But some are more equal than others. Lately, I have been working in a Functional Management team that supports users, mostly content owners and site owners, in the new intranet. We have a lot to do and never quite enough time to give all of them our full attention. So we have to prioritize.
But is it OK to “play favourites”? Spend time with some users, while others are pointed to a standard help page and told that if they want personal attention, they will have to wait?
Yes, I think that is OK. If we pick our favourites for the right reasons.
Not the people who smile most prettily at us.
Not the people who yell most loudly.
Not automatically the biggest bosses.
We give priority people who are trying to achieve something that will help many end-users a lot.
The content owners publishing key information.
The site owners managing solutions that support important business processes.
The early adoptor users who inspire many colleagues to take advantage of the new options.
I was very pleased to hear Richard Harbridge emphasize this as well in his very interesting webinar titled How to improve Office 365 & SharePoint adoption in the real world: The perception is that we need to support and invest in our users equally. But some users are more impactful than others: 20% of the people are responsible for 80% of the activity on the intranet.
We are not being undemocratic. We are just aiming to get the biggest bang for our buck. And to mix my metaphors: we pick the low hanging fruit, by helping users who only need a small boost to get back on track to rich pickings for the entire community. We don’t have an official champions programma at that organisation (yet…). But unofficially, we know who the champions are. Who makes an impact, who spends a lot of time and energy on the intranet to make such an impact. These people do a lot to make the intranet matter. So we do a lot to help these people.
We are not being undemocratic, we are not being unfriendly, we are just being practical. Because after all, some users are more equal than others.
