How to ensure successful user adoption?

ChrisD76 · ‎11-17-2023

The business benefits associated with the deployment and operation of SAP systems are contingent on effective user adoption – no adoption means no ROI. Learning is a key driver of user adoption, and is therefore essential to real, long-term, sustainable business success. When organisations are able to drive user adoption through better approaches to learning, they see many benefits, including:

Fewer user errors, and less time to fix possible errors
Fewer support tickets, and massive (60% or better) reduction in support costs
Improved quality of administrator support
Increased adoption by empowering users to understand and fully utilise system functionality as quickly as possible
Shorter deployment time
Increased satisfaction with the solution

I also want to preview a key point here – I mentioned that “learning” is a key driver of user adoption. Please note that I did not say “training” – this is a very important distinction that I will discuss further below. “Training” is not the answer!

Challenges to address

There are many challenges faced by organisations that relate to user adoption, and these challenges are as old as systems themselves. The adoption and use of systems is based on human behaviour, and as we know, humans are imperfect. When you then ask a number of different humans to do the same set of tasks in a system, in a consistent way, these challenges become more apparent, and may have a significant impact on the reliable operations of business.

Many people don’t like to (or are scared of) change and so we often see resistance to changes. If and when that change comes, we see that people change at very different rates, giving us a big challenge in terms of consistency of operations. These challenges can be so significant that they have spawned an entirely new discipline within psychology – what we call occupational psychology, and specifically within that, the field of change management.

The inconsistency of our humanness, and of this challenge of managing change leads to further challenges, such as differing levels of capability and competence, delays in deployment timescales, and overall poor satisfaction with the deployed solution. In many cases the outlet for this frustration is via the help desk, and so we often see high volume of support tickets being raised, where the actual root cause is not a system issue, but an issue of capability, competence or confidence.

How to approach user adoption

Drawing on the many years of experience I have in working with organisations around the globe, I want to address six key areas for focus to ensure successful user adoption. These six areas are:

Executive sponsorship – key to ensure the success of any program in any organisation lies in ensuring appropriate support from an executive sponsor. This will ensure that learning, and its role in ensuring effective user adoption, is seen as a key priority by the business.
Change management – whether your organisation is going through a project, or is in normal operating conditions, change is constant. Exploring this area helps you to identify how change is being handled, whether there are gaps in the change plan, and how learning sits within the context of change management.
Process roadmap and management – following on from change management, and the theme of change being constant, this focus area relates to how business processes have been defined and documented, along with how changes within the business processes and the systems that execute these business processes are identified, captured, assessed, prioritized and rolled out. In addition, how the users are enabled to adopt such changes, and the role of learning in ensuring long-term, sustainable user adoption of the processes, and changes.
Success measurement – understanding the specific KPIs used to determine “what success looks like”, and how the approaches to learning and user adoption contribute to these KPIs is key to ensure that your planned approach gets the support needed to be successfully deployed. And understanding what incentives can be used to encourage successful behaviours further increases the likelihood of a successful rollout.
Enablement – perhaps the most obvious area to focus on is the actual approach to enablement. Understanding, and planning for the different requirements of the various groups of users, and the key role of assessment in ensuring and assuring effective enablement.
Experience management – the final area I want to discuss relates to approaches for monitoring both user behaviour and user sentiment, as well as what steps to take to course correct where necessary.

With the exception of Enablement, and perhaps Change Management, it may initially be difficult to see why these areas of focus are relevant in terms of driving user adoption. The rest of the blog will explore why I believe each of these areas are crucial in ensuring long-term, sustainable user adoption.

Why executive sponsorship?

The right executive sponsor can make all the difference in terms of the success of any program, and to ensure that the learning initiatives that you wish to deploy are seen to clearly link to organisational success criteria. According to Prosci, a leading change management organisation, projects with effective sponsorship are 3.5 times more likely to meet or exceed project objectives than projects with ineffective sponsorship (See Best Practices in Change Management (prosci.com) for further reading).

Sponsors with the right level of influence can build cross-functional support from various stakeholders, not only championing change but also learning as a driver of that change, across the organisation.

While it is common to see an overall executive sponsor for an implementation project, and perhaps executive sponsors for individual functional areas, have you got an executive sponsor to “own” the user adoption of the solution? In my experience, there is no ownership for the actual user adoption aspects of a solution deployment, with an assumption that the users will simply adopt the solution because it was successfully deployed. As a result, this is an area that almost every organisation under performs in.

Having an executive sponsor for user adoption is really important. When required your sponsor can support your request/s for resources. As you may know, learning / enablement programs require not only people to deliver these but funding, for technology or other tangible assets. If your sponsor has done their job early by laying the foundation for the project and ongoing program improvements, this ask will be met with much less resistance.

Additionally, your executive sponsors should be able to communicate across the organisation, not only to advise of upcoming enablement opportunities but to inject their own personal passion for the change / new technology / new processes to support the organisation’s employees in their desire to ‘jump on board’. The executive sponsor is a visible and tangible sign of support for the user adoption program to all stakeholders; they sanction the program. The sponsor may also own the strategic vision for the program or accountability for the tactical steps to achieve it.

Without appropriate executive sponsorship, the reality is that your user adoption program, and the learning required to deliver it, will be very likely to fail. Any issue that arises can cause extensive delays, and without the right level of executive cover, they can completely derail your program, and therefore put the whole deployment project at risk. Where there is no sponsor, it is likely that other employees will feel that your user adoption program is simply not important, and an “optional” activity. And while many senior executives might think of learning and user adoption as unimportant compared to the overall project to deploy the system, user adoption and learning are actually the number 1 risk to that overall project. Ignore it at your peril!

Why change management?

“Organisations do not change. People do.”

When your organisation undertakes projects or initiatives to improve performance, seize opportunities or address key issues, they often require changes to processes, job roles, organisational structures, and types and uses of technology. However, it is actually the employees of your organisation who have to ultimately change how they do their jobs. If these individuals are unsuccessful in their personal transitions, or if they don’t learn and embrace a new way of working, the initiative will fail. On the other hand, if employees engage with and adopt changes required by the initiative, it will deliver the expected results.

So then, what is change management? Change management (see a definition for further reading) is the application of a structured process and set of tools for leading the people side of change to achieve a desired outcome. Change management has evolved into an entire discipline, with specialist change management organisations and professionals being employed full-time to support change efforts in many organisations.

Change management approaches

There are many different approaches to change management available. There are well known change management agencies, like Prosci as an example, that have defined their own methodology for managing change. In Prosci, they work with ADKAR (for example). Many consulting firms have their own methodologies. Some mature organizations have their own internal change management approaches. And of course, at SAP has their own approach as well. Generally, they may use different labels, and they may have a different number of steps, but they do all generally tend to cover the same main topics overall.

I will not go into a full explanation of phases of change management here. There are plenty of blogs in this part of the Community site devoted to change management. Suffice to say, you need to have a clearly defined approach to change management, and the clear goal of this change management plan need to be more than just “make sure everyone is trained before go-live”. Too often I have seen the change management project end at go-live. This is only half of the job! Change management needs to cover not just the project duration, but also continue well beyond go-live, to ensure that real user adoption has occurred.

Why process roadmap and management?

This is an interesting topic, and for many of you reading it, you may not understand what I mean, nor why it is included.

At the outset, I want to make clear that there are two aspects at play here. Firstly, within your business, and as part of your system implementation, there are business processes that need to be defined and documented. Definition and refinement of business processes will drive optimization and consistency – but only if everyone knows how!

The second aspect is that over time, these business processes will change. SAP Technology changes. The way your business runs also changes, in response to the technology, or your competitors, customers, or the market in general. Or perhaps for legal reasons. Whatever the reason, change is always going to happen. What matters is that you manage these changes effectively.

There are some key questions you need to be able to answer as we think about this focus area.

Are your key business processes documented?
Where is that documentation?
Do the people who need to execute the process know where this documentation is?
What process do you have in place to identify any changes that might be required to a business process?
How do you classify, review, approve and/or reject these requests for changes?
If a change is approved, how is this prioritized, scheduled, developed and rolled out?
How is this updated business process documented?
How do you ensure that your users are aware of the change, and enabled to take advantage of it?

Without a clear answer to these questions, you can expect the productivity of your users to decline over time as changes are introduced to the system.

Do we really care about who is defining and documenting processes? Is that why I asked you to think about it? No… I don’t ask this for the sake of knowing this on its own – this is an important point not for the answer itself, but for what it means further down the line. I am making this point because you need to understand the links from there to effective user adoption. From a learning perspective, and from a user adoption perspective, it isn’t important that you know exactly who in the organisation is responsible for documenting business processes. It is, however, vital that you understand that there is something in place that allows the expert who knows the process (and/or any changes to a process) to be able to share that information with the users who are required to execute that process. And that is not going to be a single step process – there will be multiple people and teams, doing multiple jobs, to get that knowledge of a process (or a change to a process) from the head of the expert, into the heads of your users. How you do that looks different from one organisation to another, and even from one team to another within the same organisation. From my own experience, there are almost always gaps in the process that have a negative impact on user adoption. That is the point of these questions… I hope this is clear.

Why success measurement?

Peter Drucker once said, “you cannot manage what you do not measure”. So, if you want to be successful, and to manage that success, then you need to put in some measurement. And from a learning perspective this is doubly important. This is not just about the measurement of success of approaches to learning. It is also about demonstrating that the approaches to learning have had a larger impact on the success of the organisation overall. I will talk more about making this connection from the success of learning to the overall success of the business later in this blog. For now, let’s just focus on measuring success and why this is important.

Looking at bottom-line results in areas such as spending, sales or profits doesn’t help you understand how or why you reached those results or how to improve your performance. Setting goals and measuring progress in areas that don’t necessarily show end-of-year results will help you incrementally improve your operations in many areas, leading to exponential growth in profits.

Setting goals is a start, but a goal is not properly set until it has a success measure attached to it. At some point stakeholders will ask where you are, what progress has been made and what’s the timeline to completion. If you don’t know what success looks like, it’s hard to answer those questions.

You may also need to get back on track at some point. Given that many change initiatives fail to achieve or exceed expectations, we must be aware that unexpected things may happen and that even the best laid plans will have hiccups. Having goals with success measures attached can help to get your project back on track in these cases.

In addition to having a goal, is ensuring that people are aligned to and actively pursuing that goal. And this is where the key topic of incentives comes in. Incentives can increase the likelihood of achieving our goals by:

Ensuring that our goals are perceived as important
Motivating instead of dictating (“carrot” instead of “stick”)
Making the endeavour worthwhile on a personal level
Recognizing and rewarding those who perform well
Creating a success-driven culture

So how does this apply to user adoption and learning? In this context, you need to be able to answer the following questions:

How do you define a successful learning program?
How does the success of a learning program contribute to overall organisational success?
How can you link specific learning KPIs to broader organisational success metrics?
What incentives are in place to ensure that everyone is working towards the success of the learning plan, and towards “successful” user adoption?

Why enablement?

There are many studies that talk about the value of “training” – many analysts firms (IDC, Gartner, Forrester, etc) regularly publish reports to articulate the value of “training” in driving successful business outcomes. Most people intrinsically understand that “training” and enablement are important. In fact, the most important and frequent cause for a failure of a deployment, or for poor adoption of a new solution is enablement. However, many organisations do not invest in this area, or see “training” as a “nice to have” rather than essential to ensure success.

There are two key reasons for this. Firstly, the word “training” tends to conjure up images of people spending time in a classroom, away from productive work. In this way, training is only part of the cost – with additional costs associated with being “away from work”, including (potentially) travel costs, training fees, as well as the lost productivity from not being able to work while attending training. There is a perception that the cost of “training” far outweighs its benefits, especially in the short-term.

Secondly, traditionally those responsible for securing the budget and time required for enablement are not great at articulating the business impact of “training”, or at proving the direct link between relevant enablement activities and achievement of key company performance measures. This is why the previous topic of “success measurement” is so important!

Changing the narrative

In many organisations, there seems to be an expectation that when they deliver “training”, “learning” takes place. The reality is that “training” and “learning” are separate, and often independent processes. When teaching a classroom of 20 students, although there is only one “teacher”, there are likely to be 20 different things learnt, and the learning continues long after the “teaching” stops. Understanding this distinction (and understanding the way in which we learn) is the first step to changing the narrative and moving to a wider view of enablement.

There are many theories of learning that have been studied and developed over the last century or more. Broadly speaking, these can be categorized as:

Behaviorist theories – based on stimulus-response (such as “Pavlov’s dog”)
Cognitive theories – based on the nature of knowledge
Humanist theories – based on the interaction of a personality and its surroundings

Most theories of learning were developed to explore a certain aspect of learning, and they don’t necessarily hold true in all learning scenarios. The reality is that learning is far more complex than these theories can explain. In addition, with digital transformation, the way in which we learn is transforming also, and most of these theories are simply outdated.

One current theory of learning which has gained much acceptance is referred to as the “70:20:10 approach” to learning.

The 70:20:10 approach tells us that around 10% of what we learn is through formal learning. For most of us, the term “formal learning” probably conjures visions of classrooms, but formal learning refers to any learning where the learning objectives are defined externally. So, e-learning falls under the formal learning category also.

The 20% refers to social learning. We learn through interaction with others. There are a lot of socio-cultural theories of learning which talk about learning as a social process, where we exchange information and through that process come to a shared understanding.

And finally, the 70% refers to experiential learning. We learn through doing.

When the narrative for enablement focusses on “training” it tends to focus just on the 10%, and so changing the approach to talk about “learning” opens up the conversation to include the additional 90%. This makes it much easier to be flexible in the approach to address the opportunity cost challenge, and also provides more flexibility in the approach, to allow learning to be more effective.

The importance of context

One common discussion about the deployment of enablement content relates to “Push vs pull”.

“Push” is where we (or someone in leadership) tell the user what to learn and when. This includes classroom training, and also is typical for compliance-based training requirements. Sometimes this is referred to as “just-in-case” training, where the learning is taught what is required for a scenario that may happen at some point in future.

The “pull” approach to learning is where the learning content is made available, and the learner chooses what and when they want to learn. This is also known as “on-demand” enablement, or “just-in-time” enablement.

So which approach is better? Push or Pull? In most cases, both are needed.

But which approach provides a more powerful learning process and why? Pull does…

It all comes down to context. One common example is when a smell triggers a memory. The human brain and the learning that goes on there is incredibly complex. When we learn, stored with that memory is a whole bunch of environmental cues – sounds, smells, colours, etc. This is the context within which learning takes place. From a learning perspective we often focus only on content – content is King! If that is true, context is Queen! Content and context together are what make a memorable learning experience. When you take a learner away from their normal daily work environment, and put them in a classroom to learn, the normal environmental cues (sights, sounds, smells etc – the context) are different. When they get back to their normal work environment, it is harder for them to remember what they learnt, because the context is different. Our most powerful learning comes when the content and the context are combined. Providing workplace learning within the context where that content will be used every day makes for much more powerful learning.

The essential role of assessment

Broadly speaking, we can separate assessments into two kinds: formative and summative. Summative assessment is where you test someone to prove that they have capability, as a result of completing some form of learning activity. This is important, as the testing helps to reinforce the learning. Many studies talk about how assessment is proven to improve knowledge retention, so assessment after learning is always valuable. Summative assessment is also important in terms of certification. This can have many meanings and usage – certification might mean that you have proven capability in some discipline, allowing the holder to differentiate themselves. This certification can also be important in terms of regulation, and there are sometimes legal requirements to “certify” that a certain type of learning has taken place.

Formative assessment is perhaps the less obvious type. Formative assessment is used before or during learning activities. Assessment BEFORE learning activities can be used to help create interest in the topic, and to inform the shape of a learning intervention. Formative assessment BEFORE learning activities can also be used to determine who should participate – those who pass the assessment can be excluded, reducing the cost of the learning.

Using quizzes, knowledge checks and little competitions DURING a learning activity are a great way to break it up, and make it more interesting and engaging. Beyond that, they also have an important role in reinforcing learning objectives, by focusing participants in certain areas. They can help to keep learning on track, by confirming that the learning is happening at the required pace, or to help you take remedial action if learning is not on track. Formative assessment DURING learning also helps to strengthen memory recall and helps to correct any misconceptions.

While assessments are in general a good thing, there is a need to actually do something with the data that the assessments provide. Otherwise, you minimize their usefulness. Keep in mind that in addition to having assessments, it is important to perform some form of reporting against the data from those assessments, and use that to help you shape the approach to the learning.

Why experience management?

Whatever else organisations might be, they are first and foremost groups of people. Understanding and managing the experience of those people, be they employees, customers or suppliers, can provide massive benefits.

Providing a positive experience for your employees leads to high levels of employee engagement. High levels of employee engagement, in turn, lead to a host of other benefits. High levels of employee engagement lead to higher levels of innovation and better customer engagement, which in turn leads to better revenues and profitability. High levels of employee engagement also lead to lower staff turnover, increased levels of innovation, and fewer workplace safety incidents – just to name a few!

In contrast, organisations which provide a poor employee experience are much more likely to see high levels of absenteeism, poor customer engagement, increasing staff turnover, increased costs due to lower productivity and losses, and suffer from stagnation.

So overall, ensuring a good experience for employees has a very positive impact on your company’s success. This applies to the way your users interact with the SAP solution also. Putting in place the ability to monitor and understand user behaviour and user sentiment in relation to your SAP solution will provide valuable insight to allow you to drive performance improvements, improve system design, reduce the support burden, and improve training effectiveness. With this insight, you can very quickly target problem areas, and apply immediate fixes at the source of the issue.

Now what?

So hopefully I have convinced you that there are six key areas that you need to think about when addressing user adoption. I also hope you can see that these are all inter-related.

Executive sponsorship – ensure that there is an executive sponsor specifically assigned to user adoption. They need to have a clear and equal role to play as part of the project’s overall governance structure.
Change management – have a clearly defined approach to change management, which covers the full cycle of user adoption activities, which means that it needs to run well past the go-live date.
Process roadmap and management – have a clear understanding about how you can (on an ongoing basis) take knowledge about how your business processes should be executed from the brains of your experts to the brains of your users.
Success measurement – be clear not only about how to measure and define success around the learning and user adoption activities, but also create a clear connection from these to the overall business KPIs.
Enablement – ensure a range of different types of content are available as needed, when needed and reinforced with relevant assessments.
Experience management – find a way to proactively monitor both user behaviour and sentiment, and take corrective action as required.

With these in mind, you can shape specific initiatives to drive more effective user adoption. How do you then convince your management to commit to these initiatives?

Dealing with senior executives (people with the power to make decisions and provide the resources you need) can be quite challenging. They are typically time-poor, and it may seem like they speak a different language – actually, in a way, they do…

Executives have really good reasons for being this way.

Firstly, consider that money is a consumable. If you have a dollar, you can only spend it once, and then it is gone. Executives are working with the entire budget of your organisation, with many different and competing needs to satisfy, and so they are looking for something that is low risk and good return to justify the money. How do they look if they authorise spend in a particular area, and that spend provides very little benefit? What does that sort of thing do to their career prospects?

They have a similar concern regarding time. Time is limited, and so once again, there is a need to focus time on areas where there is a clear and justified reason to do so, based on the expected benefits. And the reality is, that this is true throughout the organisation, and so people are busy.

The executive community is a small one, and most executives have heard plenty of horror stories about colleagues who have made a bad call in terms of investing time and money in areas where there was poor return. This all adds to the feeling of risk associated with such decisions, which is something you need to be very mindful of when crafting your request for budget or time to support your initiatives.

Bear in mind that many different people are also trying to get time and resources from these executives, both internally and externally. There is a lot of “noise” in an executive’s day. As a result, they tend to be very good at making a snap decision on what is interesting and what is not. A big part of that relates to “pattern recognition”. You will no doubt have similar filters without realising it. You probably see junk emails every day. Emails like “Grow your sales productivity!” are a classic. You spend maybe a second looking at it, and then delete it without a second thought. Executives do the same, although their filters are a little more broad. Try not to fall into these patterns when you put your proposal together, and try to avoid talking about the “costs” of everything. We often think the executive is interested in the “costs” – and to some extent this is true. Overall, though, the cost is a minor concern. If you can prove the benefits, the costs are justified, and really not that important.

Remember, we need to speak the execs language. Focus on the numbers, starting with the benefits of what you propose, and be prepared to back up the stated benefits of your initiative with real data. Make sure you have prepared relevant and specific content to help make the decision an easy one from a commercial perspective.

Break the typical patterns that execs are looking for. Come up with a new an interesting approach to differentiate what you are planning. Practice. Do a dry run with a colleague. Make sure you execute well.

Set clear expectations – be sure to outline the expected time commitments and schedules so there are clear expectations for the team and the sponsor. Develop a candid line of communication and make sure the executive knows how much time they will need to invest. Senior leaders are often sponsoring multiple initiatives across the organisation, so be clear about what you need and listen to what is realistic given their schedule.

To be successful in deploying your initiatives, leveraging executive support is easier said than done, but transformational company-wide improvements simply don’t happen without an investment. And remember that the executive’s investment in your learning initiatives is two-fold: the investment of resources (funds, time, etc.) for the program itself and a strong communication plan that is championed by senior management sends a clear message to employees that growth, education and user adoption are top priorities.

ThomasJenewein · ‎12-01-2023

Thanks for this very well written and holistic blog as part of the #BeyondAdoption Blogging Challenge - it combines all important things in the adoption field. For everyone interested, see here the intro blog to the challenge.