"Nearly three years into their e-learning initiative, what advice would members of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Group's team give others?

Focus on the business needs.

Target areas where there's a strong need for change and where you can see a dramatic change in performance, says Lars Hyland, account director for Epic, a custom e-learning development company that helped RBS build its online learning program. 'The bank's primary objective was to invest in content that would serve their needs, rather than spend a lot of money rolling out a LMS and sorting through generic content.'

Think of e-learning as a competitive advantage.

Hyland says he was pleasantly surprised that RBS mentioned its Training and Communications Network (TCN) - and its e-learning investment - in its takeover bid for National Westminster bank (NatWest). TCN is a system of multimedia PCs linked to an intranet and equipped to receive satellite broadcasts. Royal Bank officials could use the network to instantly deliver messages to employees in NatWest branches. 'It was interesting for me to see how such an intervention could affect RBS at the macro business level in terms of the acquisition and consolidation,' he says.

Get the stakeholders on board.

The Royal Bank included representatives from its HR department, retail network support, corporate affairs, and IT department; Epic; and a recording and production studio in the creation and development of its online learning project. Dave Buglass, manager of the learning infrastructure, emphasizes the importance of having IT on your side. 'They were working on the business case with us from day one. That way, we wouldn't end up with surprising them at the last minute by asking for a learning platform,' he says.

Keep courses short.

Initially, RBS's online courses for customer advisers and customer service officers consisted of lessons that could take an hour or more to complete. During the past year, those elements have been broken down to learning units or learning objects.* 'We took some of those modules and chopped them into 15-minute segments,' says Buglass. 'Since we did that, people have been using these as performance support tools after they take the training.'

Market like a dot-com.

'Don't just go spend money on infrastructure and content. You have to spend it getting people to buy in,' Buglass says. He admits that the company underestimated the cultural change involved in moving from the classroom to the virtual world when rolling out the training in RBS branches.

Don't get caught up in technology for the sake of the technology.

When working with RBS, Hyland had the team take stock of what they really needed from an LMS. 'When you're fresh to this, you come up with things you want and think you need. You may not really need them or be capable of running them,' he says. Consequently, the system Epic built for RBS may not have been the most elegant, but it does what they need it to."

Taking It To The Bank (main article)
Why Build Rather Than Buy?

The pros and cons of learning objects are discussed in Reusable Learning Objects, a thought-provoking white paper by Epic's John Harris and Matthew Fox. Click here for a summary.