LMS administration can be outsourced to third-party vendors. This will help organizations to focus on training and hence administrations headaches can be avoided. Do you agree? Let's see:
LMS administration is one of the key factors that affect ROI on training and LMS.
Every user of the LMS always looks for a quick support. The Technical support team of the LMS vendor may not be prompt or appropriate for the type of request. Mostly they respond by considering how the LMS feature works, instead of what the actual training requirement is. Often the solution provided may be very technical and the user may not understand it.
Considering these issues, most of the training divisions think that someone inside organization should be trained on LMS. The Administrator can provide technical support along with primary job.
As the number of users and their demands increase, the Administrator will be overburdened.To reduce the load he/she starts giving LMS training to other training managers and giving LMS administration access to provide technical support to their divisions. These sub-administrators may not have complete knowledge on the LMS and may not follow standards, which results in inconsistent data in the LMS. In addition sub-administrators may provide support as their secondary job. Users may get a delayed response, which makes them frustrated and they may lose interest in using LMS for their trainings. Also, organization may not want their employees to spend all the time in LMS administration, because it may be very costly and may affect on the business goals.
Will this approach work for your organization? I assume the answer is no. Then how and who can manage LMS administration?
There may be couple of options available to handle LMS administration:
- Increase level of support from existing LMS vendor
- Outsource it to trusted third-party vendor
Increasing the level of support and more dedicated support members from LMS service provider may not be a good option. The reason is, responses from such support team are very technical and it is related to LMS functionality. They may not be aware of the training functions of your organization. Using LMS vendor’s support may be a costly option and may end up being unsatisfactory.
The recommended option is outsource your LMS administration to trusted third-party vendors, who have knowledge of training functions. Now a days, training divisions are outsourcing LMS administration. Outsourcing LMS administration to IT based company who may not know much about training functions, but are good at providing technical support may again give unsatisfactory support, similar to what you may get it from your LMS support team.
Any trusted third-party vendor, who has knowledge about the organizations training function and does excellent customer service. Before outsourcing LMS administration it is recommended that you evaluate them, based on the customer service experience and quality in work. Most importantly, ask their customer references to know about the level of support service they are providing.
To conclude, it is recommended that you can be free from your LMS administration by outsourcing it to trusted third-party vendor, who can do the administration job with quality and follow all the standards. The main advantage is you can focus on trainings, while outsourced administrators will take care of your LMS administration and technical support.
Give it a try by outsourcing learner level LMS administration.
