Columnists

Published May 2007

Guerrilla ROI: Building a High-Impact Project Portfolio

Mark Bower

As the economic climate improves, and companies transition from a bottom-line focus to a top-line focus, businesses must respond quickly to new opportunities and changes in the landscape. In this ultra-competitive economy, enterprises are introducing products, services and processes at an accelerating rate.

Companies must respond quickly and effectively to opportunity. To be successful, they must rapidly respond to new opportunities and continually search for ways to maximize the impact of resources.

This faster pace influences all business functions, especially workforce learning and performance. Every function must maximize its resources to produce the highest-possible impact.

Learning and performance are no different. Learning organizations have reduced resources and must manage a larger number of training projects requests. In addition, these projects are completed in shorter periods to retain competitive advantage.

Learning leaders must implement criteria to select the highest-impact projects based on the business value they will provide. This ensures learning and performance projects provide the best results.

In this process, we must ask ourselves tough questions:

Are there better ways to build our project portfolios that are more consistent with the pace and priorities of our environment?

Can we look forward and place value on our learning projects, not based on what they did, but what we expect them to accomplish?

Can we make decisions based on information other than quantitative criteria and still make prudent business decisions?

The Evolution of Training Evaluation
The introduction of evaluation has served corporate learning well. Its application has added a business rigor to corporate learning that did not exist and has forced us to look at our industry in a new way. The training industry has not always had this level of accountability.

In fact, several years ago, I saw this quote from Brandon Hall: "There is no other workplace issue where so much money is spent with as little accountability as training."

Accurate measurement of training impact can be elusive, time-consuming and expensive, and it often produces results that lack credibility. Nonetheless, the existing evaluation methodologies have served our industry well.

We must ask, however, whether there are other methodologies to evaluate training and performance initiatives that might serve our fast-paced business environment even better. I think there is, and I call it guerrilla ROI.

Introducing Guerrilla ROI
We always have this image of a scruffy-looking, bearded man in fatigues when we think of "guerrilla." In fact, the word has been used many times recently to describe warfare, marketing tactics, music, social movements and even gardening. For our purposes, we will assume guerrilla activity has the following characteristics:

Quick: Guerrilla activity typically is a quick action with a clearly defined objective geared toward winning a small tactical victory that supports long-term goals.

Pragmatic: Guerrilla activity focuses on the practical and actionable tasks to achieve larger goals.

Focused: Guerrilla activity typically is focused on a well-defined and immediate objective that will produce results in a reasonable amount of time.

Conserves Resources: Guerrilla activity wisely and conservatively uses the resources that it has available to it. It does not spend more resources to achieve an objective than the objective provides.

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