I recently attended a presentation by Lee Reed entitled 8 Things You Must Do to Drive SharePoint User Adoption. I have seen this presentation (or a version of it) once before at SharePoint Saturday in Atlanta, GA. He mentioned during his presentation that he had added a slide just a few minutes before he started his presentation. His slide indicated that Enterprise2.0 had surmised that you couldn’t “drive” adoption. That driving adoption was akin to pushing or pulling and would be met with resistance. I thought about this over the weekend and the last couple of days. It really made me pause for a minute.
If you haven’t seen Lee’s presentation, it is a good one. He mentions things like knowing how your organization collaborates, not boiling the ocean (trying to bite off too much to chew), and allowing organic growth, but with control. All of these are good things you should know going into a SharePoint deployment, and have a plan in place for them. I think the dilemma Enterprise2.0 is facing is the negative connotation implied by the word “drive” it does have a pushing or pulling connotation, like herding. End users seeing that would think “Come on, we aren’t cats or cattle,” right? Maybe we should think more on things we can do to promote user adoption. All of the things that Lee mentioned are things that we can do, most of them behind the scenes, that will improve the deployment and acceptance of SharePoint within an organization.
So how do you “promote” user adoption? Well, I think like Lee stated, there are things we can do behind the scenes, preparing and configuring SharePoint specific to the needs of the organization, allowing controlled growth, taking on only those solutions that are needed and when they are needed. There are also some very public things we can do, like training and starting internal user groups that will promote adoption. I mean really, why would someone use SharePoint if they don’t know how?
Most users are not the technophiles that us IT people are. They don’t sit down and look at SharePoint and say wow, let’s just play with this tool for a while and see what all it can do, let’s see if I can change it, mold it, bend it to my will, or even break it. End users typically are only using SharePoint for a specific task in their work day. They don’t want to talk about it, learn more about it than they have to, or even research it. They just want it to work when they need it, and also how to use it to complete their tasks.
So here’s some ideas I have about promoting user adoption other than those great points that Lee made.
1. Ensure that you have a system that is highly available. SharePoint, if it is going to be used by non-IT people should always be there when they need it. Communicate its availability to your users. Let them know it is there for them, and will be there for them. Plan your deployments so that you can limit downtime.
2. Design for specific needs. Does everyone need a My Site off the bat? Generally, no. Someone will approach you stating “I need a place to store my personal documents while I work on them” usually in the form of “I need a file share that only I can use” or something like that. Give them a My Site, show them how to use it. What a great way to be introduced to SharePoint. “MY own personal site. WOW. What I could do with this.” These are all comments that you might hear when you give someone their own site. Use the same strategy for other needs. Don’t just create a team site for each department off the bat, not all of them will have a use for them. Let these things happen as they are needed.
3. Branding is important, but not THE most important thing. My first 2 years working with SharePoint, we had zero branding, it was all out of the box and themes. This is partly because it was 2003, so branding was not very easy, and also because, why was it important? We were using the functions it provided. Yes, people do tend to like the flashy, pretty, and branded sites more than the ones that look “sharepointy.” But it is entirely OK to roll out a site without 1000 master page changes and only use a slightly customized themes. Let your users know that this is a first iteration of your solution. Let them contribute to the branding by giving suggestions.
4. Contests are amazing ways to get people to play with SharePoint. Especially if you are going to roll it out as an intranet solution. Let your users have a contest to “name” the intranet. I’ve seen lots of different names, Insider, Source, CompanyWeb, you name it, I’ve seen it. But it allows your end users to be involved in the process. Another thing I have seen is that after an intranet is rolled out, one company had a “treasure hunt” with a new treasure to find daily for the first week, then randomly after that. Once the item or information was found there were small prizes awarded (think cookies or small value gift cards, use your imagination).
There are many more things you can do I’m sure to promote user adoption than all of these. Please feel free to share them in the comments.
Happy SharePointing!