User Adoption Strategies for Collaboration Tools

By Michael Sampson
in

I’m heading to Europe in March to attend and speak at IntraTeam Event 2010, the annual Intranet conference in Copenhagen. While global warming won’t be on the agenda, lots of intranet and collaboration topics will be! I am presenting a pre-conference workshop on User Adoption Strategies, and conference keynote on Frameworks for Evaluating Collaboration Tools. I’m really looking forward to it. Will you be there?

As part of my preparation for the workshop specifically, and in relation to a variety of other projects more generally, I am doing a lot of work around user adoption strategies for collaboration tools at the moment. User adoption is the essential stage whereby you put an intentional focus on encouraging people to adopt the new collaboration tool — Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Microsoft SharePoint, Atlassian Confluence, Yammer, Central Desktop — as part of improving the way they work. There are many user adoption strategies that can be used to this end: over-the-shoulder watching, classroom training, real-to-life narrative scenarios, exemplar stories, and more.

So, I have a request to make. I’m looking for input from you about how you approach user adoption for collaboration tools at your place of work. I have created a survey on user adoption strategies—it will take you 10 minutes to complete. Would you be willing to share your experience with me please by taking the survey?

Thanks much … all my best for your work.

Published January 21, 2010

Comments

Lessons Learned

Submitted by Anonymous on January 25, 2010 .

I think that it is a mistake to focus on tools when it comes to evaluating user adoption. Instead, try to focus on familiarity of touch points and information architecture. Workflow is also important.

Training is important but the users need to see the value proposition up front before going into training or they will just feel like they are being forced to do another thing that is not really a part of their job description.

For example, in Code-Roller (SDLC PM), we rolled our own chat room and discussion board facilities. In Cogenuity, we integrated with Google Wave instead. We felt that the Wave GUI was more like email which everyone was already familiar and comfortable with. We will be integrating Code-Roller with Google Wave shortly.