Measuring your success in learning and development - is the Success Case Method the answer?

The words 'return on investment' are almost guaranteed to send a cold shiver down the spine of the pink and fluffy ones in the L&D fraternity.

Ever since I crossed over from making money to helping others make money, most of the L&D practitioners I come across come up with all kinds of excuses as to why calculating ROI couldn’t be done. "It’s too complicated," they would say, or "All we do is deliver the training and measure the initial impact - the rest is down to the partners".

When you think about it, this is a bit like a midfielder blaming the striker for not running fast enough to catch his misplaced pass - something being difficult is not a valid excuse for at least having a go. And as in football, so in business - it's a team game. You still need to work out how you can measure the impact of what you do, so that you can continue to play to your strengths and minimise weakness.

The Success Case Method of evaluation allows you to do this by focusing your evaluation on the extreme ends of performance. This may seem at odds with convention, but it allows you to work out what's different about those who put all their learning into practice, and those that implement none of it.

Once you work out what is different at the poles, you have high-quality data that can be extrapolated into numbers, even financial numbers. What’s more, you have the basis for a dialogue with the business that can allow you to add real value to what partners do, as well as improving the quality of your own output.

Find out more about the Success Case Method in this extract from Robert O Brinkerhoff's book, 'The Success Case Method'.

Do you use the Success Case Method in your law firm? What other methods of measuring learning and development ROI do you use? Tell us about it in the comments section below...