harmon.ie’s Best Practice tips for Enterprise SharePoint Adoption Part III Providing Guidance
In our previous blog posts, Part I and Part II, we’ve shared best practice tips for delivering a consumer-grade user experience and how to help business users get 'What’s In It For Me?', when it comes to adopting SharePoint.
To encourage people to embrace and get actively involved in collaboration projects, here are some road-tested tips for how to encourage better guidance and build communities focused on supporting business needs.
- Train less, work flow more. Forrester Research estimates that for every $1 invested in purchasing collaboration software, $6-7 will need to be spent on training and getting people to use it. Instead of working to streamline training, start with solutions that minimize the need for training. The closer the solution matches users’ familiar workflow, the less training will be needed.
- Build a Community. What happens when an employee calls on support with a SharePoint issue, only to be dismissed under the pretext that “nothing is broken”? Understandably, their opinions about SharePoint and the company's support facilities are quickly tainted. FAQs, Knowledge Base articles, and self-help tools are a good start, but what people really need is someone they can talk to. Having questions quickly answered and being able to microblog with a coach, champion or subject matter expert can help make your SharePoint adoption strategy more successful.
- Remember - governance isn’t evil. Rather than dictating a set of rules that govern people’s every actions, show how clear policies about how information are organized, secured, and retained. This helps people feel confident about relying on SharePoint to do their jobs.
Stay tuned for next week’s blog, how to measure your SharePoint implementation success.
