The A2B Methodology

The Aligned to Business Methodology provides a proven approach to generate strategic alignment, that is, a method L&D organizations can use to collaborate with the businesses they serve to analyze the business, target investments in learning, and follow through to ensure that investments generate results.

Core Capabilities

A2B identifies 6 core capabilities an L&D organization must execute to generate alignment. These form the day-to-day work.

Platform Capabilities

The core capabilities assume that an L&D organization is set up for success. To help L&D organizations become set up for success, A2B spells out four platform capabilities.

First and foremost amongst the steps that an L&D organization takes when implementing the platform is to identify a small number of Business Engagement Managers. Each BEM serves a set of business groups to enable them to define and manage their portfolios. The BEM supplies the organizational focus required for A2B to succeed.

Key Practices

How should an organization carry out the core capabilities and implement the platform capabilities? To provide guidance, A2B provides a set of key practices for each. These key practices provide focused best practices for the most important aspects of the capabilities.

Tools

Finally, in addition to the key practices, A2B provides tools. To achieve alignment, an organization must manage a large amount of information about business groups, their strategies and capabilities, their needs as well as about learning investments and their targets and results. The tools provide a simple way for L&D organizations to manage all of this information so that quarter-by-quarter, a company generates an ever-improving picture of how to drive business results through learning investments.