Ninth House Measures Success with Metrics that Matter®
Company Overview: Ninth House was founded in 1996 and specializes in a unique blended learning approach to leadership development.
Description of Learning Program:Ninth House offers an innovative approach to learning. Busy executives can engage with Ninth House technology tools via self-paced courses, practice simulations, and Instant Advice® for reinforcement and retention.
Measurement Approach: Ninth House takes a customer-driven approach with its solutions. Ninth House customers requested impact data on its programs. Ninth House studied the points in their learning process where participants could naturally and unobtrusively provide feedback and meaningful data about their learning experience. KnowledgeAdvisors then worked with Ninth House to craft customized data collection instruments based on the KnowledgeAdvisors standard, benchmarkable instruments.
The result is a highly scaleable, reasonably priced solution to collect not only satisfaction data but forecast effectiveness, impact, results and financial ROI very early in a client experience with Ninth House. This feedback is critical to Ninth House clients because they often trial the Ninth House solution and need timely and credible information to determine next steps. In addition, KnowledgeAdvisors Metrics that Matter® (MTM) analytics technology automatically follows-up with participants and if desired their managers, to ‘true up’ the initial forecast of impact, results and financial ROI. This enables Ninth House to go back to the customer with an accurate picture of the learning effect on the job.
Measurement Obstacles:The result is a highly scaleable, reasonably priced solution to collect not only satisfaction data but forecast effectiveness, impact, results and financial ROI very early in a client experience with Ninth House. This feedback is critical to Ninth House clients because they often trial the Ninth House solution and need timely and credible information to determine next steps. In addition, KnowledgeAdvisors Metrics that Matter® (MTM) analytics technology automatically follows-up with participants and if desired their managers, to ‘true up’ the initial forecast of impact, results and financial ROI. This enables Ninth House to go back to the customer with an accurate picture of the learning effect on the job.
Measurement Successes: Ninth House achieved success by making MTM a standard component in all of its customer pilots. Ninth House invested a reasonable amount of time to understand how to administer the MTM system so they can be self-sufficient in using the technology in a scaleable way with little outside assistance. The tool is user friendly and once defaults are assigned it can take less than five minutes to prepare a measurement exercise for a client. Once done the technology will collect, store, process and report the results to Ninth House, saving significant time and money.
Ninth House honed in on the ‘standard’ reports they use with their customers. A Quick Question Report shows the customer every question and answer through a stratification of the data and mean scores. This allows Ninth House a tactical communication vehicle to pinpoint their areas of strength and isolate any areas that need improvement.
Another ‘standard’ report for Ninth House is the Human Capital ROI Card. This is a summary of all learning measurement levels with Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for each. This is a communication vehicle for client decision-makers as it summarizes satisfaction, effectiveness, impact, results, and the financial return relative to the cost of the program.
Finally, Ninth House prepares executive summaries. The MTM data is easily transferable to Excel to allow for offline analysis. Ninth House applies their knowledge of the learning program with their interpretation of the analytics data to summarize the client experience. This provides the client with a consultative feedback vehicle to document the value Ninth House created from the learning process.