While much of the
advice about how to maximise your chances of success with social collaboration
technology adoption focuses on the period following (and including) the launch
of your platform, in practice you should be laying the groundwork for this success
much earlier, as part of your pilot stage. Most organisations carry out a pilot
of some sort before rolling the technology out to a wider audience within their
organisation, but often not enough is done to take full advantage of this
period. The default purpose of a pilot is typically to make sure that your
chosen technology was the right choice for you - or at least that it meets the
primary needs that you set out to address - by letting a few, carefully chosen
people loose on it to try it out, and at the same time check for any problems
or bugs in the application.
However, if that's
all you use your pilot for, then you're missing some really huge opportunities
that could give you a real head start in your adoption strategy. Here are six
examples of the value that your pilot can bring if you are paying close enough
attention:
#1 Getting early buy-in from across the business
While it might seem
easier to limit your pilot users to people in your project team or IT
department, the pilot provides a great way to demonstrate that your social
collaboration initiative is about bringing different groups together and making
connections. What's more, if you can create a pilot group made up of people
from all across your organisation, you will start to build awareness across the
different business divisions of the platform and what you are trying to do,
providing a platform for your ongoing adoption efforts. This approach also
helps to avoid the platform and the initiative being seen to be
"owned" by just one part of the business, which can create friction
and inhibit adoption within other groups.
#2 Getting a head start on viral adoption
While you
can't rely on viral adoption alone to achieve enterprise-wide adoption of a
social collaboration platform, it is an extremely valuable tool in your broader
adoption strategy, and one which it is worth encouraging in any way possible.
It might be tempting to restrict the number of people taking part in your
pilot to retain control, but if there is demand from people to join in, this is a great indicator
that there is a need for such a tool among your workforce, and this is
something you should fully embrace and encourage. After all, the early
enthusiasts will likely go on to be perfect
candidates for an advocate network, and so the sooner you can identify who
they are and build a relationship with them, the better.
#3 Populating the community prior to launch
An empty community
is not a very inviting place, so the more you can populate your social
collaboration environment with real, interactive content before the official
launch, the easier it will be for people to see the value of the platform and
how it is used. New members will be much more inclined to join an existing
group or an existing conversation than they will to start a new one, and your
pilot group are the perfect people to break the ice.
#4 Highlighting key use cases for the technology within
your business
A major challenge
for social collaboration platform adoption is helping people to understand -
not how to use the tool, necessarily - but what to use it for, and in what context
it can add value to the way they work with their immediate teams and with
colleagues in the broader organisation. Your pilot provides a great opportunity
to identify a few use cases to get you started - and ideally these will be very
specific to your organisation's business or its processes, to help provide that
context. The earlier you can identify and capture these types of examples, the
earlier you can incorporate them into your training and education materials and
workshops once you finally launch.
#5 Fine tuning the platform for launch
While ironing out
kinks in the technology is important, this is not the only way the pilot can
help you smooth the way prior to launch; it can also help you to work out which
features you should - and, more importantly, should NOT - include in the launch
version of your platform. Many social collaboration tools offer a wealth of
features and functions, and this can be very overwhelming for new users to get
to grips with, especially if they are not regular users of social tools in
their non-work lives. See which features your pilot users embrace most quickly,
and disable anything that doesn't grab their attention; this will also give you
the opportunity to regularly "upgrade" the platform after launch to
help retain visibility and keep people interested.
#6 Preparing your training and support materials
While your software
vendor may (and hopefully does) provide help materials for using their
technology, you will most likely need to tailor this for your own
organisation's deployment, especially if you are disabling certain features or
have customised it in any way. The pilot phase provides a great opportunity for
creating this material, and more importantly for testing it on your pilot "guinea pigs". Your pilot users also provide a fantastic way to find out where
the sticking points might be in adopting the tool - and while this might be
something that you wish to change in the tool prior to launch, it could also
simply be something you invest extra time in within your self-service help
materials or your training courses.
Are you about to
launch a social software platform in your organisation? What have you learned
from your own pilot?
You can read about
the approaches that other organisations have taken in the various social
collaboration case studies I've published. If you have a story to share,
please get in touch.