We’ve released our most comprehensive update yet to give learning and development (L&D) teams the functionality they need to implement, manage and scale learning operations across their organizations.
To reflect this step — as well as what it means for us and L&D teams — we’ve changed our name from Synapse to Cognota.
New features and functionality span across:
- Training intake.
- Project planning.
- Capacity planning.
- Insights.
Scroll down to learn more about these updates, and how you can use Cognota to power learning operations in your organization.
Training Intake that Doesn’t Involve Scrolling through Email and Messages
Updates to Intake simplify managing and actioning training requests, while creating a more intuitive submission process for requesters.
Among other additions, key improvements for the L&D team include functionality to:
- Associate request forms with specific business units, thereby ensuring you collect information relevant for different departmental training needs.
- Collaborate with team members on the evaluation of a request, writing comments directly on the completed form — which the submitter can’t see.
- Create a new training project directly from a given request, provided you approve it, easily giving your team visibility into the requester’s needs.
Requesters can now enjoy the ability to:
- Preview request forms before filing their request, to quickly find the right form.
- View requests from other members of their team, encouraging conversations about prioritization.
- Edit the request after submission, so they can ensure your team has all the information it needs for assessment.
The anticipated results of these improvements are your team receiving requests with greater detail, while being able to assess them faster and more collaboratively.
Project Planning with the Details L&D Teams Need
With all your project workflow in one place, you’ll do better work, faster.
That’s why Projects in Cognota now provide more information and collaboration functionality — inherently relevant to training teams’ needs — than previously found in Cognota and general project management tools not explicitly built for L&D.
To make sure your project details contain everything your team needs to know, you can now:
- Add fields to project cards such as Business Unit, Budget Source, Resourcing Type and more.
- Assign Owner, Member and Collaborator roles to each project.
- Input additional information to comment and file upload sections in each project card.
To allow your team to further centralize collaboration in Cognota, you can now:
- Send notifications automatically to your team members when they’re assigned a project and tasks within that project, ensuring important action items don’t get lost in email threads or meeting notes.
- Put tasks and projects on hold, restarting whenever doing so makes sense.
- Record the actual time spent on a task, allowing for more accurate capacity planning projections.
- Switch between the Team Board and My Board, allowing you and your team members to hone in on their workflow as well as see the team’s.
As always, switching from a project card to Design is just a click away.
Reliable Capacity Planning without All the Work in Excel
The capacity planner is more dependable than ever.
By allowing team members to input time off and set default weekly capacity limits — as well as account for public holidays in their settings — you’ll have a clear picture of team and individual capacity at all times.
As a project owner, this gives you the accuracy you need to determine which team members have bandwidth to contribute. You’ll see allocated hours and capacity whenever adding them to a project. And you’ll be able to specify the duration of their tasks to ensure their available hours stay up-to-date.
This also results in L&D leadership having better visibility of workload.
Insights to Understand and Communicate Learning Operations Value
Cognota’s Insights dashboard is built to help you tell the story of learning operations in your organization, whether you’re communicating with leadership, business partners or other stakeholders.
By managing your training intake and project workflow in Cognota, the platform automatically pulls and visualizes data related to these steps of the learning operations process.
With a variety of filters, you’ll be able to see and share data such as:
- The status of received training requests (Received, Declined, In Review, Approved), by owner, time period, business unit and more.
- The speed at which requests get approved, across your team and for specific request owners.
- A breakdown of projects based on workflow stage (aligned with processes such as ADDIE, SAM and others), by priority, time period, business unit and more.
- The volume of projects created, canceled and completed within a given time period, by priority, business unit and more.
For L&D leaders, these insights will guide you to find and address inefficiencies in your learning operations process, while helping paint a picture of impact when discussing budget and resources.
What’s Next?
Try out the new-and-improved Cognota today by starting a free trial.
Or, if you’d like a discussion and guided demonstration to see how your team can manage and scale learning operations using Cognota, you can schedule a conversation.
