Top 5 reasons why adoption engagements fail
Before the introduction of Office 365 it was rarely offered, but these days it is becoming more common to receive 365 adoption support from your Microsoft partner. I remember the days where — as a trainee at Microsoft — I could choose what direction to go. At that time you were a bit crazy when you wanted to do something with technology adoption and it was recommended to become an exchange consultant. Oh how times have changed!
Where adoption support used to be a nice “extra”, companies now understand the existential need and added value more and more. Proof is increasing that without offering adoption support, productivity often decreases. Also, workplace and even work satisfaction decrease and the support desk gets too many functional questions.
We applaud that more adoption support is offered but that does not necessarily mean everything is all sorted. Organizations and people can be very complex It is more sophisticated than just offering some training. So, to learn from what goes wrong most we have listed the top 5 reasons in this article. Additionally, we have created general and WorkplaceBuddy specific recommendations that you can download here.
Disclaimer 1: This article does not suggest that most/all adoption engagements fail. We discuss that IF it fails, these are the most important reasons.
Disclaimer 2: Of course we’re not just negative! Feel free to download our recommendations for each possible fail reason here :)
1. Lack of active sponsorship
Maybe an old-fashioned way of thinking, but it still all starts top down. Often this thing is checked off only by top management agreeing that this particular project is getting started but that’s nowhere close to being enough. They — all — need to be involved! They need to show their faces and say why they agreed with this, what they are asking from others, and how they changed their ways of working and what it meant for them. Everybody I speak agrees with this but I rarely have seen it happen which is a waste considering that this is actually accomplishable.
2. Focus on ambassadors (and then a miracle happens! No Really!)
To deal with the scalability issue often ambassador programs are initiated: Colleagues that are a little more enthusiastic about new technology, who are supported to support their peers. Hopefully these people are volunteers, but I have seen many times that these people were appointed. Don’t expect anything to happen when they were appointed. Also from volunteers I have very rarely seen they had (been given) time enough to really help their colleagues. I have seen however, that the ambassadors are guided in a very devoted way, but too often we expect too much of them.
3. Training to only a portion of the workforce
Providing training to all users is too expensive. So let’s offer training to just a portion of the workforce and organize several other activities along with the ambassador program. I understand that it is hard to organize training sessions for everybody because there won’t be a business case, but why would the business case be there on a smaller portion? This is even harder to understand when considering the “Forgetting curve” from Ebbinghaus which states that within 24 hours already 70% of the information is lost, growing to 90% in a week, when the information is not being retained.
4. No one cares about the library with elearnings
A great way of solving the scalability option is to make elearnings available. There are many solutions to do this, or you can make elearnings available in a SharePoint site. There is only one thing: Very few people go to this library that is made available because they don’t care, and if they really would care intrinsically, they’d probably go to Google or Youtube. An elearning portal with movies that are waiting for you to visit them is mostly more a thing to check of from your project planning so it can be said that something has been done on this aspect. It turns out, that these cheap checking-the-box solutions are actually very expensive per piece of impact.
5. No one cares about new things and your ADKAR methodology
Really. They don’t. Or at least, most. Chances are that you, just like me, are very enthusiastic about new solutions but like with each hobby, most people have other hobbies. We have also seen that the ADKAR methodology is explained in a lot of engagements. Just don’t. It is a great framework for you to guide larger audiences but Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino also are not explaining the methodologies they used to create the perfect story, they just deliver the perfect story.
In this article you have seen the 5 major reasons why adoption programs fail if they do. I hope that by being Aware of these 5 reasons, a lot of pain can be prevented. Feel free to download our “Adoption recommendations” document to discover our suggestions on how to deal with these issues from a general perspective and how WorkplaceBuddy could contribute. I am curious to the additional adoption fail reasons and solutions you can think of, so we can learn from each other!
Download our “Adoption recommendations” document today!
Click here if you’re interested to check our video pitch or ask us a question!
