The Winning Ticket to User Adoption: Achieving Stakeholder Buy-In
As mentioned in Angela Ma’s first blog posts: A successful technical go-live that is not adopted by targeted users will not produce the benefits expected. When you think about your business-led transformation it is important that one considers how this impacts the overall organization and its internal and external stakeholders and esure the initiative has the buy-in from the onset.
To achieve this ultimate goal, ask yourself the following:
- Who are my targeted user groups, and how will they react to this implementation?
- How do these users interact with the procurement process today, and what will that look like in the future?
- What external stakeholders will I need to engage with and what is my strategy to engage with them?
- Who do I need to engage with now to ensure the new system is adopted at go-live?
Below are some strategies that one can employ at the beginning to ensure the success of the initiative at the end:
- Assess what your stakeholders require: We recommend starting the initiative with a stakeholder assessment to understand where your stakeholders stand with your initiative. With the results of the assessment you can then tailor your message to address each stakeholder group and bring them onboard.
- Engage, communicate and co-create: Engage key influencers from across your stakeholder groups prior to the start of the project and ensure their buy-in. You will need to connect with them throughout the project to address any concerns that may arise. Ask them to be formal sponsors for the initiative! Ask these key influencers to be part of the project team and involve them throughout the design and testing phases to co-create their future environment.
- Gamify the adoption: Competitive pressure is sometimes a wonderful thing! There are solutions available to gamify the adoption and make it a fun experience for your stakeholders. Challenges, achievements and leaderboard are elements to such an approach to track your end users progress and comfort with the new way of working. These solutions provide visibility to the adoption progress and tailor messages to individual users based on their progress, comfort and capability.
At the end of the day, when a project has stakeholder buy-in early on, it helps set the project up for a successful voyage. Having the right champions and engagement strategy can be the winning ticket to your user adoption.
Tune in next month when we look at the importance of your supplier enablement strategy - how to engage this very important external stakeholder group - by our team member Tyler Shackman.
Senior Program Manager at GMS Management Consulting
4yGood points Nersi. We know that you can roll out a great solution, but if the user community does not use or support it, the implemenation may not be seen as successful as it could be. Focusing on improving adoption will improve the overall acceptance and perception of success!
I help organizations drive strategic initiatives from concept to successful implementation I Change Driver I Strategy Execution I Program Manager I Leadership Coach I
4ySo true without Stakeholder buy in, not much gets accomplished. That is why any implementation needs to have a dedicated change management strategy to succeed. It's the people who do the change and not the systems.
Partner@PwC Strategy& | Strategy & Transformation
4yI love this, and I love the 'gamifying' aspect being built into modern digital adoption programs. Far too often I see systems implemented without enough support for adoption - no engagement with the end users means they don't have the right configurations or functionality, and ultimately no one really uses them...or worse is forced to use a system they hate and fight to have removed. We've definitely seen this happen at a few places, implementing entirely new systems only a few years later, believing it is a system issues when the reality is they didn't work closely enough with their stakeholders to get adoption.