User Adoption is a big deal. You can implement and customize SharePoint until your hearts content but if your users are scared of it, don’t like change or simply find it too hard to learn and find stuff, it will fail. This is often one of the hardest challenges there is.
I would love to hear what techniques you use specifically around these areas. Please use some (or all) of these questions to give inspiration :
- Did you get end-users involved in the design and implementation phases ?
- Did you train the users and if so, how ? (Videos, residential, train the trainer ?)
- If you were replacing something they used to have with SharePoint, how did you manage the change ?
- Do you measure on-going satisfaction ?
- What was your biggest challenge when implementing, what barriers did you over come ?
- Did you have a killer app, or business process that made it “all worth while ?”
- How do your users find out more information on how to do things, where’s the community ?
- During implementation, what areas did you spend lot’s of time on to get right ? (e.g Search, Info architecture, etc).
- What 3rd party apps did you buy to help you ?
If you know of a tool / resource, please add it here : http://list.ly/list/7fR-sharepoint-usability-tools
Sometimes I just have to blow people’s minds. The old SP we used for years was both underused and misused. People were just keeping track of items here and there. As I’ve started to develop our brand spanking new SP, I’ve taken it upon myself to show a few people(especially the people who were under using) what it really is capable of. If I’ve done my job of showing them how much time SP solutions can save them, adoption has never been a problem. Now, word is spreading and people are coming to me for solutions.
I have seen in many projects through out the many different companies and the common problem i found which is basically a Technic for the user adoption is too much customization and too much governance. Most of companies are implementing too much customization and ultimately looses the share point features. And at the end of the story users are suffering from slow down in site loading. Which leads to loos the user interest. I had very good experience of one of project where we used minimum customization and maximum OOB functionality and the speed was amazing. Users were double happy. And on our side, less development.
I believe the key with user adoption starts with informational/demo session(s). A lot of time users fall into 1 of 3 groups: 1) Lack of Knowledge of what SP can do, 2) Bad Experience w/SP, 3) Incorrectly Informed on what SP really does.
In an information session what I find extremely valuable is having a Demo site available with different implementations of features in SP. Now this may not meet every users needs however it gives them the opportunity to see what SP capacity and sparks ideas for a requirements session.
Hi Mark,
I like this discussion. You’re right. If users are scared of adding or changing things on SharePoint, they are hardly to optimize it.
Developing: We provide solutions to secure the data on SharePoint. Our solution is pre-build with policy and components. Our users can minimize discretionary granting of access to sensitive data across file servers. The policy sets can be easily customized or used as templates to create new policies.
Training: We host SharePoint webinars to help users to understand what the problems the users are facing and how we can help them to solve those problems. We also have technical team to work with users developing and customizing the SharePoint solution.
Customizing: During implantation, if users have specific needs, our technical supporters will work with them to satisfy the users’ requests. In addition, we share some successful case studies for users to learn.
Hi,
This is the most difficult part of SharePoint in my opinion.
Development / Design; we always get end-users involved with the design of the portal. Most of them will be super-users later in the stadium of implementation. We use a SCRUM based development of SharePoint. With small iterations we try to get users happy.
One on one Training; yes, but not too much. It’s really expensive and not really effective in my opinion. Use simple videos or make a SharePoint environment that everybody understands
The killer app is different per type of company. I see a lot of birthday webparts, newsfeed, news, digital declarations, MySite/Skydrive Pro (remote working) and sometimes the Lync integration people loves to see.
