Retain User Adoption consultants beyond the initial contract to sustain ROI.

This article was originally published on Tri Tuns Blog.

OBSERVATION

You are responsible for ensuring end-user adoption of the IT system in your organization. To ensure this occurs, you retained consulting services unique to user adoption, such as Tri Tuns. Now that the contract is near completion, you are worried that you may see a drop in employees using the system as designed – and hence a decrease in ROI.

The one truism of user adoption (UA) is it must be proactively fostered throughout the life of the IT system. Therefore, creating a new statement of work for the UA consultants may be worthwhile, in order to build a long-lasting UA program.

CONSIDER THIS

As part of a new statement of work, UA consultants will provide a User Adoption program that extends beyond the go-live period. One key area that UA consultants can help is to establish an internal UA team (made up of client employees). You may already have an implementation team, but may not have specific assignments to foster user adoption long-term.

UA consultants can help to:

1. Determine the right staff members become UA team members. Not always should the same people from the implementation team be a part of the UA team. That is because implementation team members are typically project managers and technical experts, where as long-term user adoption requires a team made up of system end-users and support staff.
2. Create solutions that will promote user adoption throughout the life of the IT system. One such example is creating data quality protocols with methods for monitoring and evaluating the accuracy of data input by end-users.
3. Develop a schedule for enacting each UA phase that minimizes disruption of pre-existing responsibilities for UA team members. Team members will undoubtedly have pre-existing workloads; therefore it is crucial to set a UA schedule that does not jeopardize any other responsibilities.

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

As you plan for the completion of the initial consulting contract, think about how you can leverage additional services that will sustain end-user adoption.

RELATED RESOURCES

Check out these other resources for more information related to this topic:

• Check out MyUserAdoptionPlan.com – an all-in-one User Adoption Portal
• Take the Tri Tuns User Adoption Challenge – a free online assessment tool
• Read: “Does Your User Adoption Methodology Remove Barriers To Adoption?”
• Read: “Design the right metrics to improve user adoption”