Digital transformation projects can be an exciting but daunting journey, especially when managing systems critical to the business’s core functions. End users have a pivotal role to play in ensuring the success of these initiatives, with real-world insights and day-to-day experience to drive decisions around system design, user training, and other elements.
As you approach your next digital transformation effort, consider these five ways your end users can help shape a smoother transition, tackle potential hurdles, and ultimately achieve better outcomes.
1: Define and understand the problem(s) your project needs to solve or the opportunities it should capture.
Users work with your existing technology tools every day and have a firsthand view of what’s working well, what typically goes wrong, where additional capabilities would be most helpful, and what sounds good but might not translate into a tangible improvement over the current platforms. Working with users, your team can develop a realistic scope of what the project can and will accomplish, and what it will take to achieve the desired results.
2: Document and understand current workflows and processes.
A smooth and successful implementation depends heavily on enabling users to quickly transition from legacy workflows to those that will power the new solution. Part of that is setting up the new system so it’s ready to integrate into the rest of the technologies within the organization. Any workarounds users may employ to overcome shortcomings of the old solution, for example, need to be understood and documented so the software design team can account for them in the programming or replace them with cleaner workflows as part of the migration.
3: Develop a plan to address potential challenges.
Every digital transformation project can bring some challenges. The ability and willingness to anticipate potential problems will be vital to empowering users with the tools to overcome any hurdles. End users are well-positioned to help craft a plan to resolve problems and evaluate how well the proposed resolutions will work in daily use. They can also build support among the wider end-user group to adopt fixes as needed during the implementation process.
4: Assess the likelihood and scale of disruptions to productivity.
The digital transformation journey requires some adjustments, and even with solid training programs and skilled support experts, users’ activities may experience some hiccups. Understanding how extensively productivity could be affected by issues during the transition is an essential part of achieving project success. Users can be instrumental in putting tangible metrics around where, when, and why productivity will likely take a hit during the implementation. They can also estimate the duration of anticipated productivity drops to help senior staff and sponsors understand how long productivity may be affected and when they can expect it to rebound after the new platform is in place.
5: Understand current engagement levels with the enterprise’s cybersecurity practices.
A core requirement of most digital transformation projects is maintaining continuous cybersecurity protection as users transition from one system to another. However, ensuring vigorous adherence to recommended security protocols going forward will be much more difficult if users aren’t consistently following them now. Talk with users to understand their current knowledge of cybersecurity best practices and candidly assess where they may be cutting corners out of convenience. You may even discover that your current processes are vulnerable and require some changes to ensure a secure migration. From there, you’ll have the insights to build a training program that addresses any gaps in users’ knowledge and focuses on bringing everyone up to date on how best to protect the new platform against exposures tied to malware, targeted attacks, and negligence.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.