Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
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CaseStudyMasterCard Case Study Driving Innovation to Solve Critical Business Issues HOW MASTERCARD IS DRIVING PRODUCT MANAGEMENT EXCELLENCE In a world that's moving toward digital commerce, MasterCard is a technology company that's been charged with developing innovative products in the global marketplace designed to make payments safer, simpler and smarter. To drive innovation in the payments space, MasterCard needed to build an organizational capability around product management excellence. It needed the necessary skills, capabilities and disciplined approach to product management to ensure high quality, rapid deployment of world-class products. "Business, technology, and the way people make payments are changing at an everincreasing pace," says Leigh Bochicchio, Vice President of Global Learning at MasterCard. "To stay ahead of the trends and drive a focus on innovation coupled with a disciplined approach to product management, we needed to build a learning curriculum that was global, yet recognized regional and local diferences. It needed to be fexible and reinforce the learning over time but still allow for rapid global deployment." With more than 7,800 employees and countless cultural and generational diferences in ofces around the globe, the mission for the learning organization shifed to: How do we support the business to achieve product management excellence? How do we get on the right path to world-class product innovation? MasterCard took on the complex business challenge by evaluating a number of learning alternatives including: >> Development of e-learning programs to support the building of critical skills and capabilities; >> Flying SMEs around the world and bringing in learners from their respective countries for days of face-to-face instructor-led training; >> Additional investment in a technology platform that delivered multi-faceted content from workbooks to videos to case studies along with learning assessments. Although recognizing the need for the various types of learning options, MasterCard concluded that the generic form of e-learning content, the passive nature of accessing ondemand content, and the signifcant funding for multiple face-to-face learning was costprohibitive for this initiative. Learning professionals knew they needed to leverage technology to address the time-sensitive business need, and they knew the solution needed to be able to: >> Engage and encourage collaboration globally >> Provide content that was relevant and connected to the learners day-to-day responsibilities >> Enable rapid design, customization and deployment Connected learning became their path of choice, and they aren't looking back. THE CONNECTED LEARNING SOLUTION MasterCard partnered with CorpU and quickly introduced two critical initiatives to support the transformation to the new connected learning platform and to begin building critical skills. First, it leveraged key leaders across the globe who were responsible for engaging employees in discussions with colleagues by using stimulating content related to product development and management. Second, MasterCard introduced a fve-week "Guided Learning Journey" focused on building and innovating scalable business models. With these programs deployed, MasterCard has seen engagement and discussion of issues among a large audience of geographically dispersed employees, an increased adoption of tools, business frameworks and practices on large initiatives, and greater collaboration across regions to solve high-priority business issues. With these programs deployed, a series of additional learning programs is under way for launch in 2014, and MasterCard is expanding its use of the platform with other business units. "Te connected learning platform of CorpU is fostering some great discussions, ongoing feedback, and providing real business results — participants are 'doing their job' during the learning process and solving complex business problems that require collaborative thinking as opposed to working on theoretical examples in classroom training," says Bochicchio. REAL BUSINESS IMPACT Te connected learning platform enabled MasterCard to enrich its overall learning experience by delivering relevant, applicable content, generating rich discussions, and providing the opportunity for people to apply the learning to their daily activities. Elearning! December 2013 / January 2014 47