LCMS Implementation - Part 1: Generating Requirements

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So your organization has decided to implement a Learning Content Management System (LCMS). Good for you. There are a variety of reasons why an organization might want an LCMS.

  • Improve efficiency and decrease time-to-market
    • Reuse and re-purpose content
    • Provide consistent design and functionality
    • Collaborative development
    • Central repository for all learning content
  • Decrease development and revision costs
    • Give content owners the ability to maintain their own content
    • Reduced contractor/vendor footprint

Just be sure your organization has a clear end-state in mind and has been able to successfully communicate the value proposition, especially to those who hold the purse strings and the resources. Golng off on your own, without buy-in from your stakeholders, is a costly and time-wasting mistake. Communicate well and communicate often. 

The first step is understanding the requirements for the LCMS. But, before you go too far down this road, be sure you're not formulating your system requirements based on the current AS IS environment. Don't try to maintain the AS IS state of learning development.  Instead, focus on what you want the learning development environment TO BE. In other words, begin with the "end" in mind. Therefore, your first set of stakeholders needs to be your organization's decision makers. They are the ones who have a clear vision of where the organization is headed and how they want to get there. The LCMS can play a major role in ensuring that vision can be achieved.

Next, get a firm understanding of:

  • what the LCMS needs to be able to do
  • how it needs to perform
  • who will need to be able to do what
  • the technical specifications
  • the compliance specifications from a content perspective (e.g., Section 508, SCORM, Learner Record Store, AICC)
  • the compliance specifications from an IT perspective (HINT - if you are implementing an LCMS for a government organization, rest assured it will need to undergo federally required IT certifications (e.g., FedRamp, RMF).

Where should these requirements come from? Who needs to weigh-in?  A good starting point is to get with your organization's learning development team to include your learning content developers, instructional system designers, content owners, and learning program managers - basically all those who will be using the system on a regular basis either directly or peripherally.  Next, get with your IT department to find out the technical requirements. There is no point in purchasing a system that is incompatible with your organization's technical environment.  Also, connect with other system owners. When it comes time to integrate your LCMS with your learning content system (LMS), you'll be glad you made the connection with this team early in the game.

If your LCMS implementation effort is limited to your department, find out if other departments in your organization have already implemented an LCMS. If so, connect with them to gain an understanding of how they went about implementing their LCMS, and capitalize on their lessons learned. Keep your ear to the ground. Listen out for other initiatives that may be underway and may have an impact on the implementation of your LCMS. You may end up identifying another department in your organization with whom you can partner. 

Once you've gathered requirements through the various stakeholders, put them into broad categories (i.e., Criteria and Sub-Criteria). Doing so helps you to see and weed out duplicates and contradictory requirements.  It also helps you to see where you might have too many requirements and where you may not have enough.  Try not to get too far into the weeds here. You should not have a set of requirements that total 100 pages. Roll them up and group them in a way that makes sense.  You may even want to establish a weighting factor to each category, as one category may be more or less important than another category. For example, your categories might be:

  • Standards & Compliance
    • SCORM
    • 508
    • ...
  • Ease of Use
    • WYSIWYG editor
    • Templates
    • Themes
    • Libraries
    • ...
  • Rapid Development
    • Search, find, replace
    • Properties editor
    • Auto-save
    • ...
  • Interactivity
    • Create branching
    • Assessment tools
    • Multiple navigation options
    • Hyperlinks
    • Hot spots and pop-ups
    • ....
  • Security
    • Warning messages/alerts
    • Lock/unlock content
    • Version tracking
    • ...
  • Publishing/Exporting
    • HTML 5
    • Does not require plug-ins
    • Publish to social media
    • Multiple publishing options (e.g., HTML 5, SCORM, Tin Can)
    • ...

Next prioritize the requirements according to importance. Don't over engineer this. Three or four priority levels should suffice and could look like this:

  1. Mandatory (Most important)
  2. Very Important (Highly desired)
  3. Important (Strongly desired)
  4. Nice to Have (Useful, but not necessary)

Check out the next post in this series: LCMS Implementation - Part 2: Market Analysis.