Building Learning Capability Through Outsourcing In Action Case Study Series

Get inside successful organizations that use outsourcing to build learning capability and reduce costs. Twelve real-life case studies offer cutting-edge lessons from organizations that use outsourcing.

Have you considered how outsourcing can help build your organization’s learning capability? Organizations in search of solutions to a variety of organizational problems have turned their attention more and more toward outsourcing. The workplace learning and performance (WLP) function seems to be among the first functions outsourced when organizations look to new ways of better managing and lowering fixed costs. It is possible to improve learning in an organization with fewer WLP professionals on staff and reduced training budgets. Outsourcing can help. Advantages of outsourcing include having ready access to leadership and practical implementation expertise from a wide variety of vendors reducing dramatically the cycle time for developing learning having access to greater objectivity for understanding the learning needs of the business client and for developing learning that will meet these needs reducing fixed costs. Today, successful organizations use outsourcing to build learning capability while also reducing costs. And, they increase their business value by increasing their ability to learn. ASTD is proud to present the 19th book in the IN ACTION series: 12 cases that provide real-life, cutting-edge lessons from professionals and organizations that have put these truths about outsourcing into practice.

This book is a guide for achieving innovation through outsourcing. Unpacking the various challenges faced by client firms and suppliers, the authors take the reader through the innovation lifecycle and devise a clear plan to achieve valuable results. Offering practical frameworks and tools to ensure informed decision-making at every stage, this book also includes collaborative structures and metrics to measure outcomes. Written by leading figures in the area of outsourcing, this book offers both the academic rigor and the hands-on experience based on dozens of cases that walk the reader from the very beginning of the outsourcing journey to the successful delivery of transformative innovations.

As a training and development or human resource professional, do you have the knowledge, skills, and experience you need to become an indispensable strategic partner within your organization? Building Business Acumen for Trainers provides step-by-step practical advice on business practices guaranteed to win the support, respect, and attention of your organization. Written for both new and seasoned professionals, this essential resource will show how to put into practice the three critical areas of business acumen: Finance skills Partnering skills Communication skills

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

This research study seeks to understand the nature of organisational change with respect to offshore outsourcing of information technology services in a multinational pharmaceutical company, and to examine the effectiveness of approaches used to manage this change so that lessons may be drawn from these experiences. Despite the abundant literature on effective organisational change management, the key factors that need to be managed properly at different stages of the offshore outsourcing process are not well understood. The research adopts a processual view to paint a broad picture of the issues involved in these different stages. A generic process model of change, based on the review of the change literature, was first developed to represent how change was intended to occur. This model focuses on the following four stages in the change process: context, diagnosis and planning, implementation, and institutionalisation. The research employs an interpretive case study approach and draws on fieldwork from three independent information systems departments (cases) of the company, where offshore outsourcing programmes were implemented. Qualitative data from semi-structured interviews, direct observation and document analysis are analysed by applying the generic process model to produce a detailed account of the way in which change was managed in the case organisations. The findings reveal that a combination of contextual factors, both external and internal to the company, influenced the adoption and use of offshore outsourcing in the case organisations. Externally, the economic forces were found to be the main catalyst for the change, while internally the role of the executive leadership and the lack of internal resources further explain the motivations behind the adoption of offshore outsourcing. The study illustrates that achieving successful outcomes from offshore outsourcing activities critically depends on the organisation adequately addressing a number of factors, such as conveying a sense of urgency, developing and communicating the vision, identifying the benefits of change and how they will be delivered, generating short-term wins, providing education and training, developing a fit between the change and organisational culture, etc., throughout the change process. The findings also highlight the effects of offshore outsourcing on the case organisations, including change in job roles and responsibilities and organisational learning activities that enable corrective actions to improve change management efforts. An important contribution of this research is the development of a model providing a more comprehensive understanding of the change process associated with the implementation of offshore IT outsourcing. Recommendations for policy makers and change managers to improve change management practice based on the research findings, as well as recommendations for further research, form a significant part of the conclusions.

This book illustrates how other companies have used and implemented a particular approach to facilitating employee learning in organizations-structured on-the-job learning. Structured on-the-job learning programs have the potential to make better use of your organization's resources and create training that is more relevant and effective.