A How Problem: Choosing Workplace Software & the Problem of User Adoption

Software ate the world. Marc Andreesen was correct.?

But suppose you are a founder, creator, or owner who accepts this reality and is excited by the possibilities that await you as you make purchasing decisions for your company. You choose the most talked-about applications, the smartest technology, and what you hear the companies you idolize are using. And then you wait, expecting your teams to adopt the tools and become wildly productive.

You wait.

Keep waiting.

Still waiting.

What happened?

Yes, these tools can assist. If applied properly, they can automate tasks, make your team more productive, and enable the change you most wish to see across your organization, but they are not magic solutions for the challenges that keep you up at night.?

The solution is about discipline, having a strong, technologically capable team and the thoughtful construction and intelligent purchase of the right tools to enable your maximum operational efficiency and company productivity.?

I have wasted immense numbers of dollars buying the wrong software.? I have wasted vast dollars operating from the premise that the right software purchase would solve the problem that most ailed my organization. I have seen many founders and owners excitedly announce new software and application purchases, create flashy rollouts for the latest products, and sell to their teams a particular piece of software as the all-mighty fix to the Himalayan mountain field of challenges they face. And then:

1. Training is not embraced or completed.?
2. Not enough thought is given to all the process changes that must be addressed for the new software to succeed.?
3. The new application does not integrate natively or seamlessly enough with the primary workflow system (Office / Gmail / Salesforce / Hubspot). After some initial excitement, the teams stop using it simply because it is not intuitively connected to their work places.?
4. It is discovered that for the first piece of software to work, another, and then another, and then another application must be rolled out to support the initial launch. Employees become confused and overwhelmed by all the options at their disposal, productivity slows, and then people revert to the original systems that were most tied together and most straightforward to work with.?
5. Attention is not paid to the necessity of clean, reliable data as an input into most of these tools. Dirty legacy data is uploaded upon the launch, or the initial data set is cleaned, but a new process is not developed to ensure clean information moving forward. The systems cannot generate reliable reporting that accurately captures a digital image of the company's physical world, so the tool fails to be broadly adopted.?

More than anything, the ability to successfully roll out new software new workflow management tools is dependent on the basic disciplines of the company, the curiosity of the team to want to learn new things, and the ability of the founder/owner/leader to link the way for the latest software to how the company will achieve its mission, grow its sales, increase its efficiency; do what it's meant to do.?

In my experience, three primary areas need to be addressed to make thoughtful and productive choices about a company's software and technology.?

Integration Capability:

Whatever the chosen application—from ERP systems to workflow and project management to intracompany communication—in my experience, the imperative is that these choices must integrate natively or through high-quality APIs with the primary work management system (Microsoft 365 or Google Workplace).?

When the systems don't integrate, and when I can't upload and easily share Word documents or spreadsheets to the project management system or the company Chat application, I lose flexibility and create additional tasks that need to be performed to complete my work.?

Years ago, I decided to roll out Salesforce Chatter when my company had not yet gone online with the Salesforce CRM. Facebook had become ubiquitous, and everyone thought companies would need social networks across their organizations. While the product worked well, it was not integrated with our Google Drive and Gmail systems, and so after the initial launch, the app became a ghost town.?

Then, we eagerly awaited the launch of Google Plus for the enterprise, only to have the application sunset. Ultimately, Google's chat application became what we used, and it was an immense success. It was also incorporated as a feature on the product we were already paying for, and everyone knew how to use it from their personal Gmail accounts. It was great.?

The other terrific aspect of using G-Chat was the strength and reliability of the Google mobile applications and the extent to which the company was always iterating and releasing new, more powerful features on these dominant components of its platform.?

Application Creep:

So many excellent workplace productivity and team management software and applications are available for today's founders and small business owners. They are almost all set up as SAAS products, and rolling them out to a team represents a relatively nominal expense for the payables account.?

Additionally, as the demand for these products has increased, numerous companies have built fantastic businesses by turning one feature or very specific need into an entire product offering.?

• Box and DropBox for document storage and management
• DocuSign for contract execution
• Smartsheets for project management?
• Asana, Notion, Jira, Monday for workflow management

These are just a few. I like this trend towards specialization. But a challenge for small businesses right now is that if they're not careful, they can suddenly ask their employees to manage their work across six, eight, or ten different digital locations that don't all integrate.?

This becomes overwhelming. Yes, companies like Zapier are doing a lot to help make integrating systems easier, but I have talked to many employees who become frustrated by the size of the folder on their phone's home screen that contains all the applications they need to manage their work and communication within their organization.?

It can become confusing and time-consuming and create plenty of opportunities for documents to be shared in the wrong channel, information to be missed, balls to be dropped, sales to be lost, and operational mistakes to be made.?

Data Integrity

Then, there is the problem of dirty data. I have seen this as a problem within the CRM and ERP space, but it rings true for almost any piece of software that manages critical information for the company.?

As I said earlier, first, there is the work of cleaning and properly structuring legacy data for the initial launch. Then, processes and tools have to be designed to accurately capture, clean, and maintain new data as it is generated, organized, and placed into these systems for analysis.?

Without clean, reliable data, your analytics won't matter. When your team realizes that the new system is not producing reliable reporting, adoption rates for the latest tools cascade.?

So what are we meant to do??

This is a live challenge for me in my work. We are also discussing a lively marketspace with lots of investor capital being put to work to solve my problems. Here are my five best pieces of advice:

1. Choose your primary work management system wisely (Microsoft or Google) and make subsequent application choices that work best with those systems.?
2. If a particular type of software (ERP system, design software, project management software) is especially important for your business, choose the work management system that is most compatible with that product.?
3. Create clear communication and processes within your company about what should be communicated via which platform. Then, as a leader, become a super user on all the platforms you're using and lead by example. Reach out proactively and positively when you see confusion or mistakes, and explain what needs to be adjusted.?
4. Purchase products with stable and highly reliable mobile applications. Before you make a purchase, especially if you're considering a startup product, be sure you think the company will exist two years from now. It's frustrating when an application becomes valuable, a funding round goes south, and the product team can no longer iterate or needs to shut the app down altogether.?
5. If possible, give your team 12 months to adapt to each new software. Be flexible, see how they use the product, and adapt the process and expectations to meet the use cases the organization genuinely finds most productivity-enhancing and exciting. Don't overwhelm your company with so much to learn on the software front that the essential work of your company is hurt.?

This is a fast-moving topic in a fast-moving space. It is fascinating to see all that is being developed and how these products change the way we work. These choices are important. How we introduce them is important. Learning by doing is hugely important.?

I would love to know what you've seen work and not work in your organizations.?

I hope everyone is having a fantastic week!

John