to your leadership and tell them the next year that you are going to need 10% more because the licensing fees have raised from the LMS vendor.
Build into your contract a clause for a lock on prices for 3 years or a lock that prices can’t increase more than 5% for 3-5 years. Even though the sales rep will be telling you not to worry the prices stay really steady and we haven’t raised our prices for years don’t believe them. Companies in the LMS industry are acquired by other companies all the time and the new company might come in and raise the prices on existing customers. You don’t want to find yourself in the situation as the customer with new LMS ownership that decides to raise the price.
Have a plan for dealing with contractors and people that need access outside of company employees.
Over 3 different LMS implementations I have found this an issue that is always not fun to deal with giving access to contractors. Typically, you need contractors and people outside of your organization to complete things like compliance or HIPAA training to pass external audits depending on what industry you are in.
You don’t want to have to pay full user price for contactors to access the system. I would recommend negotiating a special price and having a method for how you deal with contractors or vendors that you may need to have access to the system.
Understand cloud-based upgrades and how they are released to you.
Pretty much all LMS vendors these days are cloud based. Meaning you don’t’ host the LMS on your companies internal server system. The LMS vendor hosts your LMS site for you and they maintain and provide updates to the system. Typically, I have seen the model with LMS is quarterly upgrades and bug fixes.
You really want to understand how the upgrade process works. Some LMS companies are really good about pushing the updates to you but others are more of a pull model where you have to go and watch webinars and read the release notes to know what updates are coming. Sometimes these don’t get released until right before the updates are being released.
Why is this important to understand. You don’t want to discover when the features roll out to your production system that the new so called “upgrade” is not actually functioning correctly or the functionality is being interpreted as a bug and it is crashing all of the courses on your LMS.
Ask them for 3 references of other LMS clients and call them.
If you were applying for a job, you would probably get asked for a list of references by your future employer, why not do the same when you are hiring an LMS vendor?
One of the best tests for how good an LMS performs is when you ask this to the sales person and they get really nervous sounding about you calling other customers. A good LMS vendor and LMS salesperson is going to be happy you asked this question and should easily be able to provide a list of three customers that love their software. If they can’t do this or they make a big deal about doing this run for the hills and look for another LMS.