Part of HP's turnaround plan was to expand the reach of its corporate university organization-wide.
When Meg Whitman became HP's CEO in 2011, her turnaround plans for the company required a fundamental shift in our strategies for talent management and succession planning. Going forward, talent management needed to be a source of competitive advantage, and successors to leadership roles had to be "ready now" to assume new responsibilities rather than "ready with development."
People philosophy
Tracy Keogh, who had joined HP as human resources executive vice president only a few months earlier, quickly refined our HR and people strategies to support the business turnaround and drive employee engagement. Our people philosophy recognizes that HP employees will contribute through many roles during the course of their careers here.
We do not hire just to obtain a particular skill set currently in demand. Instead we hire for each individual's long-term potential. The company also hires early-career professionals and grows its leadership pipeline from within.
This philosophy places a great deal of responsibility on the learning and development (L&D) organization. We can't simply train people to perform in their current roles. Our success depends on preparing them to thrive in a changing technology and business landscape—not just to help them achieve their personal goals, but also to support HP's future plans.
As a result, we have thousands of courses available. Although keeping our learning programs up-to-date is, of course, important, we realized we needed to better align learning to career development—and to make learning easier for employees to find and take. Based on the success of a pilot university for sales, we felt ready to expand its reach to all roles and locations companywide and launched HP University as a user interface to the available learning.
The challenge
HP's L&D organization supports more than 300,000 employees in 105 countries around the world. With five major business groups and a full range of global functions, HP is an incredibly complex enterprise, and recent mergers and acquisitions have brought in employees with a broad spectrum of experiences, cultures, and skill sets. Work at HP is organized in more than 200 job families across 19 functions—from engineering to finance, to marketing and sales.
When we began the turnaround, learning and career development were separate organizations, and aligning learning opportunities to career plans was a challenge for employees. Learners complained that courses were difficult to find or that enrollment in courses of broad interest was limited to employees in certain business groups.
Our main web portal for learners was receiving 8,000 visits a week, which provided users with links to many additional learning sites. Learners also could bypass the portal and go directly to our Grow @hp learning management system (LMS). However, many expressed frustration with the difficulty of searching through it, and our portal was not providing the help they needed to find courses.
The major drivers for the new university were HP's journey, the development of HR as a strategic competitive advantage, and the need for an L&D response to these efforts.
HP's journey
Under Whitman's leadership, HP is making changes to support a turnaround to drive growth. The former eBay CEO joined HP's board of directors in January 2011 and was named president and CEO nine months later.
In May 2012, Whitman announced a multiyear initiative to simplify business process, advance innovation, and deliver better results for customers, employees, and shareholders. Savings from restructuring were to be reinvested in people, processes, and technology to support HP's journey.
Our restructuring effort continues on track for completion by the end of 2014. By 2016, Whitman expects HP's revenues to be growing in line with gross domestic product. Operating profit is expected to grow faster than revenue, industry-leading margins, and disciplined capital allocation.
HR as a strategic competitive advantage
The HP Way, a management style shaped by HP founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, was revolutionary in its time for its emphasis on offering employees opportunities "to be their best, to realize their potential, and to be recognized for their achievements." As a key part of our turnaround in 2012, we rolled out The HP Way Now—a cultural ecosystem grounded in our past and relevant for the present and future, with a focus on what really differentiates HP.
Our competitive advantage, sustainable over time, is our people. As Keogh says, "HP's success has always been built on its people—they are our legacy and our future. Their talent, spirit, energy, and drive are rivaled only by their potential."
We hire great people, and we let them lead. We've achieved exceptional levels of workforce efficiency, but to remain competitive and grow, we need breakthrough performance that will drive quality and innovation for our customers.
We've been developing cutting-edge HR programs and processes to make HP the best place to build a career. Our competitors can replicate technology almost overnight, but it takes years to develop a skilled and engaged workforce.
Our focus for 2013 is on delivering HR programs to enable business performance. To identify and grow talent, we're expanding our succession planning and talent review processes and growing our talent pipeline through targeted internal and external recruiting efforts. And our L&D organization has the task of providing specialized, targeted training focused on delivering business results.
The L&D response
In early 2012, our L&D team began planning the future state of our organization to support the changes championed by Whitman and Keogh. We needed to support employee career development with easy access to targeted learning, develop future leaders, drive sales capabilities, and develop a more user-friendly interface to our Grow @hp LMS. (Replacing the LMS was not an option, both for financial reasons and because Grow @hp works well as a content repository and utility for course registration and completion tracking.)
We defined our vision for the future state within a corporate university structure. HP University represents a new way to organize learning to provide a high-quality, consistent experience for all HP employees. Employees have easy access to the learning and the career development tools they need through a unified structure of colleges, local training centers, and career development resources. Integration of careers into HP University was achieved with no organizational restructuring, based on a strong partnership between the L&D and career development functions in HR.
Program launch
After months of design, development, and change management, we launched HP University companywide in April 2013 with a high-profile communications initiative. During the first week, we had nearly 80,000 visits to our new HPU web portal, with great feedback from learners.
Of course, this is just the beginning for HP University. We continue to evolve our processes, and incremental improvements to the HPU learner portal are in progress.
Going forward, we are focusing on offering additional courses via open enrollment that were previously only available to specific audiences in specific businesses. Open enrollment not only allows more employees to gain the skills and knowledge they need for current and future roles, but it also ensures that we fill classes to capacity, which maximizes our return on learning investments. One of our business units has been able to achieve significant efficiencies in delivery cost and fill rate in a supplier-delivered program via open enrollment.
A vision realized
Although it is too early to measure the full business impact of our new corporate university, learner responses to the web portal are positive. At launch, a poll on the new HPU portal asked visitors whether HPU makes it easier to find the learning they need. Seventy-four percent agreed or strongly agreed.
Learner feedback from all over the company tells us we're moving in the right direction. A program manager said, "Love the university look and feel—very well done," and a software architect described the portal as "very intuitive and organized, making it easier to find topics I am interested in."
A supervisor in our Global Business Services organization commented: "EXCELLENT!!! This is such a nice initiative & useful repository for the employees! Thank you for bringing all the great information & trainings we have to one single place!" Our favorite feedback came from an account technical lead who said, "This site ROCKS! ... I am a lot more motivated to take on additional learning opportunities presented by this website."
At the start of this process, Keogh and I had a vision, and I presented that vision in very raw form to my team. I didn't tell them what process to follow and I warned them that schedules would be tight, funding would be limited, and they would face no shortage of obstacles.
Some people spend their time coming up with reasons why the job can't be done. My team spends their time coming up with ways to do the job.
The whole L&D organization pitched in and performed above and beyond their job descriptions, led by a core group of people who wouldn't let obstacles prevent progress. When others would have said, "It's too hard. I'm not going to try," my team just worked harder.
Our Approach
When the HP University concept launched in 2012, we soon realized that the team would have to organize itself to process a massive amount of work in a very short time. We needed a structure that allowed us to make decisions efficiently, so we decided to employ a project management office model that enabled us to monitor progress across work streams and keep deliverables on track.
We kicked off the launch process as a major initiative in June 2012, with separate work streams for the HPU colleges, the learner web portal, the funding model, training centers for face-to-face learning, training delivery, and usage reporting. Recognizing the need for change management, we also set up a communications work stream to prepare employees in our HR and learning and development (L&D) organizations to act as ambassadors for the new university, and we began identifying the audiences we would need to reach.
Early on, we established nine colleges to organize core learning in areas such as business and professional skills, engineering, quality, sales, and supply chain. The college teams organized course curriculums by topic. A course catalog team designed a user interface to facilitate searches by college, topic, and delivery method (face-to-face, live virtual, or web-based self-paced). And an HP web development team assisted with design and implementation of the HPU learner portal.
We ran two types of focus groups to get learners’ input on their needs. One set of focus groups examined the organization of learning in the university. Other focus groups provided user testing of the HPU portal site. Their feedback was critical and resulted in further refinement of the university and the portal.
Communications efforts began with an internal web-based event where we began to educate our L&D organization on the corporate university concept. As the April 2013 launch approached, additional communications events updated the organization on the university design, implementation progress, and future plans.
In the final weeks before the launch, communications tool kits were made available to help learning and HR professionals introduce the university to their business partners. The week before launch, we provided in-depth training through a series of major events for 2,500 HR and L&D professionals whose support would be critical to successful change management. Communications efforts continue via posters, email newsletters, and web articles.
Post-launch, we began collecting usage statistics on the new web portal along with user feedback as a guide to future enhancements. Within two months after the launch, we defined Phase II enhancements and began work on incremental improvements with completion targeted for the end of HP’s fiscal year in October 2013.