In business the generally accepted litmus test for deciding to handle any task or initiative in-house or to outsource it usually comes down to a simple question – Is this what we do best? Here’s how to apply this litmus test. The things that you do best should be kept in-house, everything else – outsource it. We should define “best” since it’s so subjective. In this instance, best means world-class. What that means to you is this, if your organization cannot deliver a world-class training, certification, and licensing program you should outsource it. In yesterday’s post http://www.jasztech.com/2010/11/training-certification-and-licensing-–-preparing-for-success/ we examined the considerable level of effort involved in establishing and maintaining a world-class credentialing program, so your conclusion to outsource should be a guilt-free decision. Think of it as freeing up your personnel to do what they do best.

Although the benefits to outsourcing credentialing are fairly obvious some are not so intuitive so we’ll list them for you.

Benefits of Outsourcing Credentialing

Personnel Resource Savings – Large organizations will need several staffers to manage its program. Mid-size organizations will require at least one person. Small organizations will require one full-time person for the first 90-days during program development, while maintenance will require 10 – 20 hours per week.

Advantage of Economies of Scale – By selecting a reputable and experienced firm to outsource to you can take advantage of long standing relationships with the vendors used by your training, certification, and licensing program. Often times vendors will offer better terms, conditions, and pricing to the outsourced firm because of its high-volume purchasing practices. The benefit to you is realized through lower prices and increased flexibility in how you use the goods and services offered by training and exam voucher vendors. Do you need special examination dates setup for your organization? Looking for lower rates than advertised? Would a longer exam or training voucher expiration date work great for your workforce? Often the firm that you outsource to can leverage the business that it brings to the credentialing vendors, to negotiate a better deal for you. We’ll use a case study to explore how some Department of Defense organizations have taken an innovative approach to credentialing and saved an estimated (collective) $1.75 million in start-up costs.

Reduced Start-Up and Maintenance Costs – Another huge benefit is that your credentialing program’s operating costs are distributed across all of the outsourced vendor’s clients. This allows your organization to have a customized credentialing program for a fraction of the price.

From Concept to Production at Warp Speed – Establishing a new credentialing program can take about 90-days from concept to production with ample labor hours dedicated to the activity. Outsourcing will allow you to get up and running with a tried and proven strategy in days or weeks, depending upon how much pre-work you’ve accomplished at making business decisions about your program. In a future post we’ll discuss the process of working with a credentialing vendor.

Credentialing Program Strategies and Systems – Two tasks that can really bog down improving or implementing a credentialing program are (1) developing the strategic plan and, (2) choosing a program management application or system. The primary cause is lack of experience. This isn’t something that your organization does everyday so there’s a learning curve to overcome. Researching credentialing program best practices, regulations, vendors, and implementation methodologies takes time and personnel resources. Why recreate the wheel when you can rely on the experts. We’ll explore how the experts will work with your organization to develop, implement, and even maintain your credentialing strategy. As I said in the previous post, organizations often use Microsoft Access or Excel to track and manage its credentialing program. Later they realize that a web-enabled system is really the ideal solution. Some credentialing program vendors like ours, here at JASZ offer a hosted solution, an enterprise solution, and a corporate solution. In a future post we’ll examine each of these options so join me for the next round of this credentialing program discussion.

For many organizations in the public and private sectors a key element to its Information Assurance (IA) program is ensuring that its technology workers are trained and certified as experts in their fields. Some organization’s personnel are required to have board certifications, and licenses. Initiating a training, certification, or licensing program may sound like a simple proposition, especially since there is an entire industry established to train and certify workers.

I have been the strategic planner for small to enterprise-wide certification programs for the Department of Defense (DoD) since 2004, and I’m hear to tell you that it’s not as simple as it seems. There are a lot of moving parts to a training, certification, or licensing program, which we like to call a “credentialing program”. Many organizations make the decision to go it alone and manage its credentialing program in-house. Often by making it an additional responsibility of one or more personnel, or a single dedicated person.

In this blog post we hope to shed some light on all of the moving parts involved in implementing and sustaining a successful credentialing program. After reading this blog we hope that you ask yourselves some tough questions like – Does my program encompass the key elements to be successful? Have we dedicated adequate resources to our credentialing program? How can we improve credentialing? Should we consider outsourcing our credentialing program?

With six years of experience at developing the strategic plan for the DoD’s IA exam voucher credentialing program, implementing, and managing the program, JASZ Technology has a wealth of knowledge on the subject.  When starting or improving a training, certification, or licensing program in response to Directive 8570, or other internal or government mandates, the place to start is by examining your desired outcome then working around those goals.

Identify Credentialing Goals – (1) Our goal is to have 50% of all Information Technology workers certified in the first year of the program, 75% year two, 100% certified by year 3, and maintaining the credentials of 100% of our eligible participants. (2) Eliminate IT incidents/disasters. (3) Reduce IT staff turnover by 10%. (4) Meet the government mandates by the due date, just to give a few examples.

Establish Personnel, Resource, & Vendor Data Tracking – Many organizations think they can easily manage credentialing data and resources with an Access database or an Excel Spreadsheet. It’s been our experience that regardless of the number of personnel that you’re credentialing, most programs quickly outgrow these tools and require more flexibility, scalability, and web accessibility. Training, certification, and licensing programs rapidly create a lot of data, necessitating a software package to manage both the program and the data generated. Tracking personnel, certification status, and managing the business rules behind your certification program is often managed by the brainpower of your program manager. The responsibilities of operating a credentialing program can be overwhelming. Leaving little to no time for documentation. As a result the majority of your program information will be inside the head of your program manager. Everyone becomes so dependent on this person that when they’re on vacation the program comes to a grinding halt. Then there is the process of identifying personnel that need to be trained, certified, or licensed. Getting information and resources into their hands can be exhausting without good automation. Here’s an example of some of the data elements that most credentialing programs will need to track:

• Program participants
• Managers and approvers
• Business rules and workflow
• Training, Certification, or license status and renewal dates
• Training resources
  • Training vouchers
  • Training materials
    • Online training
    • Books
      • Hard copy
      • E-books
  • Training vendors
    • Vendor contacts (USA & International)
      • Sales contact
      • Training scheduling contact
      • Customer service contact
      • Vendor business rules and practices
  • Training scheduling
  • Scheduling processes and procedures
• Certification resources
  • Certification vouchers
  • Study materials
    • Online practice exams
    • Off-line practice exams
    • Certification exam study-books
      • Hard copy
      • E-books
  • Certification requirements
  • Certification exam information
  • FAQs
  • Certification scheduling
  • Vendor contacts (USA & International)
    • Sales contact
    • Training scheduling contact
    • Customer service contact
    • Vendor business rules and practices
    • Vendor business rules and practices

Program Implementation – Especially in large, highly mobile, and decentralized organizations, getting the word out about your program is often a major challenge. Some organizations use the Internet, intranet, blogs, newsletters, email campaigns, bulletin boards, and social media to spread the word about its credentialing program, how to access it, and what the program offers. Often private firms are brought in to handle program marketing.

Program Maintenance – You may think the heavy lifting is done once your credentialing program is off and running, but that’s where successful programs can quickly fail. When an organization falls short of putting the appropriate amount of effort into maintaining its training, certification, and licensing program, a great start can become a flop in just a few short months. The biggest culprit is change! In the world of credentialing things change often. From the types of exams required to become certified, to renewal frequency, resource expiration dates, exam scheduling processes, etc. For starters, there is a plethora of training and certification vendors to choose from, and you’ll need to establish and maintain a relationship with every organization providing training, certification, and licensing products and services for your personnel. Believe it or not some credentialing vendors still use paper to issue training and certification vouchers, and even exams. Many have standalone, proprietary, and inflexible technology systems, incapable of easily sharing data with its clients and other vendors. While others have robust technology systems but each is built on its own platform, so integration with your credentialing system can be a challenge that you’ll need to repeat for each vendor. All of these variables make it difficult for a single organization to manage and work with multiple vendors. To maintain a successful credentialing program you must have constant interaction with your vendors to access the most current data related to credentialing.  What kinds of data will you need to update on a regular basis? Well, everything from vendor contacts, pricing, training and certification offerings, rules, and qualifications, and even how to use the training and certification resources that you’ve purchased from your vendors. We have developed an extensive problem resolution database, having seen years of encountering some of the most unique problems. From, how to arrange a certification exam in a war-zone, to locating a testing center in remote, and rural locations in the U.S.

Remember the Human Factor – Your personnel are the reason for the program, but with so many other moving parts to maintain, organizations often forget to develop a well thought out support plan for its workforce. Even under the best set of circumstances, program participants will encounter challenges that necessitate human intervention. A successful program will have a person or in the best case, a team of people to assist them. Here are a few scenarios that you’ll encounter.

• Technical problems and how to questions
• Vendors issuing invalid exam or training vouchers
• Un-reported vendor changes affecting training, certification, or licensing prerequisites, schedules, usage, and more
• Scheduling difficulties

When estimating program support resources take the number of anticipated personnel to train, certify, or license, multiplied by 3 to calculate the number of end-users that your program will support. Consider this, you’re not only supporting the credentialing applicant, you’re also supporting:

• The credentialing Applicant
• Managers/Approving official – The person that authorizes the “Applicant” to use a training or certification voucher for example.
• Senior management – One or more member of the management team accessing program reports, goals met, and other metrics.
• External officials – If your credentialing program is mandated by a local or federal government agency, you may have external officials accessing or receiving program data.

There is a lot to consider when starting or improving a credentialing program, when done right everyone from management to staff, and customers win. Get it wrong and you will have lost a lot of organizational good will by raising hopes for a quality program, only to have it fail to meet goals, or staff expectations. Some organizations will do a great job handling its credentialing program internally, while others should consider outsourcing. Tomorrow we’ll consider the pros and cons of outsourcing credentialing programs.