With respect to SharePoint user adoption, End-user Training has minimal effectiveness or value.
Discuss…
Isn’t it a question about what you are training? SharePoint or their “intranet”? I have tried training people in SharePoint and have sort of the same experiences as Wendy (and your statement Ant), but focusing on the end user screen and NOT calling it SharePoint, just discussing the new user interface and procedures mapped to their Working processes is effective – in my experience.
Of cause the good old “what’s in it for me?” needs attention aswell.
Wow, training companies won’t like to hear that! Â I somewhat agree with that statement actually. Â Training by itself probably doesn’t provide as much value as companies would like. Â What I find provides the best value is actually solving a business problem or pain point with SharePoint that makes the life of the users easier. Â If it’s harder than the old way or clunky to use, adoption will suffer. Â
In addition, if you can tackle the low hanging fruit, i.e. implementing a small, easy solution in SharePoint that has maximum visibility or impact to the company, that’s a good way to get users into SharePoint who perhaps haven’t used it before. Â
Lastly, I think training can be a necessary piece to change management, however it’s your overall change management strategy that will determine how successful your rollout is in regards to user adoption, and not just the training plan you have in place. Â For our SharePoint 2010 rollout, we did conduct various end user training sessions, which I think provided value to some, but what we found to be the most helpful to our users was we had an advocate go and sit with each and every team in the company for a couple hours in the days leading up to us “shutting off” the old intranet, and answering any questions or concerns they had. Â It really eased a lot of tension and anxiety over the change and we had minimal fallout.
