At many organizations, the responsibility for user adoption is shifting from project managers to IT, and we’re seeing the emergence of IT project managers. That shift creates new challenges when you’re introducing new enterprise collaboration solutions and other large-scale technology initiatives.
When it comes to user adoption, the IT project manager’s most important task is to ensure that all of the different business functions are represented at the table when planning the implementation.
One of the main obstacles to overcome when creating project teams is “technical bias”. When the stakeholder team is heavy on technical expertise, it tends to result in solutions that work for more technical employees. To ensure strong user adoption for new collaboration tools, it’s essential to create a balanced team (not committee) from day one, and draw passionate participants from across the organization.
Here are the three most important steps your IT department should take to ensure user adoption with new collaboration tools:
- Facilitate: Recruit a panel of employees with an in interest in user adoption from various departments and business areas. You could think of it as creating a United Nations for the project, bringing a diversity of perspectives and ideas to the table.
- Segment your users: When you’re rolling out a new solution, it’s important to segment your users based on their role(s) in the organization. Commonly referred to as “user voices” or “user themes,” creating schemas of the most common types of business users helps developers with their solutions and trainers with creating a course curriculum. These could be a combination of experience level (managers, analysts, executives) as well as technical knowledge (administrators, power users, end users). You might also have to create another type for external users, such as customers or vendors.When you take the time to segment users, the likelihood of achieving user adoption nirvana skyrockets. In addition, you’ll gain buy-in from your HR and training departments, as there will be a clear strategy for educating the workforce.
- Build user adoption into the project roadmap: A project roadmap for collaboration tools is a way of capturing the needs from the business and then objectively prioritizing which features and functionality should be rolled out and when. To ensure strong user adoption, it’s important to add adoption activities as a layer across the entire roadmap. Here’s what a user adoption plan could look like, start to finish:•In the early stages of the project, focus on conversations that help the organization understand what’s happening: what new collaboration solution you’re moving to and why. You might also offer some sneak previews or demos for people who are interested.•Before the project kicks off, start more concrete user adoption activities, such as early training efforts and creating buzz about the application. The goal in this stage is to achieve some early wins and create goodwill for the collaboration solution. If you’re launching a new corporate intranet, for example, consider a naming contest and allow the company to decide on the winning submission.•After the rollout, user adoption activities tend to give way to analyzing usage metrics. In this stage, you’re looking from behind the two-way mirror and observing what’s happening naturally. It’s important to survey both active and inactive users of the tool to repeat successes and remedy any unknown challenges.
While you may not be accustomed to planning a user adoption strategy, getting employees to use the solution is always the end goal. It’s the overarching measure of whether the solution you’ve implemented solves problems and creates value for the business.
