abdi monthly newsletter

Issue 27 - July 2009

Greetings from abdi
abdi ltd has a depth of experience unique in the UK in impact measurement and ROI studies to assess investment in human capital. abdi ltd undertakes external evaluations and trains key individuals in private and public sector organisations to measure return on investment in HR interventions of all sorts including learning and development, change programmes and international assignments. Check out our website www.abdi.eu.com




A bit of planning

It's the time of year when colleagues say, 'Better leave this one until the autumn when everyone's around'.

More often than not it's commonsense. So why mention it?

Because the wooliness of this kind of planning goes to the heart of the strong relationship between the often-undervalued Level 1 (reaction and engagement) of the ROI methodology and the powerful Level 3 (performance).

The ROI Methodology is so strong because it builds credible evidence of the link between individuals' 'engagement' in what they learn and what they then do that can drive improvements in business measures for their organisations.

Anything that helps to bring clarity to how they will apply what they've learned highlights the strength of the link between their learning and their subsequent actions ... helps to build engagement.

We push people hard to confirm the applicaiton of learning from courses and important meetings by sharing simple action plans. 

Post-course 'Happy Sheets' are key guides to participants' reactions, but if they fail to gather the crucial evidence about what people plan to do with what they've learned they make only a weak contribution to evaluation.

So when I hear one of those 'autumn' plans, I ask: 'Just remind me what we'll be doing. What will it achieve for us? How will we know we achieved it? Will 'autumn' be the second or the third week in September? When will we start preparing? When will we complete?'

Then I ask them to write it down and share it.

Action planning is a valuable business habit.

It's an equally valuable evaluation tool, and one of the strongest sources of evidence of the business relevance of learning, and of the motivation and commitment of learners.

It's also one of the most cost effective means of tracking Level 3 data - in other words telling us both what has been applied and how behaviour and job performance has changed.

Jane Massy


Kath Hinchliff - ROI in the NHS

'We'd tried to evaluate in the past but never come up with methodology that we felt fitted our needs.  Colleagues said, we know this methodology, and when we went to tender there was nothing that matched our requirements in the way ROI did'.

Kath Hinchliff is Associate Director Education Commissioning at the Strategic Health Authority for Yorkshire and the Humber. With abdi, the SHA is building the metrics and the processes to enable it to report on the impact of its substantial learning and development budget for health professional education and training. It is the first Strategic Health Authority to decide to embed impact measurement in its commissioning and delivery of learning.

'It's very clearly a drive to be more efficient and effective', she says, explaining why the SHA took the ROI Methodology route. 'We needed to be able to demonstrate a clear methodology for how we evaluate our effectiveness and efficiency and also demonstrate value for money and how our investments are contributing to improving productivity and contributing to high quality health services.

'We must be able to demonstrate how the funding we receive will support the key policy drivers and how we as an organisation can show clearly that our resources are going into key government and local health economy priorities. Learning and development has to achieve demonstrably improved health outcomes'.

The work began in January 2009, and since then, Kath Hinchliff points out, the Health Service is looking even harder at how to justify and get maximum benefit from its budgets. 'It's added a new prominence and dimension that wasn't necessarily there at the start,' she says.

This underlines another key theme - 'accountability to our board for the money we spend, and identifying the benefits of it'.

She says she is very heartened by the response of the local organisations and trusts and the level of interest in having it in the SHA. 'This opens up the possibility of rolling it out into the work that the Deanery and other directorates are doing.

'We're now arriving at the point,' she feels, 'where people are getting it. I don't think everyone has quite got it yet, but the secret is getting people to understand the benefits, and putting together as streamlined a process as we can devise - not overcomplicated, and not a burden.'

So what told Kath that the ROI Methodology could offer the SHA something quite distinct? 'I think it was the light it sheds on different levels of activity. As an organisation we need to focus on the higher levels, but also need to demonstrate impact all the way down to the point of delivery to individual patients. In a regional organisation it isn't possible to drill down to the individual level in many instances, but we need to because if it is not making a positive difference to patient care we should not be investing in it.'

Making talent pay

Given the importance of employee retention to the bottom line of virtually all organisations, it's always good to see the message being hammered home of role that learning plays in this.
A study cited by the US Conference Board in May confirmed that employee satisfaction studies show that development opportunities are paramount in workers' decisions to stay at a particular company. And not just any development opportunities, but those that genuinely expand their talents.  It highlights as a barrier to this the fact that talented people develop by collaborating with other talented people, but that many organisations actively discourage work across departmental boundaries.  A business that bucks this trend is Dachangjiang, a motorcycle assembler. It doesn't hand its designers blueprints to work from but gives them basic sketches, performance outputs, and specific dimensional requirements, and then makes them collaborate.

Live and Learn  

A piece in the June edition of the Chief Finance Officer confirms what we probably already knew, that the recession has been causing companies to spend less on internal training.  In the US in 2008, they spent 11% less per learner, and they are now racking up their use of e-learning to reduce big cost items like travel.
A survey of more than 500 US companies has shown 62% shrinking their training budgets, and more than 50% increasing their use of e-learning and other types of virtual learning. The prices for virtual learning are said to have come down in some cases to no more than 15% - 20% of what they were until recently.
Our question: How many of these companies are tracking these less costly approaches to see if they achieve ROIs that make them worthwhile?

Congratulations to three more abdi ROI Foundation Award graduates

Richard Welch - Volkswagen Group UK
Alison Hunter - Volkswagen Group UK
Heather Burkinshaw - NHS Strategic Health Authority, Yorkshire and the Humber


Building a Library - Implementing Training Scorecards in Action by Jack J Phillips and Lynn Schmidt, ASTD Press 2003

The deeper we get into embedding the ROI Methodology into organisations, the more important it becomes for them to understand how to build good scorecards so that they can track, share and compare the data they collect across projects, programmes, divisions etc.

Phillips, Schmidt and various case study writers provides a mixture of solid guidance and experience.  The first, rather obvious, point that springs out is why scorecards make sense. And, as is the case for the use of the ROI Methodology as a whole, they enable what is often thought of as soft data to be presented in a way that non-trainers and non-HR people will relate to, and can use.  They are a means of underlining the manner in which learning and development activities are linked to wider business objectives.

A second point is how strongly the ROI Methodology with its needs, objectives and data presented on five levels up to and including return on investment lends itself to scorecarding.

Of course, developing scorecards is demanding, and the book flags up four key challenges:


For our work with the NHS in Yorkshire and the Humber, we've been reading up on the book's first study on a US community healthcare organisation. Another that gets widely cited is the study on the Caterpillar Corporate University dashboard. Others cover service, high-tech and motor manufacture.


Autumn courses

The numbers of learning and development and HR professionals attending abdi ROI courses accredited with Edexcel have increased fourfold in 2009 so far.

Are you happy to have missed out on what more and more of your peers now regard as an essential piece of continuing professional development?

You can put it right very quickly indeed by booking one of the remaining places on our two autumn abdi ROI Foundation courses on 21 and 22 September and 16 and 17 November 2009.

If you've already completed the Foundation course, you should think about becoming a trained ROI Evaluator. Jane Massy will be teaching this powerful 3 day course on 18, 19 and 20 November 2009.

All these courses are taught in Cambridge. We are also happy to deliver these as in house workshops elsewhere across the UK.

If you find the requirement to attend in Cambridge too difficult to justify or have too few candidates for a dedicated in house programme, it is worth talking to us about hosting a multi organisation group in your locality. We encourage professionals from different organisations to consider cooperating together to participate in a local 2 and 3 day workshops if one organisation can host it.

To secure a place on our Cambridge workshops, or for any other enquiries about our services, go to www.abdi.eu.com or call 01223 360 240


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