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
Unfortunately it often happens that user acceptance and how that impacts the platform adoption in mid-long term is neglected. Many times we’ve come across the same problem, namely the IT & Business focusing too much on the technical and business aspects and dismissing the importance of delivering value to the end-user. More often than not, user training or solution-integrated help manuals are assigned insignificant budgets due to an apparent lack of business value. However, this mostly induces decreased productivity that scales across the entire target group and may very well compromise user acceptance (at least for some of the features).
Involving key users from the early stages of a project in an Agile approach (get permanent feedback before final delivery) can help uncover flaws in the specifications or discover new and useful functionality that can make or break the project’s success on the long term.
Is also very important to have internal qualified IT personnel in various areas of SharePoint: this bridges the gap between the external service providers and the decision makers, enabling a more trusting partnership, while also minimizing user frustration by providing quick support or, if necessary, supplying sufficient information to external partners for a more efficient reaction in case of system crashes.
Try to identify also the most excited users and use them to spread the magic of SharePoint among their peers.
