Driving adoption of a VMS program

Similar to the old adage, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink,” you can deliver best designed VMS programs, but you can’t guarantee that your stakeholders will embrace it. 

Involving the end user community in the design and evaluation of the VMS program would drive efficient and dynamic communication among stakeholders in a collaborative spirit to achieve success and mutual benefits. Engaging hiring managers during these early conversations would also enable identification of best practices that result in a successful VMS program.

Designating a champion from each user category (IT, Finance, Procurement, HR, Marketing, Legal etc.) will also help educate the whole company at large. These champions will not only sit on steering committees but they will also be the advocates for the design and configuration of the VMS and act as subject matter experts in their respective areas.

Having buy-in from the end user community becomes more crucial when aligning technology with strategy. The champions would help achieve the defined strategic goals in promoting new technology and ensuring organizational readiness.

Keeping the momentum and the motivation to kick start wide-spread user engagement involve communicating about the program. The success of user adoption will depend on developing an effective message that resonates with multiple target audiences and gains their support. It’s not communicating only about cut-over dates or go live dates but more importantly about the impact the VMS program will have on their day-to day work and how negative impact will be mitigated.

Cutting critical corners like training would ultimately result in low user adoption of the VMS program. Identifying beta groups and allowing them early access to the system will help incorporate important feedback and fine-tune training prior to launch. Having a strong training program specific to each user group and sharing successful use cases between depts will increase the adoption rate. 

Having a variety of training methods – electronic, classroom, Did you know sessions will encourage users to learn  and commit to using the tool. By making training fun with contests, awards, and rewards will encourage people to create best-practices videos or share their mistakes and frustrations with the new program. Promote user adoption with monthly communications such as emails, knowledge sharing and corporate newsletters that share user tips and innovative use cases from various departments and individual users throughout the company.

Engage, Educate, Empower!!