Challenging Situations: A Few Pointers

There are a couple of situations that can make creating a financial imperatives scorecard more of a challenge. What happens if you have many participants in the same class who believe it will bring each of them different benefits? This happens with courses that are offered to a general population with many different types of jobs. The people who sign up for the course are different every time it is offered . Examples could be a presentation skills course or a stress management course. Such a class could have factory workers, administrative assistants, supervisors, and programmers all taking the course together.

The impact of the course could show up in fixed expenses, inventory, revenue, COGS, or any number of other places on the financial statements. The solution in this situation is to ask. You can query the participants themselves to tell you what benefits they expect and what they think the benefits may be worth when you ask them for feedback about the class. Or, if you have many classes but it is possible to group participants from different classes, ask their managers for an estimate of how this WLP intervention helps their people.

Jack Phillips has created an excellent method for asking others to estimate their own benefits, as part of his work on isolation.

What if you are proposing something that has never been done before in your organization? How do you get your first baseline? Suppose you are a new training manager and you believe that your department would benefit from investment in on-demand e-learning modules but there are no off-the-shelf solutions for your needs and you don ‚ t know many counterparts who have ventured into e-learning. You still need to create a scorecard that includes solution costs and estimates of the benefits to your organization. You simply need to research industry literature, interview multiple vendors , make some industry connections, and get creative in who you talk with to validate your estimates. You also needed to be more comfortable with wider margins of risk and error in your initial estimates and need to explain your assumptions as you are convincing others to invest the upfront money to bring the projected benefits to the organization.