How to Implement an LMS Within an Organization

Dariya Lopukhina
3 min readOct 6, 2020

There are many benefits of implementing an LMS, but there are also costs and risks that need to be evaluated beforehand.

The key points to consider when implementing an LMS

  • Goals.

You need to clearly determine what business goals you wish to achieve with your LMS. This will have a critical effect on all your decisions as you need to align your new LMS with the needs of your organization.

You may wish to train your internal staff only or you may want a solution for training your customers. You may need a simple system to store your training data or a more sophisticated solution for tracking and evaluating your employees’ learning progress. If you need to motivate your employees to take the training, you may consider an LMS with advanced gamification and engagement tools.

All these considerations are very important for deciding how to approach your project and which type of LMS to choose.

  • Features.

Some LMS platforms are packed with lots of features but still, they don’t necessarily have all the features you need. Other LMSs provide a skeletal version of the software where you pay per feature. If you want to develop a new LMS software for your organization, you will also have to pay for developing each feature.

You need to decide which features you want and which are unnecessary. It’s important to define the list of critical features before the project starts as it will let you see if there is an existing solution to suit your needs or you have to build a new LMS software from the ground up.

Some important features to consider for an LMS are intuitive UI, responsive design, course creation, content management, testing & assessment tools, reporting & analytics, social learning and collaborative tools, gamification, compatibility with your current organizational systems, and security.

  • Potential costs.

When it comes to LMS implementation, there’s no quick and clear way to determine the cost. If you want to go with a ready-made solution, there are several different pricing models and, besides initial costs, there can be additional setup/licensing /bandwidth/maintenance/etc. fees.

If the off-the-shelf LMS solutions don’t meet your requirements, you should opt for developing a custom LMS. With a custom-built solution, you will have complete ownership of the software and the flexibility to add any functionality according to your needs. The development costs, in this case, can vastly vary depending on your project scope, complexity, timeframe, and developers’ rates.

You will also need to invest in creating content and course material, training your employees to use the software, and maintaining the system.

Keep in mind that implementing a corporate LMS requires a significant financial investment, so consider the potential costs beforehand to make sure you can stay within your budget.

  • Maintenance.

Apart from actually implementing your LMS, you will need an in-house or remote IT specialist to maintain the software once implementation is finished as well as get the right people to maintain the course itself and update the course materials when some changes occur.

The LMS implementation process

After evaluating the costs of LMS implementation and determined that it is worth your efforts, you are ready to get the ball rolling. There are the main steps you should take to implement your new LMS successfully:

  • Assemble your team. These are the people who will oversee the implementation process, supervise the development of learning content, and manage the integration of your new LMS with other systems in your organization.
  • Plan the roll-out of the system. Develop an implementation plan and timeline that matches your budget and organizational needs.
  • Configure the LMS. Set up the user profiles, security permissions for different roles, the structure of the courses, enter the course data, learning content, and assets into the system.
  • Integrate the LMS with your current organizational systems, e.g. HR solutions, CRM tools, accounting software.
  • Test it. Thorough testing with a group of users is needed to ensure that the entire LMS is working properly, with no bugs. If some glitches are detected, discuss them with your team and decide how to fix them.
  • Launch the LMS!

Hope to be helpful! Good luck!

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Dariya Lopukhina

Head of marketing at an IT company. Blogger, content enthusiast, beer lover and Siberian husky fan.