When a business invests into new software it is important to ensure that the target audience - the end users - actually use the system. It may sound obvious but it's surprising how little budget and effort is often allocated to the adoption phase of a project, which may be the longest and most challenging. Driving high levels of adoption helps demonstrate to Senior Stakeholders and Project Sponsors the investment was worthwhile and liberates real value for the organisation making the investment. It's the only way to guarantee true ROI (Return on Investment).
Main topics within this article:
- Engage your Organisation
- Train your Organisation
- Provide regular and up to date content
- Enabling Remote Work
- Build a Champion Network
- Tracking your Adoption
Adoption is about envisioning, on-boarding, and driving value. Successful adoption can be achieved with a number of adoption tools and some ideas, plus Microsoft also offer some top tips in this article.
We recorded a useful interactive session where ClearPeople’s Co-founder and Managing Director, Katya Linossi, alongside Barry Wakelin, Operations Director, highlighted the ways you can successfully introduce, integrate and continually develop your Microsoft 365 communication platforms to ensure they meet your corporate objectives. They talked through the top tips for successful adoption and discussed common challenges organisations face.
Engage your Organisation
- Learn from others - Sharing customer stories is a great way to see what works well for organisations. Don't be afraid to share failures too. Sharing what may have been tried, although not a success, can help others learn from this. That said, here success stories featured here provide some examples of what has worked well for a number of our clients.
- Case study interviews - Staged interviews during various stages of the project through to post-launch are effective. They help to clarify the initial goals, the original business case, why the software was adopted and how the business wish to move forward. Later on interviews once the project has gone live, it helps to review the initial challenges and requirements. Hopefully, they have been met and have succeeded and if not, why? It is an opportunity to dig deeper and create a new plan of action. Sometimes it takes a few iterations to strike gold. Don't be afraid to iterate but don't hang on to a failing approach for too long.
Train your Organisation
An online learning communication site - a training portal containing all key information to help make the journey easier for users, consider the following:
- Key documents - don't forget to share your vision for the platform.
- Key contacts for users to ask for support.
- Training videos and articles.
- Yammer feed for users to share what they have learnt or what has proved valuable.
Provide regular and up to date content
- Provide regular training to all content contributors on how to use the software to encourage regular content creation.
- Ensure all content contributors have enough content to regularly post and keep it relevant.
- All contributors should understand exactly what section they are working on so everyone has clear goals.
- Consider the ability for other users to have the ability to contribute to content, for example, blogs prove popular. If your business prides itself on a particular subject area, such as Health & Well-being, allow staff to have their opportunity to write about this. It is also an opportunity for staff to react, share or comment on this if a social functionality has been integrated.
Enabling Remote Work
- Software that helps us all stay on top of communication and collaboration and share knowledge with each other easily is so valuable in these times. Making sure as a business you are aware of what is available to you and considering adopting these tools to help drive the right behaviours can really help. Consider the following:
- Effective communication tools - even consider integrating these within your Digital Workplace. See what other offices are working on, even consider uploading videos! This works especially well for global offices.
- Sharing documentation easily through various tools - an effective way to share and update documents easily between colleagues.
- Consider videoing regular events so the insights imparted aren't lost - top tips for staff working remotely.
Build a Champion Network
- Learning via co-workers is an effective solution to creating staff awareness, creating engagement within the community whilst also reducing the pressure for the core project team to provide all of the training. It also helps Champions gain more knowledge and skills which can help towards their long-term career.
- Champions will help to:
- Create enthusiasm for a new way of working.
- Identify business challenges and possible solutions.
- Provide feedback to the Project Team and Project Sponsors.
- Consider ways to incentivise and reward Champions such as, ensuring they are fully up to speed with the software, a reward and recognition programme for achieving explicit levels of adoption in their area of the business, a formal programme and certification.
- Involve Champions with an execution plan and ensure regular collaboration between champions to share success, highlight failures and overcome blockers.
- Highlight and share success across the organisation and recognise the champions responsible!
- There are some useful ideas within the following article 'Build a Champion Programme'
Tracking your Adoption
- Having the right tools to help the business see the true value of your new software is key, it helps you to view the site visits, specific functions that are widely used and the level of engagement with staff. If you are using Modern SharePoint sites, you can find out about the Usage information available by reading this article: Usage Information in Modern SharePoint
- Consider the tools available to help you customise your dashboards and tailor to your business goals for the new software.
- Arrange for the right users to have access to analytics so they can adjust content and functions to continually refine the user experience. Make sure you give them sufficient training on the analytics software.
- Make time to check the analytics regularly and even consider a visualisation to send to Project Sponsors and Senior Stakeholders which can help to easily show the initial goals are being achieved and the business is seeing ROI.
- If there appear to be some challenges, for example specific departments/users not using the software or low site views, low mobile usage, these are all opportunities to review the site and engage in some consultancy or identify training opportunities.
To effectively measure the success of technology, there should be a combination of both qualitative and quantitative measurements or KPIs. Further details can be found in this article on our blog.
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