Book Review: Happy Sheet to the Bottom Line

From the Happy Sheet to the Bottom Line: Solving the Return on Investment Challenge by Patrick Taggart and Gail Sheppard emerges at a time when focus on ensuring explicit return on investment (ROI) from training and development could not be more pertinent. 

Taggart and Sheppard present their Performance Improvement Cycle (PIC) to help organisations improve their approach to learning and development, and thus to achieve positive ROI results. They refer to Kirkpatrick’s four levels of assessment and how Phillips has added a fifth to capture explicitly ROI as part of the evaluation process.

The authors make the point that to establish ROI there should be an evaluation of the intended participants’ knowledge before the training takes place as well as after the event.  To do this effectively it is important to be able to attribute some metrics to learning, and a simple formula is given to covert the metrics into a percentage representing ROI.  It is accepted that is not easy when benefits are not explicitly quantitative (e.g. financial savings).  The starting point is to ensure that programmes have SMART aims and that converting goals to explicit saving is easier if some cash value is attributed to these, although they acknowledge this is not always possible.  

The overall message from Taggart and Sheppard is that to achieve effective ROI organisations need to shift from the traditional ‘sheep dip’ approach to organisational development where staff might be sent on programmes ad hoc, to a more transformational, integrated approach that embeds change and measures at every stage.  The necessary changes in behaviours to achieve this are outlined clearly.

The book states the obvious but the obvious does need stating as the days of patchwork training and development with little active links to business outcomes are over.  All staff, at every level in the organisation have a responsibility to engage in development to ensure ROI for the company and for themselves.

Reviewed by Julie Hyde MCMI

Published by GPSVision Ltd
£25
ISBN 978 09564 90100