Session Title: Consolidating From 500 Training Departments to One: Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen!

 

Session Number: 829

 

Room: Coronado P

 

Day and Timeslot: Tuesday - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

 

Formats: Learning Story

 

Listen to a Preview PodCast

 

 

 

Listen to a Post Conference PodCast

 

Session Description: When Carly Fiorina arrived as CEO of HP in June 1999, HP had 500 independent training departments. By 2006, HP had a new CEO, Mark Hurd, and a single, centralized training function conducting more than 1.5 million learning events per year. The business model that organizes this mass of training activity, the Horizontal Solutions Interlock (HSI), will be examined with stories about what works and what doesn't.

 

• How do you get a 100-page student manual for 20 students from San Diego to Houston via Bangalore without anyone hurting their back?
• When 10 people on 4 continents are involved with getting a class scheduled, who orders the donuts?
• How does one stay invisible when there is no place to hide?

 

Led by: John Morris - Hewlett Packard

 

John is a Learning Program Manager with Hewlett-Packard Company where he has worked for 12 years. As a LPM, John is responsible for finding and acquiring or building training related to innovation and system effectiveness. His developers are located in the US and India and his clients are worldwide and primarily comprised of technical audiences. John works "virtually" from his home in Corvallis, Oregon where his Great Pyrennes dog Fergus is his full-time office companion. His daughter, Jessie, recently joined the professional workforce in marketing after graduating from Eastern Oregon University. His son, Scott, is studying auto body work at Metro Technical College in Nebraska. John enjoys cycling, skiing and long walks with Fergus.

 

 

 

 

Teasers: Here are a few files I have used to organize my thoughts, these will provide some food for thought for the session -- I promise not to show any of these during the actual session! Unless you really want me to explain them...

 

The "Official" Model: OrganizationalAlignment.pdf

What it looks like to me:PyramidsModel-2.ppt

What I learned:Learning Story. HP's HSI Model.mmap 

 

Post-event Synopsis: During the session, I had a colleague capture the questions of those who attended the Learning Story. For completeness, I've listed the participant expectations, a few highlights of what I covered and the questions that were asked with my response summaries below. Please feel free to contact me at john.l.morris@hp.com for additional information.

 

Expectations

 

• Organization structure comparison - what did HP come from and go to?
• The process for ransition to this structure and accompanying challenges
• Justification for the changes and the activities used to gain buy in from employees

 

Background, Questions and Answers

 

• HSI has its roots in Digital Equipment Company. Compaq Computers purchased DEC prior to HP buying Compaq.
• HSI overview - this acronym stands for "horizontal solutions interlock" a clumsy attempt to capture the relationship between three very distinct types of training activities including client engagement, solution development and delivery management
• Q: Why did you have 500 training departments? A: HP's history was for allowing independent operating environments. Packard and Hewlett advocated for small, nimble organizations. This served HP well during its earlier "entrepreneurial" phase. With new leadership interested in pursuing more economies of scale, leveraging HP's size became the priority and throughout the company, there has been effort to consolidate similar yet previously isolated functions such as training.
• Businesses operate seperately - when new CEO Carly Firorina joined HP in 1999, she revealed there were 700 training websites in operation. Since that time the Learning and Development (L&D) function has downsized considerably. Still we are hosting on order of 1,5 million internal training events per year. We use a business process outsource (BPO) unit owned by HP to service the HP L&D function. This presentation is John's version HSI of the HP operating model (it is from an individual contributor's perspective, John is not in management.) John talked a good deal about the importance of understanding relationships and he has personally used the RACI (for responsible, accountable, consulted and informed) model to define these relationships and make them explicit.
• Q: How or to what extent must you leave the RACI open? A: It is important not to confine ourselves too much. The perspective is constantly evolving. After step 1 of implementation, the issues and their priorities were different than at step 0. Don't box yourself in too much.
• Q: How is money allocation in this model? A: Refer to the PyramidModel-s2.ppt above. The money in this model is held by the CEM (client engagement manager); this is the person who works most closely with the training clients and knows most about what is important to those businesses.
• Q: Tell me about your SLAs? A: Each of the RACI conversations resulted in creating a SLA (service level agreement.) Of course, this type of SLA is not legally enforceable since all parties are part of the same legal entity. Since the RACIs became quite detailed and had reviewed many tasks and many roles, the SLAs have served as a synopsis of the group's agreements in the RACI conversation.
• Q: Able to get more things through now? A: This model has created tremendous focus on what is most important for the businesses. The up-side to this is greater economies and greater efficiencies. The down-side has been loss of innovation and the loss of ability to meet the needs of individual employees or small groups. These are some of the trade-offs.
• Q: What is your operating platform / LMS? A: HP uses Saba. We have recently implemented Saba -- September 2007!
• Q: Used for internal and external clients? A: Saba is currently used for internal activities only. However, one of our next phases of implementation will leverage the internal capabilities to our external HP Education Services. At this point we anticipate leveraging content that is generated for both internal and external use.
• Q: Do you still have Shadow-Training? A: Yes. In a way it is unavoidable. When the corporation decided to focus on funding only needs that fit within a businesses priority, we consciously jeopardized the needs of individuals and small groups. But these needs didn't go away. Now managers within HP (and not in the training function) make individual choices about supporting small, innovative or emerging needs through shadow type functions that perform similar duties to the formal L&D function.
• Q: Can Shadow-Training post to LMS? A: No. Thats effectively how we bring the shadow functions out of the shadows. When they get big enough to need or desire visibility, they must merge into the sanctioned L&D function. At that point they are usually supported by a business iniative and therefore can get visibility to corporate L&D support.
   

 

 

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