Touching the void
- Article 69 of 77
- Information Age, July 2004
Obtaining end-user 'buy-in' to critical IT project rollouts can be the difference between success and failure. What's the secret?
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Effective education
Aspective's New says that in his experience, most users actually want to adapt to technology change. Initial fears - most common among employees who grew up before PCs were commonplace - are often overcome through training. For example, says New, in the case of a rollout to field service workers at a major utilities company, end users quickly appreciated the fact that new PDAs gave them more information about the jobs they were working on than the existing telephone-based dispatch centre, plotted more sensible routes between jobs and, most importantly, eliminated hours of filling in timesheets and other administration. It is only when companies begin to implement features that ride roughshod over previous practices (and rights) or impede an individual's ability to get the job done that employees complain and find their systems a burden rather than an improvement. For example, a large telecoms company recently withdrew a proposal to add global positioning system technology to its field engineers' PDAs, that would have enabled the company to pinpoint their location at any point during the day, after misgivings from employees about the sense of being spied on.
There will, however, always be recalcitrant users, unwilling to accept change and unwilling to use a new system. A combination of carrot and stick is useful for many, with both the advantages of a system (eg it will help the end user do his/her job better) and the disadvantages of not using the system (eg he will not be paid any commission unless he enters his/her orders into the system) being used to sell it. In some extreme cases, it may even be necessary to make special arrangements. Partners for Change's Williamson suggests that if a salesman is so vital that it would be impossible for the organisation to fire him even if he refuses to use a CRM system, it might be possible to work round the problem. "With a CRM system, it might be just the issue of inputting information. An interim or long-term solution might be for a PA to be entering information via a fax or phone call. You need to balance the benefits of the project against the risks of key people leaving the organisation."
One big problem for most IT departments, however, is the issue of communication: most are not very good at it. "We thought we were the intellectual visionaries who knew how to run the company," TEC's Jones recalls of his days in an IT department. "We had more intellect in our little fingers than all the senior management. That was never the recipe for success, was it?"
The Aziz Corp's Khalid Aziz agrees. "The kind of person that makes a good IT person is often not particularly good at thinking about the needs of the user," he suggests. "Most people who went into IT didn't go into it on the basis that they liked talking to people: many actually prefer sitting in front of a computer screen and interacting with that."
Aziz says that it is vital to demonstrate to IT staff the importance of communication and how to look at things from the end user's perspective. "You need to teach them understanding and tolerance. It's immensely frustrating when you know how something works to see someone who just doesn't understand it."
Meta Group analyst Ashim Pal agrees that communication is vital and an IT department's attitude to communication can determine whether or not a project is successful. By promoting what the IT department does and "selling" the systems it deploys, the department is more likely to have successful rollouts.
To get end users to use a system requires a combination of managing expectations, persuasion, coercion, education and training. But successful implementations often require a two-way process, with management and end users negotiating on features. Give employees the ability to do their job better, in a way they believe is better, and a system is far more likely to get used than one that is simply imposed from above.
User acceptance: How to do it
As change management projects go, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)'s was pretty dramatic: to take 7,500 users in 240 locations with very few PCs between them and have them become fluent not just with the basics of desktop computing, modern productivity suites, email and the web, but also a brand new system that automates one of the most vital aspects of their work.
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