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Get Zeroed-In on Learning Measurement
Issue 8
December 2007
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In this issue ...
-- Analytics in Talent Management: The Sports ViewHoliday Greetings from Zeroed-In Technologies!
Get Zeroed-In on Learning Measurement is a quarterly newsletter devoted to learning and performance measurement and the people and processes surrounding it. Each issue contains feature articles, benchmarks, case studies, opinions, and upcoming events relating to learning measurement, learning analytics, and strategic reporting inside and outside the learning organization.
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Analytics in Talent Management: The Sports View
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Learning professionals can take a lesson from the talent management analytics applied against Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics. A’s General Manager Billy Beane consistently has his team in the pennant race, despite usually having the lowest payroll of all 30 teams in the majors.
Beane and followers employ a form of analytics called Sabermetrics, which is the analysis of baseball through objective evidence; especially baseball statistics. Sabermetrics intent is to answer questions such as “which player contributes most to the team’s success?” or “how many runs will player A bat in next year?” It can also answer questions such as “does player A perform better than player B under certain circumstances?” Are you beginning to conceptualize the types of questions that analytics in talent management might answer?
Sabermetrics can also help in determining player value both in past years and in the future. Traditional baseball analytics focused on metrics like batting average. A player’s batting average is based on the number of hits he makes as a ratio of the number of at bats. But if you think about it, teams don’t win based on the number of hits they make. They win based on the number of runs they score. So a player’s ability to make more hits is not necessarily the best predictor of success for the team. Rather, the player’s ability to help the team score more runs turns out to be a much better predictor of success. Based on this logic, the more capable a player is to help the team score runs, the more valuable he is.
Sabermetricians, those who do the heavy lifting in baseball statistical analysis and number crunching, take the baseball metrics and look at them through a different lens. There is a lot more that goes into scoring a run then just the initial hit by the player – the speed of the runner, which base he is on, where the ball is put into play, and how the runner got to the base in the first place. As a result, Sabermetrics brings about a series of new measurements based on more complex formulas but using much of the original data.
Like the baseball team, we’ve got players. Our players perform specialized roles but they need to work together as a team in order for us to be successful. Across our teams there are players at varying skill levels. Let’s call our players, our performers. Our top performers are usually highly visible, as are the low end performers. However, the performers in the middle are typically hard to single out because they represent the majority and their performance numbers don’t spike on or off the charts. This fact makes their individual contributions difficult to identify. However, if you were to take a closer look at the performance statistics (i.e. the numbers) you can quickly identify the undervalued performers among the sea of mediocrity. These contributors provide consistency and stability to your team, and if managed properly, have the potential to be tomorrow’s top talent. So how do you identify these hidden gems?
Read the full article here …
http://www.talentmgt.com/assessment_evaluation/2007/December/482/index.php
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Featured Measure: Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR)
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What it means: The CAGR is a mathematical formula that provides a smoothed rate of return on any of your multi-year learning program investments. CAGR tells you how much your program or initiative has grown on an annually compounded basis; it indicates to you and your stakeholders in percentage terms what you really have at the end of a given year or period of time.
How it's measured: To calculate the CAGR, you take the nth root of the total return on investment for a given program, where ‘n’ is the number of years the program has been ongoing. For example, if you were measuring the CAGR of your two year old leadership training program, and the program cost $100,000 to start and brought in tuition charge back fees of $300,000 in Year 1 (a 200% return!), but then slipped back to $150,000 due to cost overruns in Year 2 (a 50% reduction from the prior year), what was the annual return for the two year period for the program? In this example, you take the square root (because the total period of time was two years) of 50% (the total return for the two year period) and get a CAGR of 22.5%. Table 1 illustrates the annual returns, CAGR, and average annual return for this learning program.
Table 1: How CAGR works
Year |
1
|
2
|
3
|
||
Value |
$100,000
|
$300,000
|
$150,000
|
CAGR
|
22.47%
|
| 200%
|
-50%
|
Average
|
75.00%
|
||
| Check Value
|
$100,000
|
$122,474
|
$150,000
|
||
| CAGR
|
22.47%
|
22.47%
|
If you are wondering, the full formula for computing CAGR is (Current Value/Base Value) ^ (1/# of years) - 1. You can use the XIRR function in MS Excel to calculate your own CAGR numbers.
How it’s used: The CAGR is a business measure used frequently by your organization’s Finance and Accounting staff, and by executive managers to help see how a given program or investment is doing for a particular period of time. Using measures like CAGR to manage your learning function shows your business stakeholders that you talk and understand their language.
Rick Wayman and www.investopedia.com contributed to this article on CAGR.
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Case Study: Beyond LMS Reports - Measuring Impact with Tyco Learning Dashboard
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Tyco International, Ltd. (www.tyco.com) is a multi-national group of manufacturing and services companies that provide a wide range of products to customers in the life safety, flow control, and security industries. Tyco Learning Technologies (TLT) is a globally distributed shared services group that develops and manages over 100 learning initiatives annually across many Tyco business units.
With so many concurrent initiatives, TLT needed an on-demand way to know the status of its programs, as well as the overall health of its learning strategies. Standard reports from TLT’s enterprise wide LMS were all tactical, providing mostly after-the-fact information about how things were or were not working. Custom reports that measured leading indicators of program success required extensive staff time and effort to generate, maintain, and distribute. TLT needed a better way to quickly know program status, so it could more quickly make any needed changes to keep learning tightly aligned with Tyco’s businesses.
In 2007 TLT partnered with Zeroed-In Technologies and debuted the Tyco Learning Dashboard, a 24/7 web based software tool that pulls learning measure data from the Tyco LMS and TLT financial systems and gives instant visibility to the status of TLT's program activity. TLT now measures and manages initiatives using multiple business scorecards that draw from over 70 key learning metrics.
To see a demo of Tyco Learning Dashboard and hear from Don McDougal, Director, Learning Technology at Tyco on how TLT uses its dashboard to measure the impact of its learning initiatives, attend the 2008 Learning Analytics Symposium on March 5-7 the Historic Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego.
Tyco’s Symposium session Beyond LMS Reports: Measuring Impact with Tyco Learning Dashboard runs at 9:45 AM PT on Friday March 7, 2008. Attendees will also get advice from Tyco on:
Zeroed-In Technologies is once again the exclusive Platinum sponsor of the 2008 Learning Analytics Symposium, and Zeroed-In’s Chris Moore will give several presentations during the conference on successful implementation and use of the latest performance dashboard technology. Contact us for your registration discount code!
For more event information ...
Learning Analytics Symposium 2008
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Opinion Poll: If you had the resources ....
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Visit our website at www.getzeroedin.com to take our latest quick poll:
"If you had the resources, what learning-related activity would you measure that you are not measuring now?"
We’ll include the results in our next newsletter.
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Pertinent Articles and Resources ...
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• Previous Get Zeroed-In on Learning Measurement newsletters
• Seven key learning indicators your CEO really needs to know
• Learning from Key Learning Indicators
• Talent Measurement: A Management Necessity
• Measuring Success: Capturing the right metrics
• Measuring effectiveness with learning analytics
• CLO Dashboard - Performance scorecard and dashboard for learning
Additional resources available at: http://www.getzeroedin.com/resources.php
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Upcoming Events ...
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• March 5-7, 2008 - Learning Analytics Symposium -- San Diego, CA
• April 9-11, 2008 - Elliott Masie's Learning Systems 2008 -- L:as Vegas, NV
• April 22-24, 2008 - Impact: The Business of Talent -- St. Petersburg, FL
Details about these events available at: http://www.getzeroedin.com/events.php
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Contact: Chris Moore, Zeroed-In Technologies
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email: cmoore@getzeroedin.com
phone: 410.242.6611
web: http://www.getzeroedin.com
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