Description

A focused course, tailored for you

The LMS Catalogue Rationalisation Playbook

Cut a bloated course catalogue to the courses that actually finish, and prove the completion lift to the people who fund the platform.

Your catalogue has grown to several hundred courses. Maybe a quarter of them carry the enrolments, and a much smaller fraction actually finish. The funder wants completion numbers up. The original course sponsors do not want their courses retired. You are the person in the middle holding the spreadsheet.

$199 one-time

Tailored to your situation. Access within 24 hours. 30-day money-back.

Includes a hand-built implementation playbook delivered alongside course access, generated for your specific situation.

Why this course

Learning platforms grow by accretion. A new compliance topic lands and a course gets commissioned. A new product line goes live and a course gets commissioned. A leadership cohort wants a bespoke track and a course gets commissioned. None of those courses ever get retired, because retiring a course means telling the person who championed it that it did not work. So the catalogue keeps growing, the front page keeps getting busier, the average completion rate keeps drifting down, and the quarterly review keeps surfacing the same uncomfortable question about whether the platform is worth what it costs. The honest answer is that the platform is worth a great deal if the catalogue is the right size, and very little if it is the size it currently is. The work is rationalisation, with a method that holds up to scrutiny and a memo that the original sponsors can sign without losing face.

What you walk away with

A defensible scoring rubric that ranks every course in the catalogue on completion, time-to-competency, and downstream behaviour change.
A retirement memo template that the original course sponsor will sign rather than escalate.
A rebuilt catalogue front page that pushes the highest-finishing courses to the top of the learner journey.
A funder-ready completion-lift report that shows the catalogue before, the catalogue after, and the projected impact on the next quarter.
A repeatable quarterly cadence so the catalogue stays rationalised after the first pass, rather than re-growing back to the size it was.

The 12 modules

Module 1. Pulling the catalogue export and making it usable

Start from the raw export of every course, every enrolment, and every completion record. Walk through cleaning the columns, joining the enrolment table to the completion table, and producing a single working spreadsheet that has one row per course with the four numbers that matter. Includes the handling notes for the common LMS exports that drop fields silently, and a worked example with a sample export of around four hundred courses you can run the rest of the modules against.

Module 2. The four-axis scoring rubric for course value

Score every course on enrolment volume, completion rate, time-to-completion, and downstream signal (assessment pass rate, supervisor sign-off, follow-on enrolment). Walk through how to weight the axes so the score reflects what your funder actually cares about, not what is easiest to measure. Includes the weighting decisions to make explicitly before scoring, and how to defend those choices when a course sponsor disputes the ranking.

Module 3. Tagging the long tail without losing the ones that earn their seat

Most of the catalogue is in the long tail. Some of it deserves to retire and some of it is a small course doing important work for a specific audience. Walk through the tagging pass that separates dead weight from quiet performers, the small-audience exception rules, and the regulatory or contractually required courses that stay regardless of completion. Ends with a clean retire-or-keep flag on every row.

Module 4. Writing the retirement memo the sponsor will sign

The hardest moment in catalogue work is telling the original sponsor their course is being retired. Walk through the memo structure that opens with the sponsor's original goal, acknowledges what the course did achieve, names the specific completion and behaviour signals that did not move, and proposes either retirement or a focused rebuild. Includes three worked examples, each in a different stakeholder voice, and the sign-off line that prevents the memo from becoming a negotiation.

Module 5. The focused-rebuild path for courses worth saving

Some underperforming courses are worth a rebuild rather than retirement, usually because the topic is important and the delivery was wrong. Walk through the diagnostic that separates a bad-topic course from a bad-delivery course, the rebuild brief that constrains scope to one outcome and one assessment, and the timeline that keeps the rebuild from turning into a second commissioning cycle. Includes the rebuild memo that goes back to the sponsor instead of the retirement memo.

Module 6. Rebuilding the catalogue front page around finishers

After retirement and rebuilds, the catalogue is smaller. The front page is where the learner enters, and right now it almost certainly does not push them to the highest-finishing courses. Walk through reordering by completion rate, surfacing the next-step recommendations, hiding the long tail behind search, and the AB structure that lets you prove the new front page is shifting enrolments toward courses that finish. Includes the page wireframe and the analytics events to instrument.

Module 7. The funder report that proves the lift

The funder wants one chart. Catalogue size before, catalogue size after, blended completion rate before, blended completion rate after. Walk through pulling the numbers, the honest cohort matching that prevents apples-to-oranges comparisons, and the narrative that frames the change as a deliberate decision rather than a quiet shrinkage. Includes a one-page report template and the longer appendix that holds up to a finance review.

Module 8. Handling the stakeholder who refuses the retirement

Some sponsors will refuse to sign the retirement memo. Walk through the escalation path that does not damage the relationship, the data-pack that goes to the sponsor's manager, the parking-orbit option that keeps the course hidden but technically alive, and the rare cases where the right answer is to keep a poorly performing course for political reasons and document why. Includes the script for the conversation that has to happen in person, not over email.

Module 9. Compliance and contractually required courses

Some courses cannot be retired regardless of completion data because they are tied to a regulatory obligation, a customer contract, or a certification requirement. Walk through identifying those courses early so they never enter the retirement consideration, structuring them so completion is achievable rather than nominal, and reporting on them separately from the discretionary catalogue so the funder sees the distinction. Includes a register template tracking the obligation source for each.

Module 10. The quarterly rationalisation cadence

First-pass rationalisation reduces the catalogue, but new courses keep arriving and the catalogue will regrow if there is no cadence. Walk through the quarterly review that scores any course commissioned in the last twelve months against the same rubric, the sunset clause embedded in every new course commission, and the small standing group that signs off on retirements without escalation. Includes the meeting agenda and the running register that holds the cadence in place.

Module 11. Learner notification when a course is retired

Learners enrolled in a course that is being retired need to be told, redirected, and credited where they have already invested time. Walk through the segmentation pass that finds active enrolments, the email that explains the retirement without sounding defensive, the redirect to the rebuilt or replacement course, and the credit logic for partial completion. Includes the three-email sequence and the support-team escalation script for the learners who push back.

Module 12. The twelve-week implementation plan

A week-by-week plan covering catalogue export and rubric build in the first three weeks, sponsor memos in weeks four to six, retirements and rebuilds in weeks seven to nine, front-page rebuild in week ten, learner notification in week eleven, and the funder report in week twelve. Includes the decision points where the work can pause without losing momentum, and the artefacts that need to exist at the end of each week for the next week to start cleanly.

How this addresses your situation

Specific modules that map to what you said you are dealing with.

The export is sitting in your downloads folder and you are not sure which columns to trust. Module 1 cleans it.

The funder asked for a completion-lift number at the next quarterly. Modules 2, 7, and 12 give you the number and the path to get there.

The sponsor of an underperforming course is a senior stakeholder you cannot afford to alienate. Modules 4 and 8 give you the memo and the escalation path.

The catalogue has crept back up after a previous rationalisation attempt. Module 10 puts a cadence in place so this is the last first pass you have to run.

What you get with this course

Twelve written modules in the Art of Service learning environment.
Downloadable templates for the scoring rubric, retirement memo, focused-rebuild brief, funder report, and quarterly cadence agenda.
Worked example using a sample catalogue export of around four hundred courses you can rerun against your own data.
The hand-built implementation playbook tailored to your catalogue size and funder reporting format, delivered alongside your course account.

What you will have in hand by Day 1, Week 1, Month 1

Within 24 hours your account in the learning environment is provisioned and the tailored implementation playbook is delivered alongside it.

Weeks 1 to 3 cover catalogue export, scoring rubric, and long-tail tagging.

Weeks 4 to 6 cover sponsor memos and the difficult conversations.

Weeks 7 to 9 cover retirements and focused rebuilds.

Weeks 10 to 12 cover front-page rebuild, learner notification, and funder report.

Before and after

Before

Catalogue has grown to several hundred courses. Blended completion rate is drifting down. Funder reviews surface the same uncomfortable question every quarter. Retirement conversations get postponed because nobody has a defensible method for choosing what to retire.

After

Catalogue is the right size for the audience. Blended completion rate is measurably higher. Funder review opens with a completion-lift chart instead of a defensive conversation. Quarterly cadence keeps the catalogue rationalised without a heroic effort each time.

What happens if you do not address this

Catalogue keeps growing, completion rate keeps drifting, the funder review keeps getting harder, and eventually the funding conversation moves from how to improve the platform to whether to keep it at the current scale. The retirement work is harder the longer it is left, because more sponsors have to be navigated and more learners are mid-enrolment in courses that should never have been commissioned.

Who it is for

You run, manage, or curate a learning platform. The catalogue is somewhere between two hundred and several thousand courses. You have access to enrolment and completion data per course. You report to someone who cares about the cost of the platform and the visible learner outcomes, and you have stakeholder relationships with the people who originally commissioned the courses that are now underperforming. The funder review is a regular event on your calendar, not an annual surprise.

Who this is NOT for. Not for someone shopping for an LMS for the first time, not for an instructional designer building one course at a time, and not for a chief learning officer looking for a strategy deck. This is operational, hands on the data, and ends with a retirement list and a rebuilt front page.

How it arrives

Text-based course in the Art of Service learning environment, plus downloadable templates and worked examples for every module, plus the hand-built implementation playbook delivered alongside course access.

Time investment. About two to three hours per module across twelve modules, with the heavier weight in the scoring and memo modules. Most of the work happens against your own catalogue data, so the time is productive from week one.

Why $199 is the right number

An instructional design consultancy will quote in the high five figures to run a catalogue audit and will hand back a slide deck rather than an implementation playbook. Internal-only attempts usually stall on the sponsor memos because there is no template that has been tested across multiple stakeholder relationships. This course gives you both the method and the artefacts, at a price that is a rounding error against the cost of running an oversized catalogue for another year.

FAQ

We use a niche LMS. Will the export format work for the rubric?

The rubric needs four columns: course identifier, enrolment count, completion count, and a time-to-completion or assessment-pass field. Almost every LMS exports those, even when the rest of the export is awkward. Module 1 walks through the cleaning step for the common exports.

Our catalogue has compliance courses we cannot retire. Does the method still work?

Yes. Module 9 deals specifically with compliance and contractually required courses, separates them from the discretionary catalogue, and reports them differently to the funder. The rationalisation method only operates on the discretionary portion.

How do you handle a stakeholder who refuses to accept the retirement?

Module 8 covers exactly this. It walks through the escalation path that does not damage the relationship, the data pack that goes to the sponsor's manager, and the parking-orbit option for courses that need to stay technically alive for political reasons.

Is the implementation playbook generic or tailored?

Tailored. After purchase, the playbook is hand-built for your catalogue size, your LMS export format, your funder reporting cadence, and any compliance constraints you flag during onboarding. It arrives alongside the course account, not weeks later.

30-day money-back guarantee. If after a week of working through the materials this is not what you needed, reply to the receipt email and a full refund is processed. No questions, no forms.

Within 24 hours your account in the learning environment is provisioned and the tailored implementation playbook is delivered alongside it.