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Does Your User Adoption Methodology Remove Organizational Barriers?

Success Chain

OBSERVATION: SOFTWARE ADOPTION METHODOLOGY

Many IT implementations suffer from poor user adoption because they did not take into account the barriers to user adoption that lie outside the users’ control. There are many organizational elements that, if not addressed, prevent people from using the system even if they want to do so.

Barriers to adoption may include things like lack of time for learning new processes or attending meetings, competing workload or other items given priority by management, misaligned rewards & recognition metrics that penalize people for adopting the system, inappropriate access rights within the system, undefined or poorly defined processes, or technical deficiencies within the system. Poor data quality may also reduce adoption since “garbage-in, garbage-out” makes the system generate reports meaningless for decision-making purposes.

If we want to maximize user adoption, we need to take a comprehensive approach to identify and removing barriers to adoption.

Unfortunately, most traditional Change Management programs are focused on the initial go-live, and they primarily involve providing training and communications. Traditional change approaches often ignore the critical aspect of removing adoption barriers.

We need to move beyond traditional change management methodologies to take a more expansive approach to evolve the organization and drive user adoption over the long-term.

When examining barriers to adoption, keep in mind:

  • Barriers to adoption may be different in each department or workgroup
  • Some barriers may touch multiple departments in your organization and thus require a coordinated cross-departmental approach to resolve
  • The users within each department are the people who can best identify the barriers they face, and thus you need to actively engage them in your process
  • Perception is reality when it comes to adoption barriers. You may need to address user perceptions as well as tangible barriers
  • New barriers may emerge over time, so you need to periodically review your organization to address any new barriers that may arise

CONSIDER THIS

Instead of employing a traditional Change Management methodology, use a more expansive user adoption methodology that identifies and removes barriers to adoption. Your user adoption program should begin long before go-live and continue well past the initial deployment in order to drive initial adoption and sustain it over the life of the system.

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

  • What barriers to adoption prevent people from using your system? Who has the authority and ability to remove these barriers?
  • Does your change management approach adequately address existing and future barriers to adoption?
  • How can you better engage your users to get their help in identifying and removing barriers to adoption?
  • What are the unique barriers to adoption in each user department/workgroup?
  • How will removing adoption barriers affect the level of benefits realization & ROI from your IT investment?
  • Would your organization benefit from a more effective user and software adoption methodology?

Most software projects fail to deliver the expected business outcomes because of the approach the buyer takes to getting the system live and driving adoption. Most buyer’s organizations don’t have the expertise, tools, and capacity to deliver their own success.  This short video explains many of the methodological and structural problems organizations face when dealing with software.

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The Death of SDLC

Success Chain

Observation

In the early days of IT computing, many organizations had custom systems built to meet their specific needs. Programmers adopted the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), which guided their actions during the various code development phases until the system was fully built and tested.

Over time, organizations realized they could benefit more by getting out of the custom system development business in favor of implementing pre-built Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) applications. Unfortunately, the basic methodology used to help organizations implement, adopt, and realize benefits from COTS systems still follows the SDLC, which was created to facilitate the technical development of computer code. So, what’s wrong with SDLC? Why do we need to consider alternatives?

  • SDLC is focused on addressing technical development challenges, not on driving user adoption and measurable business benefits.
    • User adoption and business benefits are primarily human performance challenges.
    • SDLC was not created to address human behavior, and it does not do so effectively.
  • Most IT projects only include limited “change management” as a bolt-on to the end of the SDLC cycle without critically examining if this is effective. Typically, it’s not.
  • Many IT projects following the SDLC are structured such that once the technology is live and stabilized, the project is complete.
    • Change Management is typically treated as a “one and done” focused on the initial deployment.
    • Ongoing efforts are required to drive and sustain user adoption over the life of the system. These are typically absent from most change management efforts.

Consider This

Organizations need to view IT projects as human and organizational performance projects that just happen to involve deploying new technology. They should not view them simply as technology projects. Changing the way we perceive, approach, structure, and execute projects will improve benefits realization and help organizations achieve measurable business goals.

  • Organizations need to move beyond just following the technical SDLC and instead adopt more robust human performance improvement methodologies. These methodologies need to address the myriad organizational and human performance challenges that affect how people use technology.
  • User adoption methodologies should NOT be dictated by technology experts or by people who blindly following existing methodologies without understanding how to change their approach to address the deficiencies of current efforts.
  • The people who develop and execute user adoption methodologies should have a firm grounding in the fields of psychology, organizational behavior, and human performance such that they understand the theory, research, and practices upon which sound change and user adoption methodologies are built. It is not sufficient to simply know how to apply an existing methodology when the methodology itself may be part of the problem.

Things to think about

  • Do you primarily follow the SDLC approach to your IT projects, or have you updated your methodology to better address the human and organizational performance challenges ignored by the SDLC?
  • Do the people who are defining your change management and user adoption methodology have expertise in the relevant theories and practices from the fields of psychology, organization development, human performance, etc., or are they primarily technology specialists? Could they develop an effective human performance improvement program if there were no new technology being deployed?
  • If you were brought in 3 years after the system is live to address user adoption challenges (without changing the system or processes), what specific things would you do to improve adoption and increase human performance? Have you included these activities in your initial change and adoption approach?
  • Does your current methodology include developing the structures, processes, policies, and activities required to measure and sustain benefits realization over the entire life of the system? If not, how will you ensure user adoption & benefits realization continue 1, 3, 5, 10, etc., years in the future?
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5 Things to Include in Your Customer Success Management (CSM) Strategy

Success Chain

Increasingly, investors and SaaS leaders are recognizing that customer retention is essential for their success. As a result, they are rushing to build Customer Success Management (CSM) programs that will help their customers maximize IT adoption and ROI from their systems.

However, they are facing significant challenges because Customer Success Management is new to most organizations, and they are not sure exactly how to get started or what to do first. They don’t always know the right question to ask, how to allocate scarce resources, or how to prioritize their efforts to get the best results.

Investing in a CSM strategy will save you time & effort

The first place to start is to create a CSM strategy and road map. Your CSM strategy should identify exactly what you are trying to achieve, define how you will achieve it, specify who will make it happen, and provide a clear road map moving forward. Your CSM strategy will help develop a shared understanding and vision for what you are trying to achieve.

It will also enable you to move forward with confidence while allowing you to avoid costly pitfalls and mistakes that can threaten your CSM program before it even gets going.

So, how do you create an effective Customer Success Management strategy? Here are five things to help you get started. Keep in mind that this is often an iterative process, and decisions you make later on may require that you revisit some of your earlier decisions.

1. Define your goals

Not surprisingly, the first step is to figure out exactly what you want your CSM team to do and the results they need to achieve. This will set the goalpost from which you will determine the specific staffing, services, tools, and methods you will need in your CSM team. It will also help you identify the budget you will need to allocate for building and maintaining your CSM capabilities.

2.Define roles, responsibilities, and org structure

One of the first questions people ask is what exactly should the CSMs do, and where do they fit within the organization? Should the CSMs be responsible for sales and renewals, or just for driving customer IT adoption and satisfaction? Do they report to sales? Do they report to customer service? Sales? And what authority do they have when it comes to working with other departments internally (like sales, product management, professional services, customer support)?

3.Develop CSM methodology, tool, and processes

Once you have figured out what you are trying to achieve and how you will work internally, identify the specific tools and processes you will need to make it happen. This may involve internal-focused tools, such as having a way to identify and report on actual customer-use of your system, and externally-focused tools, such as creating a CSM consulting methodology/toolbox that you use when working directly with your customers.

You may require a combination of tools such as CSM systems (like the ones offered by Gainsight, ChurnZero, Strikedeck, etc.), and videos, spreadsheets, presentation slides, email templates, report templates, and other such things that enable your CSM team to deliver a consistent, effective, high-quality CSM service.

4.Recruit and develop exceptional staff

Identify how you will recruit and develop exceptional staff. This may include identifying a high-level profile of the types of temperament, skills, and required experience levels you will want for your CSM team. And, it should outline how you plan to quickly onboard the CSM staff, train them, and ensure they are able to get up to speed quickly.

Just a quick word of caution: at its core, CSM is about driving IT adoption of systems. In order to be effective, CSMs need to understand the root cause of IT adoption problems and have a firm grasp of the proactive steps you can take to increase adoption. This is knowledge and skill that, generally, are in short supply.

You may need to provide additional training and development to help your CSM staff learn the skills they need to be fully effective in this role.

5.Manage the roll-out (internally & externally)

Introducing your CSM capabilities requires changes both internally to your organization and externally with how you interact with customers. Both can be major transitions, and you will want to map out in advance how you will manage these changes.

For your internal roll-out, consider how introducing CSMs will change the way existing staff perform their jobs. Have you changed the job responsibilities of sales and service staff? Will having the CSM team impact revenue and renewal targets for sales professionals? How will you go about informing people about the new service?

Introducing the CSM function will kick off a domino effect of changes to all other parts of your organization. For your external (customer) roll-out, be careful how you introduce the CSM function to both new and existing customers. Take care to ensure you set accurate expectations about what the CSM team will – and will not – deliver to customers. Also, you may want to consider if you want to pilot the CSM effort with select customers before rolling it out to everyone.

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5 Things Every Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Needs to Know Before Moving to the Cloud

Success Chain

Moving to the Cloud, CFOs love cloud systems. They offer lower upfront costs, faster deployments, and the ability to directly expense costs without messing around with ugly depreciation schedules – it’s all quite appealing.
And that is nothing compared to the potential upside that cloud systems can deliver. Reduced costs, increased revenues, elevated time savings, improved quality, increased customer satisfaction, or whatever your ROI measures, cloud technology promises to improve your organization.

Sound too good to be true? It is. kinda.

What CFOs need to recognize is that cloud technology introduces new risks and often times additional expense, erasing all potential ROI.

Cloud systems are easier to deploy but harder to adopt

From the point of view of technical and infrastructure expenses, cloud systems are easier to deploy. Less time is needed acquiring servers, building out data centers, purchasing ancillary software, and hiring staff to support the system. Oh, and they can go live faster, too – cutting implementation times from months and years to just days or weeks.

The challenge is, the technology can often go live faster than the people and organization can adapt. Traditional change management programs take time and focus on preparing people for change. There simply isn’t time for this with cloud systems. With cloud technology, the systems can change faster than people. What happens is that your new, fast, affordable cloud system sits unused.

Weight your business case to reflect effective user adoption

Almost every business case I have ever seen assumes 100% user adoption. It’s not explicitly laid out as such; rather, it’s an implied assumption. The expectation is that everyone will use the system. And they will do so starting from the first day the system is live. After all, a system that isn’t used does not deliver any value, killing your ROI.

In reality, I have never seen an organization that has 100% effective, consistent system use. Often times it is closer to 25% – 45% effective use. Occasionally more, if they’ve done it right.

Oh, and effective user adoption doesn’t start on day one. Rather, people are normally slow to include the system into their daily work routines. Each day that people delay adopting your system costs you money. And this, as you know, hurts your ROI.

At Tri Tuns, we recommend that CFOs adjust the business case / ROI projections to reflect different user adoption scenarios. Does your business case stand up if you only get 40% adoption? 50%? 75%? What is the impact if there is a 6 -12 month delay before your people use the system? (BTW, research has shown that without direct intervention, it typically takes 24-36 months for people to use systems as part of their daily working practices).

Every dollar spent on training is wasted unless people use the system

This one is a no-brainer. Every dollar that you spend training users on systems that sit idle is a waste of your time and money. It costs you money to develop and deliver the training. It costs you money to pay your people to be in a training class. And there’s the opportunity cost associated with the time people are in training and not doing their jobs.

How does your business case hold up if people never apply what they learn in training?

This is too costly a risk for anyone not to plan for.

Your cloud vendor now shares your risk

You have user adoption risk. And it can cost you big.

The good news is that with cloud systems, a portion of this user adoption risk is transferred to the cloud vendor. Why? Because you will not renew subscriptions for systems that are not delivering value to your organization.
Increasingly cloud vendors are providing tools and services to help clients drive and sustain effective user adoption.

The bad news, most of them are very bad at it. User adoption is a people and an organizational issue, not a technical issue. And software vendors are tech experts, not people experts. So, while your cloud vendor may share your user adoption risk, they often lack the capacity to solve this problem on their own.

Tell your vendor your renewal criteria right up front!

Cloud vendors rely on renewals and long-term customer relationships in order to profit. If you want to see a vendor go into panic mode, let them know that you will not renew your software subscription. They will try all sorts of things – like give you free services or training – to retain your business.

One way to get your cloud vendor to help you attain your needed ROI through user adoption is to tell them exactly the business outcome you need to see in order to renew their software. And let them know when you will be making your renewal decision.

By letting your vendor know how, and when, you will determine if the money you spend on their software is worth it; they are in a position to help make sure that you achieve your measurable business result. If you get the value you expect from the system, renew fast and without wasting any time looking at alternatives or engaging in painful negotiations.

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Appreciate your employees? Get creative in showing you care.

Success Chain

Are you a valued employee? Let me know if this one sounds familiar. When at happy hour, do you or your friends typically spend time talking about the latest dumb thing that happened at work, how clueless the boss is, or how demoralized people are with their jobs? Not exactly a “happy” hour, is it?

It is not enough just to value the work of your teammates and employees. You need to let them know that they make a valuable contribution.

I have several friends who work for organizations that have great missions that are very meaningful to my friends. They work hard and regularly put in extra effort because they believe in the mission, and they take pride in their work. And yet, they don’t feel that their contribution is acknowledged, valued, or appreciated.

Employees want to know that they are valued

So again, It is not enough just to value the work of your teammates and employees. You need to let them know that they make a valuable contribution. You need to align your words and actions so that they internalize the feeling of being appreciated.

Words are great, but actions are better

Many leaders – from the CEO down to front-line supervisors – actually appreciate the contribution of their team. They may even say the words. But they don’t often show it. You need to demonstrate that you value the contribution of others.

Small gestures make a big difference

Demonstrating that you appreciate your employees does not require major time, effort, or expense. Sure, there is a time and place for big awards, cash gifts, and bonuses. The problem is that these big-ticket appreciation gestures are expensive and happen quite infrequently. People appreciate them at the time, but then this feeling of appreciation quickly fades and needs to be renewed.

If you want to keep people motivated, you need to let them know that you are paying attention to the little things they do that make a big difference to the organization.

For example, do your people stay a little bit late to finish something up or stop what they are doing to help a co-worker with a problem they can’t fix on their own? Do they put in just that little bit of extra effort in a meeting or on a deliverable just because they care? Oh, and don’t forget the person who helps protect you from yourself by saying “no” when you are going off-course or taking on too much.

Get creative in showing you care

Acknowledging all of these small contributions is a great way to show that you are paying attention and that you value your co-workers, teammates, and direct reports. But what should you do?

Get creative! For most people, the act of acknowledging their contribution is more important than what they may actually receive. If you have just a couple of dollars or a few hundred, you do a lot to demonstrate you care.

Technology can make all of this quick and easy. For example, you can send electronic gift cards to their favorite coffee shop or a local restaurant. And since you can do it right from your smartphone, you can do it while sitting at the airport, while waiting for your next meeting to start, or when waiting at the bar for your friends to arrive. It takes so little effort for you but makes a big difference to your employee.

Want to go the extra mile? If you can find something that fits with their personal interests, it not only shows that you appreciate their contribution, it also shows that you have taken the time to get to know them as a person. Does the person always comment that their kids make a mess? Why not go to Living Social and send them a free house cleaner? Are they a Civil War history buff? Why not get them a carriage ride on the Gettysburg Battlefield?

The point is, taking a few minutes to thank people on a regular basis and show them you care is quick, painless, and goes a long way to helping make them happy and productive. Oh, and it feels pretty good to put a smile on someone else’s face. Try it; you won’t be disappointed!

Things to think about

  • What are all the ways you make small acts of appreciation for the little things your employees do every day?
  • How could you use small gestures to acknowledge the little things that people do to help adopt to changes (new systems or processes) in your organization?
  • How can you get other leaders in your organization to routinely acknowledge the little contributions of their team members?
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Using Customer Success Management (CSM) To Remove Barriers to IT User Adoption

Success Chain

When I speak with the leaders of Customer Success Management and IT User Adoption programs, they often ask about how they can make their program more effective for increasing customer renewals. This leads to a discussion about the focus, methods, and tools they use to deliver their CSM service.

More often than not, it becomes clear that the CSM tools and methods they use are part of the problem.

The goal of CSM is to help customers adopt your system

At its core, the purpose of Customer Success Management is to help your customers fully adopt and maximize the value they receive from your software or service.

Many times, the root-cause issue that needs to be addressed is that people are simply not adopting the system. This is almost never a technical issue. If your team of customer success managers can maximize and sustain effective user adoption, the value to the customer (and renewals to you) will follow.

First, identify all barriers preventing user adoption

Many people assume user adoption is a 100% discretionary effort on the part of the end-user. This leads them to focus all of their efforts on trying to help the end-user know how to use the system and see how it will make their lives easier. While this may make sense, it’s not a realistic expectation.

The reality is quite different. User adoption is not entirely a choice made by the end-user. There are many non-discretionary factors that can make users unable to adopt the system – even when they want to use it!

In our experience at Tri Tuns, almost every IT project has some organizational or system-related issue that actually prevents people from using the system. These issues fell outside the users’ span of control and required action on the part of management to resolve. Yet often, management was unaware of these issues or how they prevented system usage.

In order to be effective, your CSM methodology needs to help customers identify barriers to IT adoption. But how will you do it?

  • Do you know how to identify potential IT adoption barriers?
  • Does your current CSM methodology actively uncover all barriers that affect IT adoption?
  • If not, how will you change your approach?

Then, remove the barriers to IT user adoption

Once you have identified barriers to IT user adoption, how will you make sure your customer takes action to remove them? Sadly, driving and sustaining effective IT adoption is not a core capability of many client organizations. Even if you are able to help your customers identify barriers to adoption, it does not mean that they will know how to resolve them. You may need to help.

Change your customer success management approach

Like most initiatives, your CSM capabilities and approach will need to mature over time. Initially, your CSM team can be successful just by helping customers get minor increases in adoption and ROI. However, to maximize customer renewals and, if possible, expand accounts, you will need to adjust your approach to help customers fully resolve their IT adoption issues. To do so, you will need to expand your knowledge regarding the root causes of IT adoption and the most effective methods to influence it.

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Putting the Customer back in “Customer Success Management” (CSM)

Success Chain

I spent some time over the weekend reading various blog articles and LinkedIn discussions about Customer Success Management. I also watched various online video presentations from CSM conferences and corporate websites.

At first, I was struck by all of the great issues and questions that illuminated the amount of work and complexity involved in creating an effective CSM organization. And as I continued to watch, I noticed another theme emerge. Nearly all of the discussions and videos were focused on how to make sure the vendor was successful. But wait, isn’t CSM supposed to be about helping the customer be successful?

Many CSM experts talk about what the vendor wants out of CSM

For the most part, many of the emerging CSM experts are talking about how to maximize customer renewals. They talk about topics like, “Should CSMs have a renewal quota” and “How should CSMs interact with the sales team?”

These are all important and valid discussion that you need to have when building your CSM team. But they are also very internally focused questions. They are all about what the vendor needs to do so that the vendor benefits. You can’t stop the discussion here. Actually, you shouldn’t even start the discussion here.

Very little talk of what will actually make the customer successful

Think back to the reasons you even first started thinking about setting up a customer success management team. It was because your customers were not successful with your product, which, in turn, led them not to renew.

Before you have any hope of ever solving the renewal problem, you need to solve the customer success problem. This requires that you understand both:

  1. The reasons why your customers are not using your product
  2. What actions you – and the customer – need to do to change this

Once you do this, then you can turn to the internal questions about to structure and manage your CSM organization.
Do you have a Customer Success Management program? If not, why not? If so, how has it affected your customer churn?
Please share your thoughts and experiences on the Success Chain community forums.

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Differentiated Customer Success Management (CSM) Services

Success Chain

When speaking with Customer Success Management professionals, they consistently tell me they provide different Differentiated Customer Success Management services depending on the customer. Even basic customer segmentation has allowed them to prioritize their efforts and adjust their services to meet the specific needs of different customer groups.

Not all customers are equal

While all customers are important, they are not all equal. Some customers are more profitable. Some require more support and take more time. Some customers start small but with a huge potential lifetime value, whereas others may have limited potential.

When developing your CSM program, make sure you understand both the needs and the potential value of your different customers. And then prioritize accordingly.

Differentiated Customer Success Management for B2B or B2C

You will need to adjust your Differentiated Customer Success Management approach to meet the unique needs of B2B and B2C customers.

  • B2B customers often have less individual control and discretion when it comes to the systems and tools they use. In addition to individual user habits, you have to navigate a plethora of organizational issues, including internal business processes, incentives, policies, procedures, technical and data quality issues.
  • B2C customers tend to have a high degree of individual control and discretion when it comes to using your product or service. You may need to help them develop new habits that involve regular, sustainable use of your system.

Delivering B2B CSM services is more complex than B2C, but the revenue amounts at stake often make it a priority.

Differentiate size & budget

It will take some experimentation to determine the optimal size and budget for your CSM program. The type of Differentiated Customer Success Management services you deliver will influence the number of customer success management staff you need. It will also affect things like the amount of travel (face-to-face) service vs. the amount of remote (web and phone) service.

Many CSM programs start relatively small and then grow as the customer base grows. When you building your CSM program, be sure to include plans for how you will add additional capacity as your customer base changes and as their needs – and your software – changes.

Change your methods based on customer need and value

You can help customers be successful with your product or service in many different ways. For some customers, it may make sense to provide services that are largely automated and uniform. For others, especially those with a high potential lifetime customer value, you may need to provide more hands-on, customized CSM services. And, as your customers grow, you may need to adjust the level of service they receive.

Here are the top 35 questions you should expect your sales prospects to ask you when evaluating your customer success services!

Savvy software buyers know that the customer success services provided by alternative vendors and make or break their success. How do your customer success services stick up? Check out this free guide to learn the answers you need to expect your prospective customers to ask.? Are your customer success services competitive? When will you lose your first sales because your competitor has more effective customer success services?

Free Guide - Evaluating Competitive Customer Success Services
Get the Free Guide
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Cloud IT Renewals Depend on Value Delivered, Not Costs

Success Chain

We are still seeing the impacts of the Cloud IT revolution. Cloud computing is changing many things about how organizations buy, deploy, use, and gain value from information systems. One of the most interesting and dynamic emerging trends is that for many organizations, the focus is shifting from the technology itself to the value the organization realizes from using the technology.

The move to “as a service” is also changing the way organizations make decisions regarding the initial purchase and the renewal of the software. If you ask someone who works in traditional service industries – lawyers, accountants, wait staff, bartenders – they will tell you that people decide to come back (renewals) based on the quality of the experience and the value the individual receives from their experience with the service.

This flips the traditional perspective of technology on its head. Once viewed and evaluated like a product you would purchase and take home to keep, technology is now viewed and evaluated as a service. Cloud buyers and vendors are slowly catching on to just how important value creation from the use of the software is for their success.

One software vendor I spoke to indicated that they were great at landing an initial sale, but they had over 50% turnover in their mid-tier market alone just because the system was not being used and therefore not delivering value to the client organization.

Will you renew your cloud subscription?

When you first decide to purchase a cloud IT system, you do so because of the promise and potential for you to realize the value in the future (after you start using it). Even with lower upfront costs, you probably put together a business case that defines your expected costs and expected return.

Before cloud systems became popular, many organizations only looked at their business case during budget discussions when making the initial system purchase. Once the decision was made and the money was spent, few organizations would come back to measure their actual ROI on their IT investment. There was little need to do so – after all, the money was spent and gone.

But what if you could get out of a bad investment before you spent all the money? With cloud systems, you can.

Cloud IT subscription-based pricing changes the buying decision process

Cloud IT, with its subscription-based pricing and defined contract periods, enables organizations to evaluate the value they are actually receiving from their cloud investments and pull out of bad investments. In essence, the contract renewal date inserts a logical breakpoint in the buying process. It also changes how you make buying decisions.

Cloud renewal decisions are different from the initial purchase decision

As I mentioned, the initial cloud buying decision is made based on expectations for future results. With no direct history with the system, you make your decision based on the word of others (the vendors, vendor-provided references, online reviews, etc.) and your confidence that you can get similar results.

Renewal decisions are made primarily on your direct experience. You evaluate your experience implementing the system, the level of adoption you have achieved, and any specific success metrics / ROI calculations. This experiential information then creates a context in which you evaluate the potential of the system to deliver additional benefits in the future.

Need to focus on cloud user adoption and ROI

So, what does it all mean? It means that clients (buyers) and cloud vendors both have a vested interest in making sure the cloud system is fully adopted, and there’s clear evidence of the value you received from the cloud system.

It means that having great functionality and a low price point is not enough to get you to renew your subscription if you aren’t getting any value. It means that there is a new standard for success when it comes to investing in technology solutions. And it means that you will need an ongoing program to drive user adoption, making sure you are getting the ROI you need.

After all, as soon as the system stops delivering the value, you will stop paying for it.

Most software projects fail to deliver the expected business outcomes because of the approach the buyer takes to getting the system live and driving adoption. Most buyer’s organizations don’t have the expertise, tools, and capacity to deliver their own success.  This short video explains many of the methodological and structural problems organizations face when dealing with software.

If you are looking to help software buyers create their own internal software success programs, Success Chain can help.  Contact us to find out what we can do for you.

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Organizational Change Management (OCM) – Clarifying Change with an Action Plan

Success Chain

With Organizational Change Management (OCM) and the now-classic Seinfeldian “yada yada yada”, we have a phrase so many of us (still) use to headline a story and gloss over details is, like most comedy, a double-edged sword of both humor and truth.

Of course, the “yada yada yada” ceases to be funny when the all-too-common tendency to layout an OCM plan and leave out the details arrive on your desk in the form of a none-too-well thought out project, and you’re tasked with making sure it both works and is profitable.

That’s when this cartoon is also more painful than funny because now the truth is happening to you. This is why companies bring in third parties to drive OCM, better known today as Customer Success and Software Adoption.

Solving the OCM Problem, Delivering Customer Success

Third parties’ external perspective affords them the opportunity to assess the reality of the landscape and then build a logical, strategic, actionable plan. They eliminate the “yada yada yada” and put in real, detailed plans. They answer questions like:

  • How, precisely, will we get from Point A to Point B?
  • How will we identify the barriers to getting to Point B?
  • How will we structure this OCM plan, so you get the biggest bang for the buck?
  • Do we have the organizational capacity – infrastructure, personnel, and bandwidth – to measure and monitor progress toward the business goals?
  • If we moved ahead without a strategic OCM plan, what will a misstep cost? And is that something you can afford?
  • How will we make sure you get a short-term lift and long-term results?
  • How do we cut through the red tape and move ahead quickly in days in weeks, instead of months?

Real-World Example

Do the above questions sound familiar?  They’re from real situations we encounter all the time, and we find many clients are looking to jumpstart their organization’s internal changes (e.g., program implementations and technology adoption), usually with a deadline of yesterday.

For example, a recent client was about to launch a very expensive and very public (national) pilot program, simultaneously introducing the company’s new, proprietary software and changing their business model. They had a lot invested, and it’s not hyperbole to say the future of the organization was riding these changes. There was an incredible level of risk and uncertainty around whether or not people would use their technology and if they’d be successful.

They needed:

  • unknowns to became known
  • clarity about what issues were most pressing
  • a structured and benchmarked action plan
  • to know how best to organize and execute both the technology adoption plan and the re-org change management plan.

Being too close to their OCM project, being overworked just trying to get the system right, the client both couldn’t see the problem and didn’t have the time to figure out what to do. So in just a few days’ time, we delivered a Quick Start Strategy, replacing the “yada, yada, yada” and “insert miracle here” with:

  • precise, actionable plans of how to proceed
  • specific short- and long-term activities to achieve gains both short- and long-term
  • a sustainable success road map to guide them through the next phase of their program

In a nutshell, we helped them to take action to move forward so the whole company could move ahead confidently. As masters of their domain.

Most software projects fail to deliver the expected business outcomes because of the approach the buyer takes to getting the system live and driving adoption. Most buyer’s organizations don’t have the expertise, tools, and capacity to deliver their own success.  This short video explains many of the methodological and structural problems organizations face when dealing with software.

If you are looking to help software buyers create their own internal software success programs, Success Chain can help.  Contact us to find out what we can do for you.

The missing link between new systems and the people using them.

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