Once you have decided to introduce a Learning Management System (LMS) at your company or academic institute, you need to look out for the right solution that fulfils all your requirements. And then your next step should be focused on how to implement the LMS successfully. 

Steps to Make Your LMS Implementation Successful

The first thing that you need for a successful implementation of an LMS is planning. A genuine and detailed planning can make your LMS implementation process easier and more efficient. It will save you from any potential disruptions and future delays. Now let us discuss step-by-step how to make your LMS implementation successful.
 

1. Identify Business Goals

This should be the first step when you start any project in your organisation. While implementing an LMS solution, you should set the goals and objectives at the beginning itself. This will help you and your team to visualise the end goal and work effectively to achieve it. Before the implementation process begins, you should be able to answer the questions like
 

• Why do you need an LMS solution for your organisation?
• Will this LMS solution help you to achieve your business goals?

For instance, if you are running a training centre and you need an LMS solution to train your learners, you should decide the number of courses you are going to sell and the expected strength of your audience.
 

2. Set-Up Team

Once you have defined your objectives, you need to set up an implementation team that will be responsible for making decisions during and after the implementation process. Your team should comprise enough people to handle the workload effectively. For any organisation to run successful projects smoothly, at least 4 or 5 are people are needed like 
 

• A Team Leader who will be responsible for instructing, guiding and motivating the rest of the team to achieve the goals. 
• A Project Manager, who will be responsible for planning and monitoring the progress.
• An IT professional, who will take of any technical issue arising during and after the implementation of LMS.
• Technology Specialist, who will be responsible for managing the LMS platform, adding content and integrating various tools into your LMS solution.

Other than these members, an implementation team should comprise of other participants who would share their experience and expertise in the successful functioning of your LMS.
 

3. Workflow Documentation

To achieve your goals, you need to identify your workflow and document it. This step will include creating, tracking, storing, accessing as well as destroying the documents related to the workflow at your organisation. Workflow documentation is needed to keep track of your work and to check whether you are going in the right direction to achieve your business goal. This is the step where you will decide what tools to integrate into your LMS and what configurations should be added to it.
 

4. Configuration

Once your workflow document is ready, you should shift towards the main work required for a successful work operation i.e. configuration. When you buy an LMS solution, the LMS vendor will tell you what his product has to offer and will expect you to set the configuration according to your knowledge and demand.
 

In this step, you will add data and information related to the users as well as the audiences of your LMS. For instance, if you are implementing LMS for your educational institute, you may add demographic data related to your teachers and students like their names, educational backgrounds, contact information and courses they are associated with. An LMS also allows you to authorise administrators to make changes in the configurations according to your needs.
 

The next step is to configure course metadata. Whether you need LMS to manage students in your academic institute or you will use it to train your new hires, you will need to design your course catalogue and metadata which include your course structure, materials, assessments and evaluation reports. A good LMS will even allow you to migrate data from your setup to the new storage. 

Before adding all these things, you need to make sure from your vendor whether you can update the configurations at any time or not. If not, you need to take extra caution while configuring all the settings.
 

5. Integration

If you have successfully configured all the data into your LMS, system integration should be your next step. This will not only boost the power of your LMS solution but also refine the user experience of the software. A good LMS will allow you to integrate various tools to sync your learning platform with other useful applications that your business might need.

Some common LMS integrations to operate your business smoothly and efficiently are-
 

• CRM (Customer Relationship Management) 
• Google Analytics
• eCommerce
• Single Sign-On (SSO)
• LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability)

6. Communication Plan

Whether you are planning to implement a Learning Management System for your organisation or you are already done with the implementation process, you need to define a communication plan to deliver important messages to your team and the target audience. This plan should include the details of senders and receivers, medium of communication, frequency of status updates, feedbacks and the messages themselves. An effective communication plan will help you to share and distribute tasks and notify your team as well as learners about any new developments. 
 

Conclusion

Installation and implementation of a new LMS solution in your organisation might seem a tedious task but it is not. It might take a little time even so once you have successfully implemented the right LMS, it will provide consistency in your business and elevate the learning and development experience of your learners. Coconut Learning offers full technical support to choose the right LMS for your organization and its implementation.

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