FOCUS ON USER EXPERIENCE AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT TO IMPROVE ROI
When evaluating new technology, most companies evaluate cost of ownership. Factors like acquisition costs, implementation, maintenance, and support costs are diligently weighed and considered. However, if your carefully selected technology is rejected by key stakeholders, it will take longer to realize business value. By considering user experience and change management in your implementation, you’ll greatly improve ROI.
USER EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
Understanding how internal stakeholders manage day-to-day tasks is critical to developing a successful implementation plan. It is not uncommon for management to be unaware of every step required to complete their employees work…or all the individuals, departments, reports and systems that are critical to successfully finishing a task.
Taking time to map out workflows prior to investing in new technology helps to identify current productivity challenges easily addressed with current technology. Addressing them could save your organization millions in productivity. As you engage your team in this process, the idea of eliminating roadblocks creates quite a bit of excitement from your teams.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
For most people, change is difficult. While you will always find a few members of the team who thrive on change, for most people the idea of change elicits reactions that run from mild displeasure to full meltdown mode.
With careful change management planning, your teams will more fully embrace your tech rollout. Furthermore, if your team was actively involved in discovery and strategy workshops, aversion to change is greatly diminished. Here are some additional tips to improve adaption of new technology within your company:
Instead of planning a full training day, create short modules and time to practice.
Take advantage of employees who thrive on change by appointing them “chief change agents” and task them with helping out the rest of the team.
Finally, when budgeting for a project like this, set aside a portion of your budget to support your employees with additional training and a dedicated support team to help quickly answer questions once your new solutions are fully deployed.
By investing time and energy into engaging employees in your technology decisions, and supporting them as they learn new systems, you’ll greatly improve both your cost of ownership and employee morale.