Strategy vs. Execution: Why Most L&D Teams Are Built for the Wrong Job

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What is your L&D team actually for?

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Before you answer and they know the instinct is to save, they build training or they develop a people's capabilities, I want to offer a more precise framing because how you answer this question determines how you staff the function, how you structure it, how you measure it and ultimately whether it can do what the business needs it to do.

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Here's the distinction I would draw.

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There are 2 fundamentally different types of work in a learning function.

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Work that requires deep business judgment, such as understanding what capabilities your organization actually needs, how learning connects to your specific business model, how to align stakeholders around a shared development agenda.

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And work that requires dependable execution capacity, such as the ability to build, localise, deploy, and maintain high quality learning content at the volume and speed the business requires.

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Different work types they require different skills, they have different scalability profiles, and most L&A teams are organised as if they are the same thing, which is exactly why so many struggle to do either one well at scale.

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I am Sushmitha.

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Welcome to episode 4 of 5 foundational episodes on learning execution capacity.

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We have named the problem, quantify the cost, map the velocity, and today we are addressing the organizational design question that sits underneath all of it.

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This episode is particularly relevant for all 3 audiences: HR and people leaders who design organization structure and have the authority to change how the training function is resourced.

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Functional leaders such as sales VPs, compliance heads, CHROs who have influence over how the training function supporting their teams is structured and staffed and finally CLOs and heads of L&D for actively trying to make their function more effective and sustainable.

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3 things today: The design mistake most organizations make and why it limits both quality and volume.

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The strategic split that high performing organizations have moved to.

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What stays internal and what becomes elastic and the bill versus partner portfolio decision that sits at the center of a well designed execution model.

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So let's start with section one, the design mistake, the most common organizational design mistake I see in enterprise L&D functions.

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Is treating every type of L&D work as equivalent and staffing accordingly.

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Specifically, most organizations hire instructional designers and assign them a portfolio of work that spans the full spectrum of the L&D function: needs analysis, program design, content development, project management, vendor management, stakeholder communication, measurement, and ongoing content maintenance.

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One person, all of those things and simultaneously.

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On paper, this looks like a flexible, generalist team that can respond to any need.

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In practice, it's a team where everyone is stretched across too many work types simultaneously.

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Nobody has the focus to develop deep expertise in any single area, and the throughput ceiling is low because the same people are doing strategy and execution work without any structural separation between them.

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This model worked when training demand was lower and the pace of change was slower.

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It doesn't work when demand is continuous, high volume and requires fast cycle times because strategic work and execution work have completely different rhythms.

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Strategic work that is needs analysis, learning architecture, stakeholder alignment, measurement design.

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These benefit from depth reflection and dialogue.

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It takes time to get them right.

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The cost of doing it wrong is high.

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It should not be rushed.

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You want this work done carefully by people with deep organizational knowledge and strong business judgment.

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Now execution work that is content development, localization, quality assurance, LMS deployment.

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Please benefit from volume, consistency and speed.

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This is production work.

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It has quality standards that can be defined in advance.

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It has process steps that can be systemised.

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It has output metrics that can be measured objectively.

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So the faster you can do it without compromising quality, the more training reaches your workforce.

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When you mix these 2 work types in the same team without separation, you get a team that does neither as well as it could.

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The strategic work gets crowded out by urgent execution demands.

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The next module that needs to be built.

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There's no time for careful needs analysis.

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The execution work gets delayed by the need for strategic judgment on every decision.

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The designer can't start building until they've had the stakeholder alignment conversation that should have happened in scoping itself.

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There's also a scaling problem.

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Strategic work doesn't scale by adding more people doing the same work.

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You scale strategy by getting better at it through deeper organizational knowledge, stronger stakeholder relationships and better analytical frameworks.

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Execution work does scale by adding more capacity, more developers, more localization bandwidth, more QA resources.

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But you can only scale execution if it's separated from strategy and resource differently.

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The manifestation of this design mistake looks different depending on organizational maturity.

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In small L&D teams, that looks like a team that produces high quality work when they have time but is perpetually behind on volume.

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There is never enough development capacity because the same people doing development are also doing needs analysis, stakeholder management and measurement.

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In large L&D teams, it often looks the opposite.

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A team that produces a lot of training but has lost connection to the business outcomes it was designed to serve because execution volume crowdsolve the strategic thinking.

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Now both manifestations stem from the same design choice that is treating different work types as equivalent.

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The organizations I have seen handle learning execution capacity most effectively have made a clear structural decision.

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Internal L&D owns learning strategy.

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And execution capacity is built and managed as a production system, which may be partly or largely external.

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Let me be specific about what internal L&D owns learning strategy means in practice, because this distinction is often misunderstood.

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Internal L&D owns needs analysis, the deep organizational work of understanding what capabilities the business actually needs and why.

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This requires people who know the business, who have relationships with functional leaders, who understand the organizational culture and context.

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It can't be outsourced because the relevant knowledge is organizational and contextual, not generic.

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Internal L&D also owns Learning Architecture, the strategic decision of how learning programs are structured, sequenced, and connected to business outcomes.

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What should be a formal course versus a performance support deal versus a coaching conversation versus an embedded job aid?

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How does the sales enablement program connect to the specific sales methodology your organization uses?

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These are design decisions that require business judgment and contextual knowledge.

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Internal L&D also owns stakeholder management, that is, the ongoing work of aligning business leaders around learning priorities, managing expectations about delivery timelines and resource requirements, and ensuring training investments are connected to measurable business outcomes.

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This is relationship work it lifts inside the organization.

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Internal L&D owns measurement and evaluation.

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That is the capability to assess whether training is producing the performance outcomes it was designed to produce and to feed those insights back into the design and prioritization process.

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What internal L&D does not necessarily own is the production of training content at volume.

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The actual development work that is writing scripts, building E learning modules, creating assessments, recording and editing audio and video, managing translation vendors, conducting quality assurance testing, deploying to the LMS.

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These are execution activities that can be performed to a defined quality standard by people who don't need to be embedded in the organization.

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In fact, keeping all of this work inside the organization often has a specific disadvantage.

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A fixed internal team has a fixed.

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Good ceiling when demand spikes such as a product launch, a compliance deadline or a merger integration, the internal team hits a ceiling and something has to give quality, timeline or scope.

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Always external execution capacity, whether through a managed service partner, a staff documentation model or a structured project based vendor relationship is elastic in a way that internal headcount isn't.

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It can scale up when demand spikes and scale back when it subsides without the fixed overhead of a larger permanent team.

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Now I want to be clear about what this model is not.

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It's not an argument for outsourcing everything.

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Strategic work described that is needs analysis, learning architecture, stakeholder management and measurement.

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These are genuinely necessarily internal work.

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They require organizational knowledge and judgment that an external partner cannot replicate.

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And there's a meaningful ongoing management role for internal L&D in overseeing external production capacity to ensure quality standards are maintained and the work connects to business objectives.

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So the internal team doesn't necessarily get smaller in this model, instead it gets refocused on the work that only it can do.

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The practical question that follows from the strategic split is how do you decide what to build internally versus what to partner on and what kind of partner relationship serves each type of need?

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I use a framework built around 3 demand types, each of which calls for a different capacity model.

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Demand type one recurring and continuous.

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This is the baseline production work of a mature training function, keeping existing content current across a changing regulatory and business landscape, supporting ongoing onboarding for a growing organization, maintaining compliance program currency across multiple jurisdictions, and refreshing performance support content as products evolve.

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This demand type doesn't peak dramatically.

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It just exists persistently at a volume that most fixed internal teams can't fully absorb alongside new program development for recurring and continuous demand.

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The right capacity model is a managed execution partnership, a structured ongoing relationship with an external partner who operates to your quality standards as an extension of your production capability, not a vendor you call when you have a project.

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A partner with a different standing engagement, shared standards and production capacity that's already on boarded to your organization requirements.

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Demand type 2 deadline bound spikes.

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A major product launch requiring training across your entire sales force before launch day.

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A regulatory change requiring compliance training deployment for 10,000 employees before the effective date.

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A merger integration requiring onboarding for a newly acquired workforce.

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These arrive with a hard.

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Deadline a large scope and often inadequate advance notice for deadline bound spikes.

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The right model is a controlled search bringing in focused external production capacity specifically for the spike duration with a clear brief, defined quality standards and a project management structure that ensures the output meets your standards.

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The keyword is control.

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This is not throwing a project over the world to a vendor and hoping for the best.

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It's an intensive, closely managed engagement with clear acceptance criteria.

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Demand type 3 defined role gap situations where you need a specific capability your current team doesn't have, such as expertise in a new learning technology specialization in a new content format.

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A deep knowledge of a new geographic market or regulatory context for defined role gaps.

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The right model is an embedded specialist and external expert who works inside your teams tools, processes and quality standards for a defined period.

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The goal is either to build a lasting internal competency through knowledge transfer or to maintain a defined ongoing specialist contribution in an area that doesn't warrant a permanent internal hire.

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The most expensive mistake I see in L&D capacity planning is using the wrong model for a demand time.

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Using a managed execution partner for a one time spike adds governance overhead that engagement does justify.

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Using project by project vendors for continuous baseline demand needs your constant.

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re-onboarding, never building shared quality understanding, and paying a coordination premium for inconsistency.

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Using a generalist vendor for a defined role gap means you get generic output rather than specialised expertise.

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The discipline is classification before sourcing.

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What is the shape of this demand?

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Is it continuous, episodic, or one-time gap?

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The answer determines the model.

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The model determines the partner type, and the partner type determines the outcome.

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Let me illustrate the strategic split with the real case from a large professional services firm, a consulting organization with roughly 15,000 employees operating globally with a continuous training obligation across professional development, client engagement skills and front lines.

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When I first worked with this organization, their L&D function had 18 people organised as a generalist team.

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Everyone did a bit of everything.

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They were producing good quality work, genuinely good instructional design.

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But significantly behind on volume.

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Average time from training request to deployment was 4 months.

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They had a backlog of over 60 projects at various stages of development.

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The team knew they had a capacity problem.

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The CLO had requested additional headcount twice and been declined 4 times on the basis that the existing team was already well resourced related to industry benchmarks.

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The conversation we had was about reframing the constraint.

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The team wasn't under resourced for strategy work, they were under resourced for execution work.

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The 18 people were spending the large majority of their time on development, building content.

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They were spending a small minority of their time on needs analysis, stakeholder management and measurement.

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That's the strategic work that should be driving everything else.

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The redesign separated the function into 2 explicit streams.

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A strategic team of 8 people, the most experienced, most organizationally connected members of the team, focused entirely on needs analysis, learning architecture, stakeholder alignment, and measurement.

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An execution stream initially built through a managed external partnership rather than internal headcount, handled all content development, localization, and deployment.

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In the first year, 3 specific outcomes changed.

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The backlog cleared, the average time from request to deployment fell from 4 months to 6 weeks for standard content.

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And for the first time, the CLO had systemic data on whether training was producing business outcomes because the strategic stream now had the bandwidth to build measurement into every significant programme.

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The total cost of the redesign module internal strategic team plus managed external execution partner was approximately equivalent to what it would have cost to hire the additional headcount.

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That had been requested and declined, but unlike fixed headcount, the external execution capacity was elastic when a major practice expansion in Q3 generated an unusual development spike.

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The execution capacity scaled up without disrupting anything else.

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When Q4 was lighter, it scaled back.

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So 3 things from today.

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First, map your L&D teams time allocation in a typical month.

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What percentage of the time is spent on strategic work meets analysis architecture?

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Stakeholder management measurement versus execution work, that is development, localization, QA and deployment.

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If execution work is consuming more than 60 to 70% of the team's time, you have a structural imbalance that's limiting both the quality of your strategy and the volume of your execution.

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Second, classify your current training demand by time.

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What's recurring and continuous?

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What are the deadline bounce spikes in the next 12 months?

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Where are the defined role gaps in your current team?

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Classification tells you which capacity model you need for each type and where a different sourcing approach could produce materially different outcomes.

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3rd, challenge the internal headcount assumption in your next capacity conversation.

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Before supporting a request for more internal L&E staff, ask whether the work that needs doing is judgment work or execution work.

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If it is execution work, external capacity might be faster.

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More flexible and no more expensive than internal head count and significantly more elastic to demand variability.

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Episode 4 Done the organizational design question underneath the learning execution capacity prompt.

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Episode 5 finale brings everything together into the learning operations model.

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All the 5 components, 3 maturity levels for each and where to start for your specific situation.

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Stay tuned, visit CommLabindia.com slash podcast.

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Subscribe whenever you are listening.

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I am Sushmitha, thank you for listening to the eLearning Champions podcast.