PROOF OF NECESSITY

NHS National Programme for IT: £12.7bn spent, £2.6bn benefits delivered, £10bn net destruction. Public Accounts Committee: "one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in history." Root cause: not technology failure but adoption failure—inadequate training, no user involvement.

The pattern repeats: TSB migration (£330m + £49m FCA fine, 1.9m customers locked out), Universal Credit (£34m write-offs, 38% vs 90% expected adoption), FiReControl (£469m, zero delivery).

Your risk: 70% of software implementations fail due to poor user adoption. Only 26% of employees actually use their company's ERP. Training happens week 48 of a 52-week project—then becomes the scapegoat when staff won't touch the system.

Working memory cannot absorb it: Working memory holds 4±1 chunks (Cowan, 2001), maximum 20 seconds for novel information, processes only 2-4 elements concurrently (Sweller, 1988). Enterprise software with 10-20+ interacting elements overwhelms working memory by 3-5x. Information exceeding capacity does not encode—it's lost before learning begins.

The forgetting curve: Ebbinghaus (1885), replicated by Murre & Dros (2015)—retention drops to 34% at 1 day, 21% at 31 days. By Day 5 of consecutive delivery, Days 1-3 content has undergone massive, predictable decay with no reinforcement.

Transfer failure: Only 15% of learners successfully apply training on the job (Brinkerhoff & Mooney, 2008). 65% revert to old behaviours within 30 days. Result: 80-85% scrap learning. Spaced repetition delivers 200% better retention than massed practice—but five consecutive days is massed by definition.

Development time requirements: Chapman (2010), 249 organisations, 3,947 L&D professionals: Instructor-led training requires 43 hours development per 1 finished hour (range 22-82). Interactive e-learning: 184 hours. Advanced: 716 hours. A 5-day course needs ~1,500 development hours at average ILT ratio.

The SME reality: They treat training as secondary to operational duties, spend 25-40% of time on knowledge-sharing, average 3.8-day review wait with 23-item queues. One quantified case: 152 person-days monthly delay across 40-person team = $1.46m annual productivity loss.

Goldratt's principle: "An hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour lost out of the entire system. An hour saved at a non-bottleneck is worthless." Adding more designers or LMS admins without addressing the SME constraint is local optimisation that cannot improve throughput.

The folly: Rewarded (A): Days delivered, heads trained, courses completed, hours billed. Hoped for (B): Competence achieved, behaviour changed, business outcomes improved.

T&M reality: 90-95% of outsourcing operates on T&M (Genpact). Linear relationship between time spent and revenue. Zero incentive for efficiency. Reducing project duration reduces income. Providers benefit from scope creep, extended timelines, client dependency. This is rational response to incentive structure.

The Cobra Effect: British Delhi offered cobra bounties. Locals bred cobras for income. Bounty cancelled, breeders released snakes—worsening the original problem. In training: paying per course day incentivises more course days, not better courses.

How organisations evaluate: 50% at Level 1 only (satisfaction "smile sheets"), 34% reach Level 2 (knowledge tests), 13% reach Level 3 (behaviour change), Only 3% evaluate Level 4 (business results). Result: Only 11% of employees can fully use their training in their job.

Mager's framework (1962): Over 4 million copies sold. Effective objectives require observable performance, conditions, and criterion. Rejected vague verbs: "understand," "know," "appreciate," "be familiar with."

The contrast: "Participants will be familiar with the billing process" (unmeasurable) vs "Using the CRM system, participants will process minimum 12 customer billing adjustments per hour with <2% errors" (testable).

The evidence: FCA spot checks (2023): 40% of firms had gaps in training records. Gallup: Only 10% of employees report compliance training impacted work practices. NHS: Only 8% of Trusts aligned to most recent Core Skills Training Framework.

Regulatory exposure: FCA Consumer Duty (Principle 12) requires firms demonstrate delivery of good outcomes—raising the bar beyond tick-box completion. Senior Managers & Certification Regime means personal liability.

Real consequences: TSB's former CIO personally fined £81,620 for conduct rule failures during 2018 migration disaster. Not corporate penalty—personal.