Having helped organizations with process and system implementations for years, I have also naturally acquired several years of training experience. You might have heard me say that I’m a data nerd or that I’m a wanna-be tech geek. I could make a similar claim about training and education—I imagine that I will pursue information about how I might positively impact training and education endeavors for the rest of my days.

I recently read an article that reminded me of the importance of keeping your eye on the ball (or the target, or goal…pick your analogy). Bill Stater’s Training: It’s Not Always the Answer is a great piece. While I work really hard to continuously improve the training sessions that I lead, this article is a nice reminder that what your organization needs—what all organizations need—is not the best trained employees, but the best performing employees!

A needs analysis, he says, is a critical first step if you want to close the gap between your desired outcome and your current state. He recognizes that there are many acceptable methodologies to perform a needs analysis and a couple of great guides are featured in his paper. I sincerely appreciate easy access to useful tools and information, so I’ll share one here that I found straightforward:

Seven-Step Needs Analysis Process:

1. Clarify the problem.
2. Construct an analysis plan.
3. Collect data on current and actual states.
4. Analyze data to reveal gaps.
5. Validate origins and causes of gaps.
6. Prescribe solutions for each gap.
7. Brief affected parties on the findings and results.

Stater suggests that we “think of needs analysis as intelligence gathering…a systematic needs analysis represents a wide open opportunity to gain valuable internal intelligence—data to help make the human side of the business more efficient, effective and competent.”

If the processes that you are managing in policyIQ aren’t running as smoothly or effectively as you’d like, employ one (or a combination) of the needs analysis processes that are presented in Bill Stater’s paper. If you determine that the root cause is related to the site’s configuration, ineffective workflow and/or communication, or simply that users do not know how to complete a task (like checking out a page or setting up a report), then reach out to us and we’ll get to work on helping you to close the gap. If you have processes that are not running as efficiently as you wish, but don’t know where to begin (with time or staff) to perform your needs analysis, we can help you with that, too.

Follow this link to read the full paper and add it to your online learning transcript for future reference!