International Data Corporation (IDC) published a study several years ago which detailed a link between the amount of training provided to the end user and the impression of product success.
Similarly, in an oft-quoted survey by Sandhill and NeoChange2, 72% of respondents said the primary driver for realizing value from a software implementation is End User Adoption; “The effectiveness and overall success of an enterprise-class piece of software does not lie within the technology itself but in the processes and procedures around them. Many a software deployment delivers 100% on the business requirements only to fail in the final phase of user adoption.”
How many of us have gone through a great implementation only to get to the last steps and realize there’s no time or budget left to produce the guides and training that are so critical for the End Users? I had an experience where our training was created when a team member stood in front of a room of Designers and spoke off-the-cuff (using their system testing experience) while the rest of our team frantically took notes in the back of the room. Not exactly a recipe for success!
At SBS, we have leveraged our lineage as a Services and Process Improvement organization to provide a methodology for increasing and maintaining End User Adoption. Our recently released SBS eLearn solution provides step-by-step guides, videos, tips and tricks for all of our End User products. Here are some key aspects:
Visual Learning
One of the key aspects of contemporary learning systems is the ability to create a visual, interactive training environment. SBS eLearn offers a robust and discipline specific set of instructions, supplemented with end-user exercises, to ensure that the students are engaged during the learning process.
Example of Discipline-Specific Instructions
Configurable Learning
SBS eLearn provides a foundationfor learning that can be then be expanded to meet the unique requirements of a given client. Each organization is able to add learning elements to the base training that are unique to the way they do business without having to develop an extensive set of custom training.
Motivate, Measure and Maintain
A key to motivating technology users is to establish that they will be measured and then rewarded as they improve their capabilities. The SBS eLearn environment provides a number of capabilities to support this concept. Quizzes assist the learning process by focusing the students on important principles. The awarding of proficiency badges provides positive reinforcement to both users and management that everyone is moving in the right direction with user adoption. Finally, the use of additional learning resources(i.e videos, tips & tricks, etc) and the continuous update of the base training as new software is released provides a set of searchable and ever-expanding resources on which users may maintain and develop their skills.
Example Quiz
We are excited for the opportunities SBS eLearn will provide our clients. Project Teams will now get up to speed quicker on the front end of a Project. The platform provides for delivering basic or process-specific training to Users when moving to production. Giving users a set of exercises and guides that they can refer to at any time goes a long way towards allowing them to be comfortable with your solution, and we all know comfort with software equals big increases in adoption!
As always, we love to hear your feedback. What other solutions or methodologies have you used to increase the End User Adoption of your software implementations
1 http://edu.arrow.com/__Contents__/media/files/pdf/catalog/547/IDC_Impact_of_Training_2011.pdf
2 http://www.sandhill.com/assets/pdf/2009_Achieving_Enterprise_Software_Success.pdf
