How to Use Change Management for Your Technology Adoption
Going through a transition — of any kind or size — can be a difficult task to take on for both you and your company. Using change management methods will help you start on the right foot when developing and launching a new technology.
According to McKinsey & Company, 70% of digital transformations fail. Most often it’s due to a lack of communication or plan. We’ve laid out the steps you should take to ensure a successful technology launch for your company.
Why is Change Management Important?
Developing a change management process can mean the difference between users adopting your new technology versus users outright rejecting it. Why is this important? When the users buy into it, your adoption rate skyrockets with their newfound motivated ownership, thus relegating through to your ROI.
If your users do not feel the tech your company has chosen for them is useful, it likely means they were not involved in the process. Involving the people who will use the technology in the process will help you from pre-launch to post-launch and beyond because they’ll be more invested in its success.
Change management’s role is much more than “good communication”. It’s a way for your company to help users understand the product, reduce overall costs, and prevent major data loss during migrations. It can even affect external sources like contracts, vendors, customers, and payments.
Help Users Adopt New Tech Step by Step
Getting users to learn something new can be a challenging task — especially for those who have been using the same tech for years. Here are some steps you can take to implement a successful technology adoption using change management.
Embark
Set a goal and make a plan to achieve it. We all know that Benjamin Franklin said “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” How often, though, do we take a step back and actually do it? Here are a few ways to plan well:
Choose a fitting method based on your company’s culture and operations. Whether it’s Kotter’s method, Prosci’s 3-phase process or you create your own, make sure it works for you.
Include items such as how and when you’ll communicate, a backup plan, what constitutes a change, and any other preparations.
Always relate plan items back to the main goal.
Without a plan, resistance is imminent; create yours to work toward a successful launch.
Endorse
Once you have established a goal, find the core dedicated team of people who will not only be your evangelists for the new product/tech but will be your canary in the coal mine. Being able to see any potential problems with the product in each relevant department will help you prevent the disasters that cause poor adoption rates and loss of revenue.
This team can also be your beta testers who discover issues with the product before moving forward. Having this kind of personal feedback loop will help you fix the issues before more people have them. During these discussions, you can also begin to develop the beginnings of a truly useful guide that can help create tutorials of all kinds for new users.
Since this team will be a vital piece of the plan, you’ll want to include all varieties of diversity in it. People from all generations, as many departments as possible, leaders, general users, and stakeholders. Getting different types of people involved in the process will only boost your engagement throughout the company as well as provide you with quality feedback. This group can even help reduce the fears behind the new tech.
Educate
No change is going to be successful within your company without a training program for it. Whether it’s via your evangelists or an external company, your people will need to understand and learn their new system. This takes time, effort, and even more communication.
One way to help your employees understand what the new tech helps them with is to customize the training for each department. Some departments may not use all of the components so keep it simple (especially at first as they’ll already be a little overwhelmed). Train them on what aspects of this new product will help them specifically. They’ll be more excited, less resistant, and better trained to use it properly.
Entice
If you haven’t already implemented a gamification/reward system within any of your departments, now is a great time to start! This process can help you not only engage your employees with the new tech, but reward them for learning it, learning fast, and helping others. This will help develop your users into their own evangelism and have fun doing it.
Create different ways users can earn points for rewards that can be anything from financial to time off to a party at the office. Anything you can do to engage them will not only help you ensure it’s used once it’s officially launched but will encourage them to explore its full benefits. As long as you have done your due diligence and followed the 10 step formula, you’ll see success bloom.
Evolve
As with any technology, there will be constant upgrades, updates, tweaks, and uses for it. Make continual training part of your long-term plan to ensure its usage does not decrease along with user happiness overall. Incorporate your gamification rewards into it, if possible, but always provide regular training — especially for new employees.
Launch with Confidence
There are many different efficient and useful methods of implementing change within your company. We love helping companies assess what will work best, develop the cost-benefit analysis, and create the strategy.
Since training is a vital piece to the adoption puzzle, we help create the training program for your new tech including workshops for decision-making, planning, or onboarding to the technology. We’ll also ensure your vendors, contracts, and all other aspects of your business are not excluded from the evaluation and plan.
Whichever way you choose to implement your new product, use a great change management method and follow through completely to help your users adopt it with confidence.