Now more than ever, companies are relying on newly implemented technologies to stay relevant. With an increase both in remote work and in the realization of how important analytics has become, efforts to digitize in the last few years have grown exponentially. But, companies still struggle to achieve widespread use of products–as many as 70% of tech projects still fail, and poor adoption is among the major reasons why.
Unfortunately some of these adoption issues come down to company culture and whether a given team embraces change and newness on a whole. But there are concrete strategies companies can employ to ensure their technology initiatives are successful across a wide swath of users. Here are the top three, as we see it:
Bring Your Team Into The Research & Planning
Adoption failures stem mostly from a lack of alignment between the team that’s going to use the tool and the person or persons making the buying decisions. It’s easy to stand outside this situation and see the shortcomings, but it’s much less easy when a change is needed quickly and getting a team consensus takes a lot of time. For the sake of time, managers and leaders often choose the tools.
The result is that the needs and priorities of the buyer are weighed more heavily in buying decisions than the needs and priorities of the users. This is no slight to leaders; it’s just human nature. But it presents clear roadblocks to wide adoption.
A more successful approach to technology projects is to task select users with researching and proposing possible technologies. This lets them prioritize the features and processes that are important to them and gives the buyer a more well-rounded perspective on what might be a successfully implemented technology.
The “Pilot Program”
Following the approach above will likely result in several software recommendations. This isn’t a bad thing. Having different perspectives from different teams provides the opportunity to try a limited run of a particular technology, within a relatively isolated environment, before rolling it out company-wide: a “pilot program”.
Teams can learn and analyze the successes and failures of new tech, as well as how much training it requires and if it’ll fit within established workflows at a much lower risk. If it’s successful in these test cases, the tech can be rolled out in phases more broadly. If it’s not successful, there’s less investment of time, energy, and money to abandon or redirect.
Start Training Early
Perhaps one the single greatest detriments to wide adoption is a lack of training. If people don’t know how to use a tool, or have to spend valuable time and effort slogging through an interface with which they aren’t familiar, they simply aren’t going to use it. Period.
Before software is even decided on, certainly before implementation begins, in the very earliest (earliest!) stages of an upgrade, get your team into trials of software. As a result of trying out the product before the stakes are high, they’ll be learning how to use it without the frustration of solving their actual problems at the same time.
Often companies fail by implementing a technology and then training their teams on it once it’s in place. That means the change-over to live use is almost concurrent with the learning. Worse still, many companies do the switchover and then train–resulting in a situation where teams are learning the tool while they’re supposed to be actually using it, slowing down work and frustrating people and process.
It can’t be overstated: the earlier companies expose their teams to new technologies, the better adoption of those technologies will be. It seems almost too obvious to state, but even a cursory Google search unearths study upon study showing that lack of proper training is a leading cause of poort adoption. Learn from these mistakes.
Fostering Discovery
As I mentioned above, successfully navigating technology changes can often come down to the type of culture a company nurtures. Is it a culture of learning and discovery? Is it a culture of openness and experimentation? Answers to these questions may help determine how quickly, widely, and successfully a new tool takes hold across teams.
Ultimately, there’s no formulaic approach that guarantees adoption. It’s a highly nuanced aspect of change management that sometimes depends on the constellation of personalities within a team and company. But team involvement from the outset of a project is absolutely key to any success. And, understanding that for large companies this is difficult, rolling out changes in smaller teams and departments can go a long way toward making deep team involvement an achievable strategy when technology updates are on the table.
Bill Erickson is Interject’s Director of Communications. Contact him or the Interject Solutions Team at info@gointerject.com