In a recent Training Magazine Network webinar, learning leader Debbie Richards laid out a practical roadmap to shift from an overwhelmed order-taking function into a strategic business engine using data, operations, and AI-enabled LearnOps practices.
Why L&D Needs Data-Driven Operations Now
Most L&D teams are doing more with less in chaotic conditions: Reactive requests, siloed tools, and little data to prove impact. Brandon Hall Group research cited in the session shows only 11% of organizations say their learning strategy is fully aligned with business goals, leaving 89% operating with a disconnect between training and real business outcomes. About 25% admit they are not aligned at all, which is why L&D often struggles to secure resources or “a seat at the table” with the C‑suite.
To surface how widespread this is, Debbie ran a live poll on alignment, where “somewhat aligned” is the clear majority, this is dangerous territory, she argues, because it means L&D still cannot consistently prove value when finance leaders come asking tough questions.
The Cost of Operational Chaos in L&D
L&D’s everyday friction is a business problem, not an annoyance. The immediate focus tends to be in “leaked wages,” but a more strategic lens reveals a deeper issue: chaos represents hours of wasted capacity every year. Those hours could be invested in accelerating sales onboarding to hit revenue targets faster, or upskilling engineers to speed time-to-market for critical products.
In a LearnOps mindset, these hours are not simply “lost time”, they are misallocated capital, and every hour spent chasing spreadsheets or approvals is an hour not driving business performance. The problem is systemic, not individual.
What Is LearnOps and Why It Matters
LearnOps is the operating system for the L&D function. Where an LMS manages content delivery to employees, LearnOps manages the end-to-end operations behind the learning lifecycle, including intake, planning, resourcing, execution, and measurement. This framework is based on Cognota and Brandon Hall Group’s “The Rise of Learning Operations,” a research-based model for modernizing learning operations.
Teams can move from chaos to a repeatable, scalable cycle:
- Plan and align: the “digital front door” where all requests enter, are tied to business goals, and evaluated before any resources are spent.
- Execute: where real capacity is managed and work is allocated based on hours, not gut feel.
- Measure: where operational data, such as time to market and scrap rate, are tracked and reported as business velocity, not just “courses delivered.”
Despite this clear structure, 83% of L&D teams attempt to run this framework using three to eight disconnected tools, creating tool sprawl, silos, and administrative drag. Most teams sit at Level 2 (“Managed”) on Cognota’s LearnOps maturity model, with siloed work, manual data, and fragmented tools; the near-term goal is to reach Level 3, with a single source of truth that positions L&D as a trusted advisor rather than an order taker. Levels 4 and 5 represent more advanced futures, including AI-powered predictive operations where learning teams can anticipate demand instead of constantly firefighting.
Three Core Strategies for L&D Operational Excellence
1. Fix the Front Door: Formal Intake and Alignment
Only about 40% of L&D teams use a formal intake process; most still accept work through hallway conversations, emails, or impromptu Slack and Teams messages. These “dark signals” never enter a visible system, making it impossible to prioritize what you cannot see. Instead of training L&D professionals to personally say “no,” implement a standard intake form that requires stakeholders to define the business problem, desired impact, and urgency up front.
Once requests are captured and structured, you can automate prioritization based on criteria such as alignment to strategic goals, risk, or potential value. This reframes difficult conversations from “we’re too busy” to “to start this, we’d have to pause a higher-priority project, what would the executive team prefer?”, which helps reposition L&D from cost center to strategic partner.
2. Stop Guessing and Start Forecasting Capacity
Do you have real-time data on your team’s capacity to take on new work? Most respondents answer that they would either have to ask every team member individually or guess. 64% of L&D teams lack visibility into workloads, meaning they are effectively “flying blind” and cannot be strategic if they don’t know their own availability.
Shift from “feeling-based” planning to hourly-based planning, similar to checking a bank balance before writing a check. This involves:
- Auditing available hours for each team member
- Assigning estimated hours to each intake request; and
- Monitoring utilization to spot resource blind spots early.
Even simple tools like Microsoft Forms feeding into a shared spreadsheet can be a starting point, although the gold standard would be to move toward a more robust system of record.
3. Measure Operational ROI: Scrap Rate and Time to Market
Run L&D like a business, by measuring operational outcomes, not just learning activities. Two essential metrics your CFO will care about are:
- Scrap rate: Borrowed from manufacturing, scrap in L&D is the percentage of projects that are canceled, shelved, or never launched due to poor alignment or lack of resources. Lowering scrap ensures that more of L&D’s budget and effort stays focused on the organization’s north star.
- Time to market: When a product launches in Q1 but training isn’t ready until Q2, L&D becomes a revenue bottleneck. Reducing time to market directly affects revenue velocity, making L&D an accelerant rather than a blocker.
When L&D reports on scrap rate and time to market, it is reporting on business velocity, demonstrating clearly how much faster the company can move because operations are optimized.
New Roles and the Future of AI-Enabled LearnOps
The rise of roles such as Learning Operations Manager, Director of Learning Operations, VP of Learning Enablement, and Head of Learning Strategy are positions that sit at the intersection of L&D, HR, finance, data, and IT.
Every L&D role will soon include an AI dimension, shifting AI’s function from “helping write quizzes” to acting as an “agentic operator” that manages signals across the learning ecosystem. Examples include AI systems that:
- Analyze new intake requests and automatically check them against real-time team capacity,
- Map learning consumption to business performance data to identify which programs actually move the needle, and
- Anticipate upcoming demand by monitoring product launches or strategic initiatives.
LearnOps is the foundation that makes AI useful at scale, turning L&D workflows into a data-rich environment where predictive, autonomous operations become possible.
Your “LearnOps Sprint”
To make the ideas actionable, try this simple Learn Ops sprint for L&D leaders:
- Stop the leaks
- Stop accepting new training requests via ad hoc email, Slack, Teams, or hallway conversations.
- Redirect stakeholders to a single digital front door (even if it’s a basic Microsoft Form) so every request is documented and aligned to strategy.
- Audit your opportunity costs
- With your team, calculate how many hours were spent last week in status meetings, chasing approvals, and managing admin tasks.
- Compare those hours to your CEO’s top priorities (e.g., a product launch or sales pivot) to reveal where your time should have gone.
- Establish your baseline
- Use a maturity assessment (such as Cognota’s free LearnOps maturity assessment) to understand where your team falls today from Level 1 to Level 5.
- Use the output as a conversation starter with your team and leadership to build a roadmap for improvement.
- Grade your toolkit
- Ask whether you would ever expect Sales to operate without a CRM, then challenge why L&D is still running its operations on spreadsheets.
- Start planning a shift from manual, fragmented tools to a dedicated platform that can centralize intake, capacity management, and ROI reporting.
The cost of chaos is, in many ways, now optional; L&D leaders can decide to stop paying it by formalizing operations and embracing a LearnOps mindset.
How Cognota and the LearnOps Community Fit In
Cognota is actively leading a LearnOps movement, helping L&D teams evolve from cost center to performance engine in an AI-driven enterprise. Get started for free by:
- Joining Cognota’s LearnOps Community, a global network of roughly 8,000 learning professionals who participate in live coffee chats, podcast club discussions, and informal problem-solving sessions.
- Attending the free Reinventing Learning Operations workshops to build a concrete LearnOps roadmap for your organization.
Organizations with formal intake and project visibility processes are two to three times more likely to achieve executive alignment and faster decision making. That shift, from ad hoc execution to proactive, data-informed operations, is the path to delivering measurable, strategic value.
