Situation
In a decision to shift their core business to a singular focus on aircraft manufacturing, a GP Strategies® client needed to divest, or spin off, two of their subsidiaries. This prompted the need to provide the two subsidiaries with their own human capital management (HCM) solutions, including individual learning management systems (LMSs).
Providing learners with relevant content and a quality user experience.
Challenge
The ultimate goal for the go-live of the project was to stand the two subsidiaries up with their individual LMS platforms and individualized content while still providing them with the learning content and training programs necessary from the parent LMS, including outbound integrations with third-party content providers. This was to be done without impacting the user experience for the learners who are part of the subsidiaries; they will never know that the LMS is different, other than new logos.
Solution
GP Strategies helped the client to review their SuccessFactors and BizX LMS and develop a plan to implement the two new LMSs in March 2019. The initial step was to define the scope of the project, which included the need for two LMSs; migration of over 3 million learning history records; inbound integrations from Workday and other internal applications; and outbound integrations to LinkedIn Learning, OpenSesame, and getAbstract. The SAP SuccessFactors Premium Content Management (PCM) team was engaged and provided iContent migration support. GP Strategies was responsible for gathering and providing iContent migration requirements to PCM for the content migration to the new LMSs.
Due to the number of involved business lines and functional groups (six), there was a high number of custom and detailed requirements for the migration process. These requirements were centered around which pieces of content should be made available in the new LMSs and were related back to requirements for their regions, languages, job function, and level. To meet these needs, GP Strategies created 56 custom scripts for data extraction and migration activities. These scripts were used by the GP Strategies team to safely and efficiently extract and migrate the data from the parent LMS to the new LMSs.
Because the data extraction and migration activities where so extensive, four practice data migrations were completed before the official go-live to ensure all information was accurate, all workstreams and functional groups were on board, and there were no inconsistencies or discrepancies with the data once migrated to the new environments. A full “dry run” of the go-live process was executed to confirm timing and duration of key processes, as the LMS implementations were coordinated with other core HCM applications.
After an effective dry run in December 2019, the team had a successful go-live in January 2020.
Although the LMS version for the two subsidiaries did not differ from that of the parent LMS, and no new functionality would be introduced, each LMS environment was configured to mirror GLP design and meet specific data migration requirements. This simple approach provided a straightforward path to migration; minimized learner, instructor, and administrator impact; and provided a user experience that was already familiar to existing users. This made user adoption and engagement with the LMS much easier and streamlined.
Migration of over 3 MILLION learning history records.
Results
After the official go-live, the subsidiaries have over 65,000 live users on their systems combined. More than 3 million learning history records have been successfully migrated from the parent LMS environment to the new LMS platforms for employee profiles. Being able to successfully migrate these records allows the learner to continue their learning journey seamlessly.
Over 83,000 content items were migrated to the new environments from the original LMS, allowing learners to access content that was previously available to them in the parent LMS. Since the go-live of the new LMS platforms, 102,316 learning items have been accessed within the new LMS environments. The employees at both subsidiaries are using the learning courses on a daily basis.
