When you’re having user adoption problems with your existing collaboration solutions, it’s sometimes difficult to determine whether the deficiency is in the tool itself, in the training you offer, the interface design or other contributing factors.
A few years back, a mid-sized organization adopted a cloud-based tool that helped its project teams communicate and collaborate. While this single-purpose tool didn’t offer much in terms of document management, it worked well for communication, so it seemed worthwhile.
The organization soon realized, however, that its users needed strong document management capabilities on a regular basis, and the communication tool it adopted had serious deficiencies in that regard. With its collaborative business solutions unable to provide what users truly needed, the organization had a true functionality gap.
Here are four steps for understanding and resolving your user adoption challenges with collaborative business solutions:
- Observe how people actually use your current tools: Understanding whether your users are actually using your collaborative business solutions starts with observation. If you rely on asking people why they aren’t using a certain tool, they may not be aware of the reasons or have difficulty articulating them. Instead, the project manager should observe workers to see how they use tools to accomplish their tasks.
- Analyze gaps: Based on any gaps you observe, determine which are due to missing features or to existing features that aren’t accessible enough to users. The fact is, most users don’t need a huge set of features, and the functionality they need is often already available.With full-featured software like SharePoint, for example, most users only need to use about 10 percent of the features. Usually, the problem comes from how you’re organizing and presenting these features and functions.Too often, an organization pushes out the whole feature set to users, which overloads them and hurts user adoption. Too many options lead to confusion and paralysis, and users don’t know where to begin. Rather than spending a lot of time trying to figure out what features are relevant to them, they avoid using the collaboration platform.
- Look for design solutions to resolve gaps: When solving user adoption problems, start with analyzing the issue from a user design perspective. If the functionality users need is available, but it’s not being presented in a way that is intuitive, try to address the issue through simple design tweaks to the user interface. These relatively easy fixes are the low-hanging fruit.
- Consider upgrading or replacing your solution: Redesigning the user interface won’t solve the problem if the underlying feature set of your solution doesn’t help you close those gaps. In this situation, you may need to look for another solution with a richer feature set.If your organization has been upgrading your collaborative business solutions along the way, another upgrade might be the best option. But if your current solution is nearing the end of its useful life and your suite of tools no longer meets your company’s evolving needs, it might be time for a fresh start.
Time To Start Fresh?
There are several reasons why it might make good financial sense to give up on an older platform and start fresh. These include:
- Software that’s becoming obsolete: For example, Windows Server 2003 is coming to the end of its lifecycle in the second quarter of this year. Microsoft won’t be supporting the product anymore, so continuing to use the system could result in additional risks and expense. You need to think about systems that may be approaching end-of-life in the next year or 18 months.
- Software that’s no longer competitive: When your current vendor isn’t keeping up with the times, you end up with a true feature gap between what you have now and what’s available in the marketplace. Other collaborative business solutions could offer superior capabilities for equal or lower cost than continuing to upgrade what you have.
- High cost of maintaining your existing system: Maintaining older collaborative business solutions comes with a variety of hard and soft costs. If your current solution requires an array of server farms on-premises and several people to keep it up and running, moving to a cloud-based solution probably makes good financial sense. When you analyze the most cost-effective way to meet your user needs, the cloud model invariably presents significant financial incentives for organizations.
If you’re considering starting fresh, it’s important to define the needs and priorities for your organization before talking to vendors. Without this prep work, the vendor will define them for you based on the features they offer. Make sure you’re driving the conversation and getting a solution that meets your specific requirements.
