What Can Warren Buffett Teach Us About User Adoption?
IN THE NEWS
In a recent interview on CNBC Warren Buffett said that he could end the federal deficit in five minutes.
"I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that any time there's a deficit of more than three percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election. Yeah, yeah, now you've got the incentives in the right place, right? (Laughs)” – Source: www.CNBC.com 07 July 2011.
What Warren Buffett knows that most people seemed to forget (or just ignore) is that you need to develop meaningful incentives that reward the desired behavior and work performance you want to receive. This simple concept is as true for politicians in Congress as it is for users of IT systems in your organization. User adoption is ultimately about changing user behavior. So how do we effectively change behavior? Looking to another part of life, there is evidence from public efforts to change driver behavior that programs that combine incentives with enforcement and consequences are more effective than programs that only focus on motivation alone. The Washington Post reports:“The campaign against distracted driving has provided another illustration that American drivers are more likely to respond to safety initiatives when they carry the threat of punishment.
...Publicity efforts alone, such as the “Buckle Up for Safety” campaign, were high-profile failures, but the “Click It or Ticket” effort that followed is credited with increasing seat-belt use. The weeping victims of drunken driving who appeared in public presentations and in the media captured widespread attention, but experts say sobriety checkpoints provided stronger motivation for the use of designated drivers.” - Source: www.WashingtonPost.com 11 July 2011.
OBSERVATION
A common problem of most IT implementations is a focus on sending out 1-way communications, without developing truly meaningful incentive programs that drive desired user behavior. Many IT projects focus their communications on the typical, yet ineffective “What’s In It For Me (WIIFM)” message, but do little or nothing to define how they will measure user adoption and the rewards or consequences for meeting or missing adoption goals. In effect, the approach to user adoption found in many organizations is a “Buckle Up For Safety” campaign when a “Click It or Ticket” approach is needed.CONSIDER THIS
- If you want to improve user adoption, you need to make sure you have specified user adoption targets and defined policies that align incentives and rewards (including consequences) with desires behavior. The rewards and consequences must be strong enough – and meaningful to end users – to actually influence user behavior.
- You need a structured program to measure user adoption against defined targets and then enforce your incentive policies. This may include setting monthly user adoption metrics and targets, and then providing regular reports to monitor performance.
- You need to formally assign responsibility for implementing your incentive and rewards program. With “Click It or Ticket”, police officers are responsible for enforcing seatbelt policies. In your organization, it may fall to team leaders, department managers or directors. What matters is that everyone is clear on whose job it is to implement your user adoption policies.
- Don’t forget that incentive programs that are heavily focused on driving user commitment to adopt systems are preferable to programs that only focus on compliance or WIIFM. Of course, even commitment-centric approaches still require that you have a structured program for monitoring adoption and allocating rewards.
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
- Do you currently take a “Buckle Up for Safety” or “Click It or Ticket” approach to user adoption? Is it effective?
- Are your incentive systems truly aligned to drive desired user behavior? Do end-users feel meaningful rewards and consequences if they do not use your system? How are they enforced?
- How do you know if your incentive program is meaningful to end users? What do you do to validate that the rewards/consequences actually matter to the individuals whose behavior you are trying to change? Or do you just assume you have the right incentives?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Check out MyUserAdoptionPlan.com – an all-in-one User Adoption Portal
- Read: “Design the right metrics to improve user adoption”
- Read: “Motivating User Adoption: Commitment, Compliance Or WIIFM?”
- Read: "What is IT "Success"?
- Read: “Leadership: Are You Really Committed?”
- Read: “The Myth of User Resistance”
What’s wrong with my questions? How IT projects typically fail to ask questions pertinent to long-term user adoption.
OBSERVATION
Does your IT implementation plan include a Change Management (CM) effort? It probably does. Does this CM effort include attaining information about the user community’s needs, in preparation for an IT build? Again, your answer may typically be yes. So what could possibly be missing? The answer lies in what you are not asking about your client. Most often, consulting firms and IT implementation teams only seek information about the technical requirements to an IT build. What they forget to determine are the organizational impacts and barriers to actually using the new IT system. Once the IT system is built and installed, it is a fallacy to assume the user community (system end-users) will adopt the new system fully and as designed (known as User Adoption). Therefore is imperative to determine factors beyond technical requirements that can positively and negatively affect system usage.CONSIDER THIS
Below are just a couple of example questions one may ask the user community, in order to determine both organizational impacts and barriers to using a new IT system:- In addition to technical system training (e.g. classroom, reference guides), what other support mechanisms or skill set needs would help you operate the new IT system as designed (e.g. scenario process steps, vehicle for sharing best practices, etc.)?
- What support would you like to see your managers provide to assist you in delivering quality services regarding the use of the new IT system?
- Who will be responsible for the ongoing assessment and management of user adoption? How will you adjust their current roles & responsibilities to handle the added role?
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
As you plan to implement a new IT system, include assessments in your project plan that will address issues that will foster user adoption. Identifying user adoption issues during the project will better prepare the user community for both initial go-live of the system as well as long-term system usage.RELATED RESOURCES
Check out these other resources for more information related to this topic:- Check out MyUserAdoptionPlan.com - an all-in-one User Adoption Portal
- Take the Tri Tuns User Adoption Challenge - a free online assessment tool
- Read: “Does Your User Adoption Methodology Remove Barriers To Adoption?”
Influence culture to drive user adoption
OBSERVATION
People often talk about corporate culture but they really don’t know how to sufficiently explain / define it, how to influence it, or how it can influence an IT project implementation. You may have tried to define what the culture of your client’s organization is today, but have you given thought to the readiness of your client’s organization to accept a new technology? You should, as this readiness is a key influencing aspect of your culture, and will influence the adoption of the technology you are implementing (User Adoption).Low adoption of the technology will keep the organization from getting the most value out of its investment. Without driving adoption, you might see:
- Limited usage of the new technology
- Users expressing frustration and difficulty with the new system
- Poor performance results at the individual and division level Let’s think about the technology implementation for your client. You may encounter resistance to the new technology.
- Leadership: Do leaders promote and support the new technology?
- Processes: Are there multiple or conflicting processes in the way?
- Training: Are staff properly trained, including and beyond technical training?
- Project overload: Are there simultaneous projects competing for end-users’ time and attention?
CONSIDER THIS
If your client’s technology is great but the level of readiness to apply the technology is low, you will not see much user adoption. In the below diagram, one can see a direct correlation between organizational readiness and end-user adoption. Your goal is to focus on increasing readiness by utilizing and acting on the assessment criteria stated above. This will put you on the way to creating a culture of increased readiness and improved user adoption, the goal for any technology implementation. 
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
Have you thought about user readiness for new technology when trying to assess the culture of an organization?RELATED RESOURCES
Check out these other resources for more information related to this topic:- Take the Tri Tuns User Adoption Challenge - a free online assessment tool
- Read: “Accelerating User Adoption”
- Read: “Motivating User Adoption: Commitment, Compliance Or Wiifm?”
Return on Relationships
OBSERVATION
It is a common trap on many IT projects that team members are so focused on ensuring project “success” (typically defined as on-time and on-budget delivery) that team members forget the critical importance of developing and maintaining effective relationships. Ironically, forgoing the relationship building elements of the project (e.g. developing trust, ensuring effective project team interaction, etc.) often causes project delays, disagreements, and quality problems which ultimately lead to the project running late, over budget, or otherwise being deemed a failure.When project teams skip the critical step of building effective relationships:
- Project timelines are increased due to extensive time being wasted resolving disagreements, such as different views on scope of work, bugs vs. enhancements and performance measurements
- Stakeholders are unwilling to divulge important information with consultants and/or internal project team members, leading to ineffective solutions being developed and implemented
- Problems slowly escalate and disagreements become more intense as the project go-live date nears.
CONSIDER THIS
Investing time and energy to develop effective, trusting relationships with team members, clients, partners and others will deliver benefits that far exceed the costs. This is realized through proactive collaboration and teamwork, streamlined problem resolution, improved customer satisfaction, increased referrals and references, and maintaining long-term, profitable relationships (a positive Return on Relationships). Project team members should view time spent relationship building as an investment that will deliver future benefits. The perceived benefits of skipping or short-changing relationship building efforts are much lower than the very real costs when the project encounters the inevitable stress and disagreements that emerge (a negative Return on Relationships).THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
- Do you typically have a positive or negative Return on Relationships? What could you do to ensure you have a positive Return on Relationships? What additional benefits would you get from spending more time developing positive relationships with each stakeholder? What problems could be avoided by doing so?
- Do your project team members know how to develop effective relationships? Can they repair damaged relationships? Are they comfortable working with clients? Other departments? Senior executives? Many times project team members are great subject matter experts in their field, but they do not know how to develop and maintain effective professional relationships. Team members – even senior members – may need help learning to develop productive professional relationships.
- What can you do to build trust with each stakeholder? Trust is the ultimate tool for relationships. This tool can neither be granted nor created during a single meeting; it is built slowly and steadily over time through repeated interactions. What can you do to ensure that once it is earned, you maintain the trust of others?
RELATED RESOURCES
Check out these other resources for more information related to this topic:- Take the Tri Tuns User Adoption Challenge - a free online assessment tool
- Read: “Leadership: Are You Really Committed?”
- Read: “Does Your User Adoption Methodology Remove Barriers To Adoption?”
- Read: “Motivating User Adoption: Commitment, Compliance or WIIFM?”
- Read: “The Myth Of User Resistance”
Resistance is a Judgment, Not an Action
OBSERVATION
When talking about user adoption of major IT systems – CRM, ERP, HRIS, etc – at some point the discussion always focuses on overcoming “user resistance”. When I probe deeper and ask clients to define exactly what they mean by “user resistance” (what form it takes, what causes it, and what they do to “overcome” it) they often struggle to provide specific answers. If we cannot accurately articulate the problem, how can we recognize and solve it?The term “user resistance” has become a vague concept - a convenient short-hand of sorts – that is used to justify poor user adoption. Implicit in this term are the ideas that 1.) user adoption is solely at the discretion of the end-user and 2.) if the end-user does not adopt your system it is an act of defiance. If you accept this to be true, it follows that the responsibility for overcoming user resistance lies completing at the feet of the end-user. This just isn’t true.
In a previous blog entry on leadership, I shared the quote, “We judge others by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions.” When discussing user resistance it is very important to recognize that we observe discrete actions (user behaviors), but it is not until we assign our judgment that they become “user resistance”.
When we judge an action to be “user resistance” it has serious implications:
- It blames the user. By shifting responsibility for IT adoption from the implementation & management team to the end-user, we have created a convenient scapegoat if the system is deemed a failure.
- It helps us save face. By focusing all the attention on the users, we don’t need to examine where we might have done something wrong or lacked the skills to perform our jobs.
- It creates blind-spots. Our approach to change management might have been inappropriate, and as a result we might have ignored barriers to adoption that fall outside the users’ control. These organizational barriers could be what are preventing users from adopting the system.
- It ignores root-causes & contributing factors. Focusing on user behaviors may cause us to miss other technical, organizational, functional, process, data, or other factors that prevent user adoption.
CONSIDER THIS
Whenever the label “user resistance” is assigned, this is a signal that YOU have more work to do.- Stop and clarify what are the specific actions you observed.
- Identify what made you determine that these are instances of “resistance”.
- Determine if there are other explanations or contributing factors for these actions. Share your observations with the actual end-users and ask for their help in understanding what caused the behaviors, while requesting specific alternative behaviors they should take in the future.
- Look at other issues, contributing factors, and root-causes for undesirable behavior
- Find new solutions where before we might not have seen alternatives
- Take ownership and action for driving user adoption – without abdicating this responsibility to the end-users
- Help move things forward and drive success
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
- What made you decide that the problem was “user resistance”? What specific actions/behaviors did you observe that led you to this conclusion?
- What causes the users to demonstrate this behavior? Was this an act of defiance? Were users not clear on what behavior was expected of them? Did you share your observations and suggest specific alternative actions they should take in the future?
- Are there other causes/drivers for the action (or inaction)? Are there organizational barriers that prevent users from acting as desired? Are there misaligned rewards or incentives that are encouraging the problem behavior?
- Is there something that YOU can do to change user behavior? Is there something YOU need to do differently to drive desired behavior? Is there something about your change or user adoption methodology that is encouraging the behavior that you labeled “resistance”?
RELATED RESOURCES
Check out these other resources for more information related to this topic:- Take the Tri Tuns User Adoption Challenge - a free online assessment tool
- Read: “Leadership: Are You Really Committed?”
- Read: “Does Your User Adoption Methodology Remove Barriers To Adoption?”
- Read: “Motivating User Adoption: Commitment, Compliance or WIIFM?”
- Read: “The Myth Of User Resistance”
Leadership: Are You Really Committed?
OBSERVATION
“We judge others by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions.” We all know that leadership commitment to a new project, IT system, or business transformation is critical for motivating people to change and embrace the new initiative. People in an organization look to the leadership for cues about their level of commitment and then they adjust their behavior accordingly. So, the challenge is, how do we know if our leaders are truly committed? Far too often I have seen where people talk about the need for management “commitment” or “buy-in” but they don’t talk about exactly what they mean by these terms or how they will recognize when they have it (or don’t). Many projects get into trouble because they equate simply sending out some communications or holding a meeting with key leaders as having commitment. These are activities intended to build commitment, they are not evidence of actual leadership commitment.CONSIDER THIS
It is not enough to just be verbally committed to an initiative; the commitment needs to be backed up by observable action. The people you are trying to support and motivate will judge your commitment based on your actions, not just your words. Further, once they observe an action, they need to ascribe a meaning to it. You may need to support your actions with words to help people correctly interpret your actions and link them to your intentions.To help people observe and correctly interpret your actions:
- Get people to move beyond just words to focus on demonstrating commitment. If you can’t see it, you don’t have it.
- Help people to know exactly what they need to do to demonstrate their commitment. Set SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound) for how people can and should show their support.
- Let people know what actions they should be looking for from their leaders as evidence of leadership commitment. If necessary, explicitly state the intention behind the action so that people extract the desired meaning from the actions they observe.
- It’s not just the leadership who need to know how to demonstrate their commitment. Help everyone in the organization know what specific actions they can take to show their coworkers and supervisor that they too are embracing the new initiative.
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
- Do your observable actions match your intentions? How do you know? Do you obtain feedback from others about what they observe and how they interpret your actions? If there are disconnects here, how will you adjust?
- How do leaders know what actions they need to take in order to demonstrate their commitment in way that is meaningful others? Do you provide leaders (and others) with guidance as to the specific actions they need to take?
- How do you determine what actions a leader should take to demonstrate commitment? Do you ask the people in the organization what are the specific things they would like to see management do to demonstrate they are committed to the project?
- Do you explicitly state your intentions behind your actions so that people know that you are trying to demonstrate your commitment and support? If not, how can you make sure that people understand why you have taken an action and what it is you would like them to take away from their observation of your activities?
RELATED RESOURCES
Check out these other resources for more information related to this topic:- Take the Tri Tuns User Adoption Challenge - a free online assessment tool