SPC2011: Drive Adoption and Get Users Excited About SharePoint (SPC102)

October 11, 2011 Leave a comment

Notes from the SharePoint Conference 2011
Session:  Drive Adoption and Get Users Excited About SharePoint (SPC102)
Speakers: Scott Jamison, Chris Bortlik

I’m always interested to hear about how others drive user adoption for SharePoint because in my opinion, it IS hard to get users to adopt SharePoint. Let’s face it – SharePoint is big/complex and its got its quirks and you really have to spend time playing around with it before you can start getting use out of it.

In this session, they used an example of VHS over Betamax to point out that even though Betamax was the better technology, VHS won out in the end because it had better content (this was all before my time so I’ll take their word for it). It’s content that drives user adoption, not the technology.

Another point that they made was that SharePoint adoption is hard because people don’t need to use SharePoint to do collaboration – People have been sending and resending documents to each other as attachments in emails  for forever.

Connect SharePoint with user’s business goals

What is the driving factor? (not requirements like this button should be red)

Good site design

What’s in it for me? How will it help my job? –> need to show how it will actually help them

Elements for Adoption Strategy:

Communication Plan

    • Leverage experts and champions
    • Town hall meetings
    • Break Room poster
    • Online scavenger hunts
    • Launch Parties
    • *Ongoing communication!*

Training Plan

    • Training for Power Users, Visitors, Members, Contributors
    • “Just in time and just enough” – ie. 60 second videos

Content Conversion Plan (for migrating data from legacy systems)

    • Clean and migrate recent content only
    • Trash in = trash out

User Support Plan

    • Contact person for every page
    • Internal User Groups
    • Get the IT help desk on board
    • End user feedback loop! Get evidence that SharePoint is better for them!
    • Training guides

Incentives and Reward Plan

    • Show with real data why something is useful
    • Make it fun!
    • Recognition for Content Contribution (ie. Leader board)
    • Example – Microsoft Academy Content Contributions

Executive Sponsorship Plan

    • Getting Executive buy in: not just numbers, its intangibles like productivity gains, employee retention, community)

Information Architecture Plan

    • If it’s not easy to find, users will give up (going back to good site design)
    • Branding
    • Simplify templates – don’t just turn everything on!

Governance Plan

Find your Killer Application:

Adoption = Value > Change

Using SharePoint as a glorified file share is not enough to adopt

Find where users need to use SharePoint (critical business process/flow) – Mostly around automation

Using surveys to get user buy-in/opinion/support

Microsoft Experience Center: http://envisionthepossible.com

Examples of killer apps:

  • Youtube for the Enterprise

Motto: Crawl, Walk, Run

Don’t need to know how to do everything at once

Just in time training as roll out different functionality

http://blogs.technet.com/b/cbortlik/archive/2010/04/27/learning-to-crawl-walk-and-run-with-sharepoint.aspx

Must-Have (Free Resources):

  • iUseSharePoint.com

Getting Buy In:

Forrester study shows positive ROI in roughly 9 months: http://tinyurl.com/sp2010roi

This was a good session – I liked everything they were saying!

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