Speaker 1: In university, I did an economics degree and my thesis was on switching costs. These are the costs incurred when a consumer moves from one supplier to another. One we're probably all familiar with are frequent flyer points. We fly a lot with one airline, it makes it hard to fly with the other airline because we feel like we're kind of losing on those frequent flyer points and that the cost of migrating to the other airline is too much. And organizations face the same problem with learning management systems. Lots of organizations out there have an old learning management system, had it for five or ten years. It's really not fit for purpose anymore, it's out of date, it's very expensive, it's not doing what they want, but the cost of switching to a new LMS looks a bit overwhelming and so they put up with the inferior one as a result. Let's look at an eight-step process to help minimize the cost of switching between LMSs, to allow you to think about getting the benefits from a new LMS. So first thing is, we need to scope out what exactly is being migrated. I bet in that old LMS you had tons of training courses that you're not using anymore and lots of stuff that doesn't actually need to be migrated. So the initial part is what actually needs to move across, it might be a lot less than you think. We're going to reduce that further in step two by focusing on stages. And what all we really need to do for day zero, your cutover date to the new LMS, is migrate the training we need for that day. You don't need to have every single bit of training ready on the day you cut over. You just need enough to get going. This is typically induction and compliance training for new employees. So we're just going to focus on that for day zero. Once we've done that, we're then going to migrate across your users. This is step three. It's usually quite quick. You can usually download a CSV from your old LMS and upload that into the new LMS or use an integration to quickly grab things from a HR system. It's actually a lot less work than people think. In step four, we're going to return to the list of things that we want to migrate for day zero and now do the content part. What we might be doing here is selectively identifying those modules that need to be ready on day zero and figuring out where they come from. Maybe we're moving an existing score module from one LMS to the other. That's easy. Maybe we're actually going to update some training because it's a bit out of date. And often this data migration is a good chance to recognize that. So maybe that's a little bit more work, but maybe we can slim that down to the smallest amount of change needed right now. Maybe we're actually moving from one LMS's library to another LMS's library and there's matching topics, which means the migration is almost nothing. If we can really cut down the amount of content that needs to be migrated and specify where it's coming from, that content migration for day zero can be a lot smaller than you think. We're then going to migrate in step five, the training data for day one. So this is just the data that needs to be in the new system about previous enrollments for day zero or day one. Now, this is not every single bit of training ever completed in the other LMS. It's just the modules that you've moved across so far. With a modern LMS, you can normally fix this via a CSV upload. So you can download all of your training history out of the other LMS and upload it into the new LMS and also backdate all the completion dates so it matches. We've seen organizations transfer 50,000 records like that in under an hour. At this point now, we've migrated across the content. We've got your users ready. We've migrated across historical training data or for just the bit of data we need for day zero. So now we cut over. Now, you're in the new LMS with new employees and people doing essential training on that day. Now, at this point, we can move to day two, three, four and five and continue to migrate the rest across as we need to, each time asking ourselves, does this really need to be migrated? Maybe it doesn't. Maybe you just need a historical record that something was previously done in the old LMS. So just getting a big download of your data from that LMS and saving it is enough. And indeed, if you have to exit your old LMS really quickly, just getting that spreadsheet out of them is pretty much all you need. Not surprisingly, when you approach this as a change management process and boil it down into simple steps, it really becomes just a couple of weeks to migrate out of one LMS into another and get all those benefits that you're looking for.