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Make or Buy?
Should you outsource your training?

By Jeanie McKay
NOVA Quality Communications

That question is a common one in corporate conference rooms throughout America. Because quality improvement training is comprised of many layers of technical content, the decision to off-load the responsibility for training to someone else is tough to make. Improvement training by its very nature is both political and statistical. Faint-hearted trainers and course developers NEED NOT APPLY!

When faced with the decision to make or to buy, certain questions have to be asked about where you are in your training process. Are you beginning at ground-level zero? Have your training needs been thoroughly assessed? Do you have a variety of concept levels that need to be taught? How many employees need to be trained? Do materials exist that can be picked up and delivered? Are you certain that the classroom is the best media for delivering your training? All of these questions are viable and need to be answered before you move on to your make or buy decisions.

How much help and guidance will you need? Just as most training pros would not attempt to design and build bridges without engineering expertise and support, so it is when engineering and manufacturing professionals set out to create training without guidance. Without some level of professional guidance, many well-intentioned training efforts collapse because the teams did not know how to lay the proper groundwork or design it. Regardless of the anticipated complexity of your soon-to-be training program, there are several factors you must look at when deciding to make or buy.

What are the cost considerations?

Regardless of whether you plan to create line-administered training, use your corporate training department, or outsource your training, you will have to justify your decision to your management. And most likely cost will be the first question they ask.

Outsourced program costs to consider are:

• Actual purchase price
• Train-the-trainer costs
• Licensing fees or conditions for use
• Custom tailoring costs
• Update costs (when material becomes outdated)
• Consultant expenses (travel/per diem, etc.)

Internally produced program costs to consider are:

• Staff salaries and benefits (including support staff)
• Lost time (while away from other assignments)
• Materials production and media costs

What level of training expertise do you need?

Instead of basing your decision on resource cost alone, you also need to assess what organizational, in-house training department and vendor resources can offer your program in terms of:

• Subject matter knowledge
• Industry knowledge and experience
• Teaching skills
• Instructional design abilities
• Company knowledge
• Credibility with the audience

Line organizations and management frequently lack a true understanding of the time investment required to design, revise and produce effective training programs from scratch. If time is a big factor and external resources can meet your needs, it will, of course save time to buy their packages rather than creating your own.

However, modifying or tailoring off-the-shelf products will increase your time commitment considerably. Vendors can often do the tailoring for you, but they must somehow acquire extensive company and employee job-role knowledge...which adds more time. However, if you work with a vendor who specializes in designing quality improvement curricula, you can minimize your time investment. If specialized, that vendor should have a fairly shallow learning curve, and he or she can provide a wealth of experience (and lessons learned from projects in other organizations). If you have to bring someone up to speed who doesn’t understand improvement tools or methods, you had better have a long lead-time.

If the total number of people to be trained is small, you might be able to send people to carefully screened public seminars. If the audience is large and your training needs will continue for a long time, it may be more cost effective to build your own in-house program with consultant-led guidance and train-the-trainer programs.

If the audience is at a management level where outsider-credibility is necessary or a lot of people need to be trained quickly, a vendor-delivered training program may work best. If there are many people to be trained and they are scattered over a large geographical location, your best bet might be to have a quality improvement specialized course designer create a web-based program for you. The cost for this media is initially higher and it requires more time; however, web-based training offers advantages if you do not have a cadre of available trainers or a large travel budget. (See next month’s article on E-mania for an in-depth look at the pros and cons of web-based training.)

If you decide to use a training vendor, what should you look for?

If you decide to use a training vendor, finding the cheapest or the most expensive does not always mean you are getting the best deal. You should search for a training vendor who is experienced in both quality improvement methods and in adult learning. It is harder than you might think to find someone who wears both hats. When you interview the vendor, it is critical for you to ask very direct questions. As you question, attempt to get an idea of their improvement process knowledge, communication skills and learning philosophies.

Here are some key qualities to look for in a quality improvement training vendor:

• Trustworthiness - Your chosen vendor should have a solid reputation in the industry for keeping commitments, meeting deadlines, and respecting organizational confidences.

• Objectivity – Your chosen vendor should be a good listener. He or she should not come to you selling a "solution" without knowing your organizations’ unique "needs."

• Results orientation – Your chosen vendor must be able to take initiative to get the project rolling forward. He or she should work with you to establish a reasonable schedule that includes adequate revision time and ample time to train your in-house trainers (if that is needed).

• People orientation – Your chosen vendor should demonstrate enthusiasm for the project and be able to relate well to members of the team. He or she must be able to speak up, inspire confidence, question the status quo, and not provide thoughtful insight (not simply parroting what they think you or management wants to hear).

It is tough not to judge a book by its cover. But if you decide to go the training vendor route, there are a few things to be warned about in advance:

• Beware of glitz and marketing hype. You may not need a Mercedes when a Chevrolet will do. Be sure you are not dazzled by the fancy training packaging and add-ons. Ask to review any vendor-written training materials. Peruse the content carefully. Is the packaging overblown? Is the content too basic? Is this relevant to your organization’s audience? Are the concepts sequenced properly? Will this instruction meet your needs?

• Be equally cautious about training technology bells and whistles. Once again...let the needs of the participants and your budget dictate the technology to be used. Don’t be sold on the trendiness of a new training technology.

• Remember...your trainees probably don’t need an Einstein. Sure you want to hire a course developer and trainer with brains. But whomever you hire must be able to relate to the common employee who doesn’t already "know this stuff." Give your prospective vendor a few test questions. Ask how they would simplify and explain a concept you present to them. Do they explain it in a way that participants could understand? Do they explain it with an example or a graphic?

• Focus on the end-result first. When buying off-the-shelf training programs, probe the vendor about expected outcomes. How will this training improve performance? How will learning be assessed during the training? If you get a deer-in-the-headlights look, call another vendor.

• Ask for learning insurance. There are many training vendors who pose as consultants when they are actually sellers of canned training products. Watch out for those one-size-fits-all pre-packaged solutions that are tied together with a big industry name. Look for a proper balance of training methods which will appeal to different learning styles. If possible, observe the trainer in action. (Count the viewfoils!)

• Assess the relevance. While entertaining performances by stand-up trainers keep participants awake, good trainers know how to link the content to the participants' real work-world. Be wary of training pros who are not interested in learning all they can about your products, processes, people and overall business strategies.

 

If you decide to use a vendor to design instructional materials for you, here are a few things you can do to keep the costs down and to ensure a more effective program:

• Avoid having the instructional designer do all the grunt-work. Generally, the more you can provide in the way of information, case studies and examples, the more on-site vendor expenses are saved.

• Avoid selecting an instructional design "generalist." While any training developers worth their salt should able to create good training, you will save time and budget if your designer comes to you with knowledge and experience in improvement methodology.

• Avoid rush jobs. Most vendors boost rates for quick turn-around projects. You may get the training when you need it, but the training may show the scars of long hours or inadequate preparation.

• Avoid unnecessary content changes. Experienced instructional designers are masters at helping teams nail down ambiguous requirements. But if you are outsourcing your curriculum, bring the vendor into the strategy sessions early. Strive to get content agreed upon by the team in order to avoid last minute major revisions.

• Avoid selecting ‘rookie’ trainers. When instructional designers have to create instructor manuals for novice (or non-content expert) trainers, the lesson plans require greater detail. This obviously takes longer to produce, and the train-the-trainer courses will also require extra time as well.

That decision can only be made after careful consideration of resources and costs. The process for reaching the best decision mimics the process used in performing a product risk analysis. There comes a point where you must weigh the options, risks, and costs as objectively as possible. Consider putting together a simple checklist such as the one below to help you decide between creating your own training, involving your training department or outsourcing the project to an external vendor:

Ask each person involved in the decision-making process to complete their own assessment. Then compare your rankings. Once you have made your , begin to schedule the time and budget the costs.

Remember that training (like any other process) requires careful planning, monitoring, maintenance and continuous improvement.

 ŠJeanie McKay, 2001
NOVA Quality Communications

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