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Stephen Cribbett
Saturday, February 12th, 2011 at 7:10 am
Whether you are new to the world of online qual and collaborative innovation or not, you might be tasked with creating company or department-wide adoption of your new software. The range of social software available to you, including our own IdeaStream online qual solution of course, can drive productivity and efficiency in terms of delivering qualitative research. What's more, exposure to the range of features available is key if the opportunity is to be optimised within the organisation.
Software can fail because it doesn't get adopted by a wider group of users, so it's imperative that, if you've had a positive experience, you share your experience with others and help them repeat your success. IdeaStream has a good range of capabilities and features designed by researchers for researchers. By working with Dub to create a roll-out plan, you will witness greater, faster adoption across your business, which in turn will experience greater research success, a more innovative approach and a burgeoning pipeline.
Here are just few pointers that you may wish to follow in order to generate greater adoption among your colleagues, but for more information, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327
#1 Assign 'Champions'
Successful roll-out of your new new software, be it IdeaStream or any other, is best drive by a core group of energetic and well-connected individual 'champions'. What typifies a champion is their ability to communicate with passion, their connectivity within the organisation and their early-adopter status. Champions spot the underlying benefits early on and discover ways to articulate these to the group. They are proponents of social software and heavy users of social media and online networks for their own personal purposes.
Dub has a range of materials to support the whorl of champions and aid the roll-out, including training videos and written documents, webinars and presentations.
#2 Get hands-on
Key to adoption is the first step of getting your colleagues to 'try it' and get hands-on. To enable this, the 'whats in it for me' question is always an important one to answer, so why not consider creating an internal project which may glean insight that helps them with a current project or challenge. Internal communities are a very valid and powerful way to deliver fresh insight and new perspectives, so don't take them lightly. They can be created in a very short time given the strong connectivity that already exists among the group, not to mention the shared interest in using the new tool and delivering fresh insight around the chosen topic.
To make initial introductions to the software, encourage your colleagues to come to an initial presentation with their laptops. Get them to sign up to your trial project and kick start involvement there and then. Get them to complete their profile and take in a single, simple task. This will help them witness first-hand how easy the software is to use and how natural it feels to them to add content in a way they are familiar with from their own personal use of social networks.
#3 Build an internal research and innovation community
Following on from #2, after you have completed your introductory session with you colleagues involvement, continue the 'conversations' by running the project over a number of days. Beware not to overplay the trial - you don't want to overload your colleagues. Try and restrict it to no more than 4 or 5 tasks that last approximately 3 days.
Build a range of tasks using the full suite of tools so that your colleagues can experience what their participants may experience in the future. The at the end of the project, present them the Admin Centre and explain how easy it was to moderate the discussions. At this stage it may be pertinent to give your colleagues access to the Admin Centre so that they themselves can experience its feature set.
#4 Build a bank of support documents and training videos
Dub has a range of documents, presentations and webinars for you to access as you plan for adoption, but there's no reason why you can't create your own. These should be deposited in a central location, perhaps your intranet or via a wiki such as Google Docs (which allow document sharing and editing among a group via a web interface).
To get advice on how to plan your roll-out and adoption, contact Stephen Cribbett.