Key to success is the actual regular use by end-users. And the key to that adoption and use is learning.

The most important measure of a successful implementation, success criterion #1, is how much your end-users get out of the new tool, solution or service, which then directly impacts the ultimate ROI for your organization.

Training and education are at the very heart of helping your end-users get to the point where they are comfortable and confident with the solution or service, where they’ve really learned it, so that they adopt it and use it. 

That said, the actual value itself doesn’t come from the training or even the implementation. Value only comes from when your people are using it and using it regularly.

What is critical to success

Before we dive into training and support specifically, let’s explore some of the critical success factors (CSF) related to your people more generally. These are based on best practices across all industries and markets. Throughout a project (like rolling out SharePoint or Microsoft Teams) and long after it’s done, you want to maintain a laser-eyed focus on the ongoing cultural and change management needs and their implications. For illustration, some of those CSF may include:

1. Ensure you’ve developed and continuously elicit the desired behaviours and habits (e.g., the right user adoption and usage) through:

   • continuously meeting both end-user and business needs (e.g., users can access needed content that is available in a single place)

   • effective targeted communications and training (e.g., incorporating up to Level 3 evaluations: how well they apply what they know)

   • ongoing and deliberate engagement (e.g., check-ins, user experience surveys, lunch-n-learns, spotlight and stories)

   • the right kind and amount of monitoring/metrics

2. Show clear value and results

   • build solid and meaningful relationships/partnerships

   • the solution is demonstrably part of the value chain

   • tie into executive corporate goals (i.e., Level 4 Business Impact / Results and Level 5 ROI evaluations)

3. Always be able to demonstrate a continued appreciation of the real impact on the users’ daily lives

The art of change through your people

Let’s now weave in and anchor this in a larger picture item: organizational change management (OCM). What is that one may ask. Inspired by a famous quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower about leadership and adapted for OCM, I would offer that

“Change Management is the art of getting your employees to adopt a new way of doing something that the organization wants/needs them to because they themselves want to do it.”

So how is this done?

Through the course of my years leading global programs and change initiatives, I derived an easy-to-follow framework for effective change management. Plus, it ensures you don’t forget essential opportunities for reinforcing the change. I adapted this framework from the six sources of influence as outlined in “Influencer: The Power to Change Anything” by Kerry Patterson, et al, and incorporated the change management approach from the Prosci Methodology (e.g., Project Change Triangle Model, 3-Phase Change Management, ADKAR Model) with other relevant change management models such as Conner’s Commitment Curve.

Within it there are 6 distinct areas which I call “levers” that influence and impact end-user behaviours and attitudes, which are the “because they want to do it” part. Your Change Strategy and its work plan should reflect activities that take advantage of these.

Training overlaps two of these levers that center on “ability,” which I’ll only briefly introduce here. We’ll explore each of the six levers in much greater detail in future blog posts. With training, you want to tackle the competency development and reinforcement in these two ways:

1. Individual-level ability development through skills training – this is training that is delivered directly to the individual themselves through targeted skills-based learning. This can take a hybrid form of classroom/virtual training and supporting e-learning.

2. Social-level ability reinforcement through community and peer support – developing networks and communities around the users that provide continuous support, guidance, evolving best practices. This can take the form of a change champion department level site administrator network and/or a peer-to-peer user community. Some organizations that have a formal help desk will want to include that here as well.  

From individual-level ability development to corporate-level competency

It can’t be overemphasized that learning is ongoing and evolutionary. It cannot only rely on formal training (e.g., on classroom training or a single e-learning module) but must also include continuous real-life practice, coaching and support. This is the only way to ensure true competency (i.e., technical mastery, comfort, and confidence) for the user-base. Therefore, the most effective training approach is blended. For a great read on Gravity Union’s philosophy and our approach to training I highly recommend you check out our post How much SharePoint training do end-users need?

Circling back, your training plan should include:

• Instructor-led training (e.g., interactive classroom or virtual lectures and hands-on labs)

• Supporting material available online (e.g., FAQ, How Do I’s, quick reference guides, standard operational procedures, video tutorials)

• Real-life hands-on practice with the system (e.g., manual migration of content, daily use with monitoring)

• Active and passive follow-up and support to ensure adoption (e.g., trained change champions, peer-to-peer support, lunch-n-learns, follow-up tips and tricks emails/bulletins)

The secret to learning is the real-life using. With a digital transformation like a SharePoint implementation, it usually involves some level of content migration, that is, moving everyone’s stuff from disparate locations and legacy systems like shared drives, desktops, emails and other systems over to the new SharePoint environment.  This is the golden opportunity to reinforce what users have learned through more formal means. Plus, it gets the content moved.

Also, you’ll want to read our post on how to Kick-start employee learning with Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways to see how you can leverage Microsoft’s online learning environment.

Skills training and support isn’t just for end-users  

When developing your training strategy and plan, think of all your other training audiences, too. And have training targeted for them. These audiences may include:

• change agents / champions

• community administrators

• content managers

• localized department or team-level site administrators

• records managers

• support centre/help desk

• IT operational support roles

• and yes, leadership!

The path to success

For individuals, I believe that Organizational Change Management is the strategic process of first meeting people where they are, and then inspiring them to go where the business needs them to go. For the business, training is an essential part of the path forward to that goal.

Sometimes it helps to have an outside voice to assist with these conversations. Contact us and we’d be happy to help you with planning for digital transformation and the training you need.