Monday 11 April 2011

A Critical Time for SharePoint User Adoption

More than ever before it is critical for the SharePoint partner community to focus on SharePoint user adoption techniques and ensure that adoption is not just for a singular solution, but for a wider programme of SharePoint-driven services. Millions of licenses have been sold worldwide through the partner network but little has been monitored about how well SharePoint is entrenching into a wide range of organisations for the long term. If SharePoint is going to bed-in to any organisation and be seen as a critical core of any IT strategy, the business users have to want to use it, understand why they are using it and like using it.

We have witnessed a number of SharePoint projects that have started well only to stall and stumble a year on, typically due to the fact that the client believes they can progress themselves without any outside help or adoption strategy, reliant on a single contractor and most usually because the client has not been helped with a business strategy and associated techniques that allow the client to leverage the most out of SharePoint, most easily. Clients need business aligned roadmaps to sweat the assest of SharePoint.

A client is often left to believe after the first SharePoint project, that any new SharePoint service or solution is yet another project that will take another three or six months to deliver. This is because generally the partner community does not set out a plan for the clients and distinguish between which type of solutions should be run as a project and which solutions can be delivered almost directly out of the box without being termed a project.

However whatever the project and roadmap situation, we are at a loss to understand why so many partners are happy to deliver so many SharePoint solutions and yet walk away at the moment when the client asks what strategies are required to encourage the users to engage with the solutions. Many partners explain that this is not something they deal with (they point to a training company instead), though they are happy to perform a small amount of client training for handover activities. That may be true but user adoption isn't just about training.

User adoption is about understanding the psychology of the client, the client culture, the end user audience, the business challenges, the requirement for change, the requirement for new technologies, the ability to change, the ability to adopt, the diverse and distributed nature of a geographically or divisionally-dispersed client, the variety of user-types within a singular client audience, the variety opf user-types across multiple business audiences, the timescales for adoption, the challenges on business time, the cost of adoption and so on. If this is not first understood and an adoption strategy performed, the training as a result will potentially be ineffectual.

By the same token, partners often offer clients train-the-trainer activities, the provisioning of a technical support manual, and maybe a quick start guide and someone within the client organisation, typically an internal project manager is left to pick up the pieces and roll the solution out to end users. If the job is done right, end business users will know clearly what is coming next, why it is coming, when it is coming and the clear benefits it will being as well as the impact on their working day. This is all part of the initial adoption strategy. Users like to know how they will be trained, what the impact will be and how easy the new SharePoint solution is to use. 

Yet what we see too frequently is a client user base that views the next solution as yet another piece of software being thrown out there by an uninvolved IT team who has little understanding of how a business operates and how business divisions do their job. The divide between what a business user wants and what an IT team think they want is often a vast gulf. Solutions that are not designed with the end business user in mind will often fail, unless it is simply filling a temporary gap. The foundation of any SharePoint adoption strategy is in fulfilling the basic business user requirements. Simple, but all too often ignored.

Similarly clients are often guilty of not budgeting for user adoption activities and training in advance, and where they do so the budget is limited, if non-existent. Clients all too often make statements such as, 'we want the solution developed so it is as easy-to-use and intuitive as possible'. What they really mean is that they hope the solution can be designed so that the business users do not need training because they fear an impact on business time will affect business adoption and there will be a negative backlash. They also fear the fact that they 'forgot' to budget for adoption and training. In reality many IT departments see little merit in holding back a large amount of valuable budget for end-user business training and occasionally we see clients ask business units for wooden-dollar budget contributions for staff training.

Software can be designed to be easy to use as possible but not all users are the same and there is ALWAYS a requirement for training. It is not always how to perform a task that matters, but why use the new solution in the first place. What was wrong with the old way, a user asks! This is why all forms of training and user adoption are underpinned by governance and policy. Give a business user 15 ways to share a file and they will ask which way should they share. Unless the policy has been defined prior to training, the end user will be non the wiser. Therefore all types of SharePoint training have to be underpinned by clear business logic relating to business tasks. Fail on this and adoption will fail too.

Here at Salem we have established a training and user adoption service that underpins the Salem Process methodology. We would never encourage any client to set in motion a SharePoint programme or project without also considering (and budgeting for) an adoption programme. From this comes a clear training strategy and plan which can then be initiated well in advance of any delivery. It is this process that distinguishes our approach from so many others.

Take the right stance with SharePoint adoption and training from the outset and the delivery of business services becomes so much more focused and useful, and business buy-in far more comfortable. Once buy-in occurs the next task is to ensure the roadmap is followed and that SharePoint becomes the core of business service delivery in the long term. For once, the business customer may just be right.