Our Customer Success team shares how you can leverage your Cognota Intake and Project insights when having budgeting conversations for the upcoming year.
This month we launched our new Insights dashboards to provide teams with operational analytics that they can leverage to understand their team performance and efficiency. It’s a timely release, given conversations that teams are having around 2023 planning and budgeting.
We wanted to share some of the data points you can leverage from your Cognota Insights when having planning conversations with your leadership. And we’d love to hear how you’re using the Insights dashboard to guide these conversations too!
If you’re using Cognota to receive requests for training development or learning support from business stakeholders, you’ve got good insight into the pulse of the organization’s training needs. Understanding how these requests are trending can be a valuable tool in communicating and forecasting future volume.
You’ll be able to see a month-over-month analysis by request status, type of request received, form selected and the business unit the request originated from.
If these charts show that the volume of your requests has been steadily increasing, you can communicate this trend with leadership so they understand the potential impacts on team bandwidth and capacity.
It also will allow you to see if you’re supporting one business unit more than others so if there is a shared services model, you understand which client groups may be requiring more support and therefore budget and resourcing.
All requests are also not equal from a time commitment perspective. A request for course maintenance may be an easier lift than new content development, whereas some requests may just represent simple tasks that need to be completed. Understanding trends in the request type volume can be a critical way to make a business case for more resources for certain types of project or task work.
Analyzing the requests you were not able to approve can also be a valuable tool during budget conversations. If you see that you’re declining requests due to scope or resourcing you can have strategic conversations with leadership to understand the impact of having to turn those away.
If you’re declining requests because they are duplicates, you may get a good indication of organizational focuses and where you should be investing more time.
Often, teams look at trends in what they are approving, but what you’re declining can also yield interesting insights.
It may seem relatively straightforward, but having a good understanding on the volume of projects you’ve supported can be a key factor in budget and planning conversations. Without a LearnOps platform, teams are often left to guess at how much work has been completed by who and when, whereas the Insights dashboard can quickly show you how many projects were started, completed and remain in progress.
You’ll also be able to see a presentation of Project priority which can help guide your planning. For example, if the large majority of the projects you supported were all High priority, you may need to assess whether you have proper resources or what might have to shift if resources are constrained.
The Insights dashboards will also show you a representation of your Project Health. Project timelines can be at risk for all sorts of reasons; scope creep, priority changes, SME availability, procurement challenges.
Being able to show the number of projects that have been completed on track and as per their project timelines, versus where you may have needed additional resources can be a helpful tool in communicating your team and resource needs.
If you’re interested in additional resources around planning, budgeting and demonstrating return on learning investment, check out this panel conversation.
