Setting up effective tools and processes to achieve user adoption often turns out to be difficult. No time, no money, no resources. You should still make that time, find the money, and locate the resources, because why roll out something like Office 365 if users do not adopt it? Nevertheless, let us take a look at some things you can start doing right now that require only a little attention.
Set an example
Office 365 is a great toolkit for communication, collaboration and sharing knowledge. So let’s use it to support the roll-out of Office 365. Eat your own dog food!
Use Office to collaborate in your IT / information management / roll-out team. That allows you to check if everything is working properly, and it offers an example of the practical application of the tools that you can show to others.
And use Office 365 to share with the stakeholders outside your team. For instance, when you organize something like workshops or training sessions:
- Do not send any materials as e-mail attachments, but share them on a SharePoint site.
- Offer a Skype meeting or Teams meeting to allow people to join you online if they cannot join in real life.
- Take notes of these sessions in OneNote and share them.
Also, encourage managers and other influencers to use the new tools when they become available. For instance, post announcements on the SharePoint. And if they want to send a newsletter or other e-mail for higher visibility, only include summaries in the mail text, with links to the full story.
Offer help content to answer frequently asked questions
User will ask how things work. At least, I get quite a few emails and calls with such questions and I know many my colleagues get them as well. Instead of detailing the same answer to each user, put these answers in a central location and point to those instructions and explanations to help them out.
- A basic user manual,
- A help page,
- A list with clear tips or frequently asked questions.
- A demo site with the SharePoint site template you have found or developed. Add some content to show what you can do in such a site.
- A Short video, if you have more time or if you find it easier to show something in a quick recording than writing it down.
Anything, as long as it explains what is what, how to use it and what’s in it for them.
Do you have an information portal or help center? Great, use it!
If you don’t have anything elaborate (yet), just put something in a public team site. Even if you cannot broadcast the information yet, at least the information is available. Just send a link to anyone who asks a question.
Inspire people who show an interest
It takes a lot of time and effort to get everyone onboard on the Office 365 train. But in every organization, there are at least some enthusiasts who like to experiment and get started with new tools. They may contact you to learn more.
Inspire them with tips and tricks of what is already possible and sneak peaks of what will become available soon. Then they can inspire their colleagues. But be honest about the limitations and the reasons why some things are not available yet – these early adopters may want to move faster than you call roll out Office 365 in a controlled manner.
Try to find out what they really need, in their situation. Standard Office 365 features can be amazing discoveries if you were unaware of them and they turn out to meet your needs. Examples of things that made some people quite happy recently:
- For a colleague the idea of sharing notes in the team site notebook was an eye opener. After all, that is included in every SharePoint site but he was not aware of that, so he was taking notes in a notebook in his OneDrive. Quite a few people were awed by the functionality offered by OneNote, which they found a lot more practical than notes on paper or on Word.
- For a team that is discussing a draft versions of deliverable documents, Microsoft Teams was just what they needed: persistent chat threads in the context of the document under discussion.
- A colleague had heard about Teams and thought that they would help him. But after some brainstorming, it turned out he wanted to manage an overview of information that was perfectly suited to list in SharePoint with some fields for status, owner and hyperlinks to other sources.
These are some things you can do to take a few steps towards some user adoption. But don’t stop there. In most organizations, you need to do a lot more to achieve real user adoption. See for example these earlier blog posts: 5 lessons learned about user adoption programmes, 5 more lessons learned about User Adoption and the DIWUG eMagazine article: How do we get users to adopt Office 365?
It takes a lot of time and effort to get everyone onboard on the Office 365 train.
But in every organization, there are at least some enthusiasts who like to experiment and get started with new tools.
They may contact you to learn more.
Inspire them with tips and tricks of what is already possible and sneak peaks of what will become available soon.
Then they can inspire their colleagues.
But be honest about the limitations and the reasons why some things are not available yet – these early adopters may want to move faster than you call roll out Office 365 in a controlled manner.
Comment by jacksonliam341 — May 28, 2021 @ 19:19