Designing a SharePoint User Adoption Strategy
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Too often SharePoint projects focus on deploying sites without planning for the user adoption and training that comes after, and as a result, the solution’s momentum fizzles and falls short of its potential once the project ends. In this presentation, I share my strategies and insights for designing an effective end-user adoption and training strategy that you can use in your projects to help your users thrive.
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Designing a SharePoint User Adoption Strategy
- 1. SharePoint User Group Designing a User Adoption Strategy October 2014 Steve Goodyear
- 2. You're introducing a change—a new SharePoint deployment
- 3. You want users to adopt and be productive to give you a return
- 4. Our user adoption strategy focuses on change management and training
- 7. What business needs are you solving?
- 8. What are your guiding principles?
- 9. How will SharePoint benefit people and the organization?
- 10. Identify owners
- 11. Who can provide executive support?
- 12. What are the roles and responsibilities?
- 13. Who owns accountability for the vision?
- 14. Measure success
- 15. What does success look like?
- 16. How will you measure success?
- 17. How will you gather feedback?
- 18. Manage change
- 19. Cater to your audience
- 20. How can you communicate ways SharePoint will benefit people's work?
- 21. How might the change affect the organization's culture?
- 22. Who might struggle with or resist the change?
- 24. How can you communicate the vision and leadership's commitment?
- 25. When can you host open town hall meetings?
- 26. What is your plan to maintain continuous communication?
- 28. How can you create a sense of urgency for the change?
- 29. Where can you create excitement?
- 30. How can you adapt to and apply people's feedback?
- 31. Provide training
- 33. How can you make people aware of available support and training resources?
- 34. Who can you groom as champions or super users?
- 35. What can you showcase as a relevant example of visible success?
- 37. What knowledge or skill gaps exist?
- 38. How can you avoid overwhelming people with the breadth of SharePoint?
- 39. What do people need to learn?
- 41. How can you use language and processes familiar to people's work?
- 42. What short, just-in-time training options can you provide?
- 43. When can you offer live, in-person training or support?
- 44. Our user adoption strategy focuses on change management and training http://habaneroconsulting.com/insights/designing-a-sharepoint-user-adoption-and-training-strategy
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Today I'm going to talk about user adoption and why user adoption doesn't just happen on its own. I'm going to focus on three key aspects that drive user adoption: a vision, change, and training. Before I get into those details, I'll set some context. You're introducing a change -- a new SharePoint deployment. Your users might be used to storing documents on a file share or emailing content around, and you want to introduce a user experience where they can collaborate together online. You could be introducing a very big change.
- Yet, this change can help your users be more productive and better meet their needs. They might not realize it, but this change should improve their work. So you want people to embrace this change and adopt SharePoint. Plus, the more productive users become and the more they adopt SharePoint, the better the return on your investment. So how do you get there?
- Our strategy to drive effective user adoption focuses on three key aspects: establishing a vision, managing the change, and providing training. This defines where we want to go and how we will lead people to get there. I am going to talk about each of these three aspects and I'll share some rhetorical questions that you can use to apply these strategies.
- The first key to effective user adoption is establishing a vision. This orientates everyone. Without a vision, you won't be able to chart a course to lead your users through the change. It would be like driving around aimlessly without a destination in mind--you'll be busy moving, but you're not getting anywhere or achieving anything. An effective vision aims for something on the horizon. It includes purpose, owners, and some measure of success.
- Defining a purpose gives your SharePoint initiative meaning. A purpose is different from a goal. A goal focuses on a particular milestone such as a specific use case. A goal is something you will achieve. A purpose is something you work toward, something bigger that you strive for. A purpose provides the underlying meaning that individual goals align with. Your purpose explains why you're deploying SharePoint and why it's valuable for the organization and users.
- So how do you define a purpose? Start by asking what business needs are you solving. Start with an actual business problem you want to solve and then identify the business needs SharePoint can address. For example, maybe people lack a natural way to discover other people across the organization or the work someone else is doing in another department, and the symptoms of this is a siloed environment with fragmented collaboration.
- Guiding principles are your values. These will help you make decisions and keep you aligned with your purpose. These should be unique and meaningful to you and your organization because generic principles just won't resonate with people. For example, one guiding principle might be facilitating internal communities, and you use this principle to consider whether an option facilitates internal communities as a deciding factor.
- We are not deploying technology just for technology's sake. We need to understand the value and benefits we expect SharePoint will provide, not just a list of product features. Articulate the ways SharePoint will benefit actual people, the actual knowledge workers in your organization. This vision and these benefits should inspire non-technical people--that's how you'll know when you're on the right track.
- Identifying owners and the people involved gets everyone on the same page. This will also help to make sure nothing slips through the cracks -- the buck has to stop with someone. Owners serve a couple of purposes. One is that users will buy into a change easier when they see the leadership team supports the new direction. Another is that users will know who to turn for help, as owners include the budget owners and the owners for support.
- SharePoint deployments are more successful when they have support and buy-in from the top. You'll want your leadership team behind a SharePoint initiative, because then it's easier for the rest of the organization to get behind it.
- In addition to support from your leadership team and having a sponsor, you'll also have owners at other levels, such as the SharePoint administrator, the database administrator, the service desk, and so on. Identifying these roles and their responsibilities is crucial for providing a stable service, but it also communicates who owns what and where people can go for help.
- You also need a sponsor to own it--someone who funds it and who champions it with other leaders and throughout the organization. Your sponsor will own the vision and hold ultimate accountability for delivering on the vision.
- The third part of establishing a vision is to measure success. Measuring success will help you track how well you are performing against your purpose. Monitoring trends and metrics will give you early warning signs to detect issues with adoption earlier. Measuring success is the feedback loop that'll enable you to make adjustments when needed.
- Before you can measure success, you first need to know what success looks like. This becomes your benchmark you can work toward. Your vision of success should encompass resolving the business problem you identified as part of your overall purpose.
- Once you identify what success looks like, you should think about the ways you can measure success. You can use these measures to help you track progress and highlight when things are drifting off track. For example, if success looks like people sharing content on SharePoint instead of desktops or network drives, you can measure this by tracking the storage trends.
- Another way to measure success is to gather feedback. What do people think about SharePoint? This could be direct feedback in the form of a survey where people tell you what they think, or it can be more indirect where people "vote with their feet" -- gathering feedback through actual usage metrics.
- Establishing a vision is the first key to effective user adoption. The second key is managing the change process. This positions the new SharePoint initiative from your user's perspective and how it will benefit them. You can use this then to generate excitement while also anticipating potential issues. An effective change management plan caters to your audience, it communicates effectively, and it reinforces the change.
- Catering to your audience makes your SharePoint initiative relevant to your users. It's easy to focus on the technology itself, because there are technical pieces to configure or because that's our reality. But it's not our users' reality--they don't work in IT. Our users are usually more interested in how technology will help them. What's in it for them and their work? This means speaking their language and focusing on what makes sense to them and what is important to them.
- Communicating the ways SharePoint will benefit people's work is important because it makes the change relevant to people and it also gives them incentive to accept and embrace the new system. One technique I've frequently used is to create a video with someone from the business describing benefits. For example, this person might walk through how to use a search portal and explain how easier it is to find relevant people from other departments, even without knowing their name, which saves them the time and hassle of figuring out who is who.
- Some changes can affect your organization's culture. It's worth thinking about these ahead of time so you can have a plan for them. For example, if you are deploying a forms and workflow solution to automate a manual, paper-based process, this could affect cultural aspects, such as making the process self-service, causing a loss for those who appreciated having an actual person help with the process. This change could create tensions for those people, and so we should cater to them in a different way from those eager for self-service.
- As you think about your audience, start to think about those who might struggle or resist the change. Who are they? These might be the people you onboard later, giving your SharePoint initiative time to have successes and build momentum solving business problems with earlier adopters. You can also tailor specific training and messaging to better support these people who might struggle or resist.
- Once you have a strategy to cater to your audience and make the change relevant to them, you need to communicate the change and how it will benefit them. Your goal is to create excitement by making people aware of how SharePoint will help them.
- The primary message you need to communicate with people is your vision for SharePoint and your leadership's commitment to that vision. Remember, you built your vision around your business needs and how SharePoint will benefit people's work. I'm a big fan of using a promotional video to communicate the vision and leadership's support, along with the benefits. You can also use email or portal articles.
- I find town hall meetings particularly effective. These are open forums where you can present some points on the key changes, and then take questions or comments from the audience. Town halls uncover concerns early by providing people with a channel to share their thoughts.
- Once you let people know what's coming and how it will benefit them, it's important to keep the momentum going by keeping people informed. The best way to do this is to design a continuous communication strategy--this could be weekly announcement updates on your employee portal, or an email update.
- The third aspect of managing change is to reinforce the change. Catering to your audience and communicating the change creates the first part of the loop, and you close that loop by reinforcing the change with people. Your goal is to continue encouraging and supporting people with the change, and also to adapt to how people are responding. This will help keep momentum and guide people toward the new habits for working and collaborating together.
- Changes that lack a sense of urgency are less effective. If people think the current way of doing things is good enough, then why would they embrace something new? One way you can create a sense of urgency is to focus on the business problem you are addressing and coming up with something urgent about solving that problem. For example, if the problem is no consistent way to store and manage content, then the urgency could be the threat of potential litigation risks exposed without an electronic discovery and case management solution.
- One way to build excitement is to get people using SharePoint in a way that benefits their work. You should target pilots and early adopters who are more likely to be engaged and excited about SharePoint's potential for their work. You can use these early adopters to showcase a success and encourage others.
- Feedback gives you a measure for how the change is going and where people are struggling. If something isn't working, it's better to adapt and remove roadblocks. Otherwise people will build resistance and might even actively work against you. By taking and applying their feedback, you will keep your users engaged and help reinforce the change.
- Establishing a vision and managing the change are the first two keys to effective user adoption. The third key is providing training. This ensures everyone has the skills and abilities to perform their tasks. You can use training to prepare your users and remove the mystery around SharePoint and its features, which removes the main roadblocks to adoption. An effective training solution focuses on increasing your users' confidence, providing bite-sized portions, and offering targeted training scenarios.
- Increasing people's confidence will help them feel comfortable with SharePoint. A new SharePoint deployment can be intimidating for people if they have never worked with online software like it, and people don't like feeling vulnerable and confused when they just want to do their job. Showing people how to use SharePoint will increase their confidence and encourage more people to try it out.
- The best way to increase people's confidence is to make sure they know what support and training resources are available. This can be a page on your employee portal or you can add it to the help section within SharePoint.
- Your early adopters are great candidates to help you scale and drive adoption. Because these early adopters are business users, having them gives a peer whom people can turn to for help.
- Seeing peers have visible success with SharePoint can build people's confidence and interest in also adopting the solution. You encourage others by promoting an early adopter's experience and success solving a business problem.
- Increasing people's confidence can be a continuous process, particularly when you offer training in manageable chunks just as people need it. Focus on delivering bite-sized portions rather than an entire buffet all at once. Your goal is to educate people on what they need when they need it. You don't want to overwhelm people with unnecessary details on every possible SharePoint features, because they simply won't retain it.
- One way to identify the bite-sized pieces you need is to assess what knowledge or skill gaps exist. What will be new for people that you can help guide them through? For example, if they're used to sending documents around in emails, will they struggle with the concept of a document library?
- SharePoint has an extensive list of features and capabilities that can overwhelm people. Focus on a narrow set of tasks that non-technical people can relate to and grasp.
- Separate out tasks people need to perform in their work. Focus only on the necessary aspects of SharePoint. This will help you focus your training to what people need to learn, rather than every possible thing about SharePoint that would overwhelm them.
- Similar to my earlier point about catering the change to your audience, offering targeted training will help make the training (and ultimately the new SharePoint deployment) much more relevant to your people. Rather than simply focusing on the technical steps for how a feature works in SharePoint, you should target how the feature relates to someone's job and why they would use it in the context of their role. This will help them retain more simply because it'll be more relevant.
- Help your users relate to the training concepts by designing training and materials with language and processes that are already familiar to them. This makes the training more relevant for people and it links back to your purpose where you identified how SharePoint will benefit people and your organization.
- One successful strategy is to make training resources available on-demand to guide users through specific tasks and processes. For example, having one-page quick reference cards with the key steps users need for specific processes gives users just enough training right when they need it. You could also deliver this type of training as a short video.
- Nothing beats face-to-face, but it's expensive and doesn't scale well. Nonetheless, having this option available will be encouraging for people and it offers you the best influence on how people adopt SharePoint. Some options I've used include having a regular schedule for half-day or full day instructor-led training workshops, hosting regular "office hours" like a professor in a university where people can drop by with questions, or hosting lunch and learn sessions where you present on different topics.
- Introducing SharePoint can mean a big change for people, and you want to help guide people through this change to get a return on your SharePoint investment. Our strategy for driving effective user adoption focuses on three key aspects: establishing a vision, managing the change, and providing training. One tool we're working on that can help you drive effective training and user adoption is an e-book we're going to give away for free, a step-by-step guide for the key collaboration functions on a team site. Its title will be Productive SharePoint Collaboration and your users will be able to download this book for free later this year.