Performance support is a journey, not a destination. What works for an organization that is just starting down this road looks very different from what works for an organization that has been effectively utilizing performance support strategies for years.

Performance support has become an ever-more powerful proposition with the advent of mobile devices that can deliver to learners wherever they are. It can help learners apply what they have learned back in the workplace or even replace the need for upfront training. And the future is exciting, because mobile performance support will be adaptive and contextual, turning iDevices into a combination of coach and personal assistant, and bridging the gap between the classroom and the workplace. But getting started isn‘t always easy.

As we move, albeit haltingly, to more independent and technology-enabled learning and performance support, participants enjoy choice. Lots of it. They choose to participate, engage, and contribute. Or they can choose to skip your learning program entirely.

You need a performance support solution, but getting approval to implement a larger, more costly solution takes time—if you have the budget at all. But maybe you don’t need the larger, more costly system. Maybe you can start your performance support journey using tools you already have available.

W.W. Grainger, a global industrial supply distribution company with thousands of users across 369 branches, 15 distribution centers, and a growing online presence, needs to prepare their end-users for a big change: an SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) deployment supporting the business in Mexico and Canada. Multiple geographically dispersed locations make traditional instructor-led training expensive, complicated, and risky.

When formal learning finishes, we release learners back into their everyday reality, back into a structure that includes both formal hierarchies of support as well as social structures we can call “tribes.“ These are the communities where workers make sense of the learning and rehearse new behaviors. But we don‘t have to leave this to chance. If we understand how these tribes form, how these communities work, and the types of roles we play in them, we can better support learners in these sense-making activities. All too often, we rely on the technology to do this, while in reality it‘s a social issue. Technology can‘t deliver great performance support without functioning communities, coherent tribes behind it.

Delivering performance support tools for sales can be a challenge. There are many approaches to consider, departments to align, and technology options to decipher, all in an effort to create a strategy and provide resources that will effectively support the performance of sales reps. A successful performance support strategy is absolutely critical for optimal sales productivity.

We often describe the shift towards performance support as a linear journey, one that continues in a single direction. The reality is quite different. Over time an organization’s utilization of performance support rises and falls with the changing tides. Managing your journey over the course of time can be a challenge. 

In large organizations, learning and performance support content typically develops over time in an organic, ad-hoc fashion until one day the organization realizes it has an unmoderated mass of content stored on file servers, intranet sites, and the LMS. As a result, employees don’t know what’s available and can’t find the content they need when they need it, falling back on familiar and possibly incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated information. To the organization, the task of making this mass of content easily accessible, usable, and targeted to workflow performance can be daunting, to say the least. Where and how to start?

Strategize, design, develop, implement, integrate, roadbock!, re-strategize, re-implement … the realities of doing performance support unfortunately seldom match up with the idealized stories you hear. Join practitioners and leaders from KPMG, Wells Fargo, and Ontuitive in this candid conversation about learning by doing, about moving forward around roadblocks, about constant tinkering, and about some surprising successes, too.

Adopting an embedded performance support (EPS) strategy is unlike most other learning initiatives because it involves a paradigm shift from learning to performance. As such, the presence of change—potentially transformational change—becomes a significant restrainer when attempts are made to disrupt familiar methodologies. In other words, the problem is effectively positioning the solution.

You’ve heard about performance support and hopefully tried a small project or two. Or maybe you’re excited by the idea and want to accelerate its growth in your organization. Once you get to initial buy-in, either just within your team or with a small group of initial clients, what’s next?

Your organization has been using performance support for some time. You’ve got resources and tools in place that are well received, and the buzz around what you’re doing seems overwhelmingly positive. It’s time to take your efforts to the next level. Anecdotal feedback is valuable, but most organizations need verifiable, data-driven analytics for major enterprise applications. 

Panviva will take an in-depth look at the challenges enterprises face when it comes to evolving and improving their performance support solutions. They will explore how information, access, and architecture play a role in driving productivity. Organizations can no longer think about departmental solutions, but must focus on an enterprise-wide approach that breaks down the silos of information to improve overall performance. In addition, Panviva will share the top secrets to help performance support professionals excel at training, retaining, and sharing mission critical information.