Your organization has decided to implement a new system or tool. Are you (and more importantly, all of your affected personnel) ready?
While concrete needs such as budget and infrastructure will naturally be top of mind during an upgrade, you must also consider your team’s readiness for the changes to come.
The first tip on our list is by far the most important.
Get extensive input from the people who will be using a system before implementing it.
Getting input isn’t just a courtesy to your people—it’s a baseline necessity if you want to maximize your new system’s adoption. When people feel unheard when it comes to new technology, there is a real risk of them circumventing the new system, turning to unapproved resources to do the job in the way they feel is more efficient—a recognized set of maladaptive workplace patterns known as “shadow IT.”
There’s a good chance your agency currently relies (and overspends) on commercial products and platforms. Cloud sprawl—“the uncontrolled proliferation of an organization’s cloud instances, services or providers,” per TechTarget—can happen quickly if you are not actively monitoring all of the tools your teams use in their jobs.
Simply surveying your personnel can identify many tools you might not have been aware of.
Alternatively, you can turn to your IT team to analyze traffic and usage patterns across approved and unapproved work systems.
When you know exactly which systems your people actually rely on and those they don’t really need, it’s much easier to find a new platform that groups up all those needs in one package.
A system with modular but unified components will almost always beat a fixed, indivisible alternative in adapting to your specific needs.
That increased adaptability is especially useful during the early design phase of your technology upgrade, when exact needs may still be uncertain.
More importantly, the ability to quickly swap or add features becomes crucial later on when changing needs, compliance issues, or legal concerns end up requiring different capabilities than those you began with.
All of the buy-in in the world isn’t going to help if your people aren’t proficient at the new system.
In many cases, it will be possible for some users to get hands-on access to a testing environment prior to full implementation.
Give a trusted team member an opportunity for directed training and access in advance, and you’ll have a valuable software champion when the new system launches: Someone to whom others can turn when they forget how to do a process or access a system.
A custom training module delivered through an online LMS is the perfect environment to provide the broad details about your new platform, such as:
Couple this with classroom training for full-simulation roleplaying—where personnel are asked to complete role-specific tasks within the system—and your team will be ready for a seamless launch.
Digital transformation is difficult, and preparing your personnel is one of its biggest challenges. From preventing unauthorized workarounds to finding a system that suits all of your staff’s use-cases, there’s a lot of complexity. Still, the results—functional teams perfectly aligned with the platforms you’ve provided them—are more than worth it.
Posted on Aug 3, 2021
