Your team is struggling to adapt to new technology. How can you make the transition easier?

A good strategy to consider is to have the team provide a representative who would be a liaison between the your team and the technology/project team. This person would advocate for their needs, and provide real time feedback to your team as the technology development progresses.

The first part of assessing your team's needs and skills gaps is to communicate with them. You can either do this in several ways - workshops, one one-on-one informal chats, anonymous surveys etc. Once you've defined where the team thinks their skills gaps lie you can start implementing strategies to help fill them.

Conduct a live demo with your team to have a good feel of the technology before it officially goes live. This way you get their buy-in because they experience first hand the benefits of the new technology and how it makes their work easier. You also get their feedback on areas that need to be tweaked or improved. Once they feel they are part of the process and they can see the benefits they would own the process, and in most cases work with you to fast track the launch.

The benefits of constant training and retraining cannot be over emphasized. Scheduling frequent training for your team would keep them abreast with all the features of the technology particularly improvements and new features. Don’t take this for granted, as the team composition can change more frequently than you like, hence frequent trainings improves the team efficiency as everyone would at least have the same baseline information. Training manuals are great for reference, but live trainings and webinars give the team opportunity to ask questions and get feedback in real-time

Create milestones for using the technology and reward your team when they meet these milestones. Reward and recognition are great motivators for employees, it gives them an opportunity to be seen and absence of accomplishment that their efforts are being rewarded. This also spurs healthy competition within the team as everyone would work towards being recognized for their efforts.

Here's the hack: Build a Tech Force poised for innovation. Consider not only hiring people knowledgeable about your future/new tech stack but also building them knowledgeable about both legacy and future tech stacks. A cohort of technologists hired together, trained together, and used to build enterprise products together will facilitate, spearhead, and ignite the transition within the rest of the organization. I've seen some of my client's stakeholders' skepticism, only to rave about performance, productivity, and overall results of such an approach while looking forward to the next deployment. It is called Tech Force by Design, and once deployed, you'll wonder why you didn't do it before.

Change is never a happy space for several teams. Explain the reasons for the new technology, the problems it solves, and the benefits it brings. Understanding the value of the change can help motivate the team to adapt. Offer detailed training sessions to help team members familiarize themselves with the new technology. Provide clear guidance, manuals, other resources to help ensure a smooth transition. Encourage team members to provide feedback on how to improve the adoption process. Involve team members in the planning, implementation and testing stages to ensure that their needs are considered. Being patient is the key. Allow team members to learn at their own pace, and offer positive reinforcement and support along the way.