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It’s not everyday that you get to work on an award winning project. For the most part, technology and training projects are the quiet enablers for the business results of major corporations. If your IT is working right, and your staff knows how to use the tools, silent satisfaction from users is often the indicator of success. I was therefore very pleased to hear from Carol Cohen, Learning Program Manager at Hewlett Packard, that a project that she championed and utilized Hudson Learning & Performance consultants for, won an ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) Excellence in Practice Award. This Carol  attended the #ASTD2012 International Conference and Exposition where she received the certificate.

HP Connections and Learn2Connect

Senior executives at HP sought to improve the time efficiency within their vast global sales organization by making it easier to find experts to assist in sales challenges and learn from other team member best practices. After implementing HP Connections, a social business platform based on Jive Software, HP predicted improved sales efficiency of 20 hours selling time per year, and improved response times to customer inquiries. To achieve these objectives meant aggressively rolling out the platform to sales account teams who would need to adopt the platform and embrace extensive change to their sales process.

Carol’s Learning and Development team came up with a compelling concept, Learn2Connect, a social/collaborative training program that could effectively respond to any resistance to change, support new users as they overcome the challenge of trying something new, and help build confidence in a whole new set of skills and knowledge in the use of HP Connections.

The program followed 3 pillars of design:

1. Learning the Fundamentals: Instructor-led fundamentals classes, intro to Connections webinar briefings, task-specific learning modules.
2. Expanding Capabilities: multilingual, task-specific job aids, blog postings, facilitated discussions
3. Succeeding with Guidance: Personal trainer sessions, daily open conference calls, short training modules available on demand.

Many of the assets for Learn2Connect were housed within the Learning team’s own HP Connections portal. By doing this, the trainers “walked a mile in the shoes” of the sales team to whom they would need to make the platform a part of their work life.

The Learn2Connect space within HP Connections.

You can watch and hear Carol Cohen provide more insight into the project design and some of its innovative components in this Brainshark webinar excerpt:

Hudson Learning & Performance Team Vital to Program Success

With an ambitious, high-profile project on her hands and a tight deadline for delivery, Carol looked to outside partners to help round out the skills necessary to ensure success. She came to me knowing that:

“One of the best things about working with Hudson is the bench strength of the talent available to me. I can count on their Instructional Design, Project Management, eLearning Development and Training skills from any number of high quality resources who have proven experience within my industry.”

-Carol Cohen, Learning Program Manager, HP

Throughout the development of Learn2Connect, we were proud to engage Maryann Glover, Helena Nacinovic, and Todd DeHaven to provide support to Carol’s team. In various roles from personal trainers to blog writers, job aid producers and webinar facilitators, the Hudson team played a key part in the successful execution of the program.

If you would like to download a one page summary of our work on the Learn2Connect program, have a look at our  HP Jive Social Media Intranet Case Study. Congratulations again to Carol, the HP and Hudson team on an outstanding workplace learning and development project! We look forward to much more collaboration in the future.

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Tags: Case Study, eLearning, Instructional Design, Intranet, Learning and Development, Social Media, Trainer, Training