Top Strategies for Cloud Adoption & Change Management

Change can be difficult for any organization. People are accustomed to their routine, technology, and ways of interacting as a team. However, the world around us is ever evolving and we must evolve with it. Specifically, the world of technology. Migrating your organization to the cloud is one of the best moves a company can make in 2022 to maintain a competitive advantage. With this, it’s necessary to consider things from an employee standpoint. Having a strong?adoption and change management ?strategy is key to a successful cloud migration. Let’s take a look at some key strategies of adoption and change management.

Strategies

Build a Champion Network

In the early-stage adoption process, it’s important to determine who your stakeholders are. These are people most affected by and most concerned about the adoption process. For example, a Director of IT is heavily involved in the adoption process. The success of their job is dependent on whether the adoption goes well. This would be someone you want in your corner as an adoption specialist. Once you determine who these important stakeholders are, you can begin to build your champions’ network. A champions network is a network of employees who are genuinely excited about the new technology and techniques. These employees who are naturally passionate about new technology are going to take that and champion it for you. This meaning, they are the ones who are teaching and managing the knowledge around the adoption and pushing the use of these new skills. This is important for adoption and change management because they already have a trusting relationship with their coworkers. Acting as this support network and advocating for the change will encourage others to utilize new technology and feel more comfortable doing so. Additionally, building this network of champions during the adoption process prevents organizations from having to heavily invest in tech support.

Adoption Should be Engrained into Customer Service Centers

Many large businesses have a Customer Service Center, or CSC. This is where employees can turn if they have questions, especially regarding technology. Another term for this would be an IT help desk. This is often a forgotten group when it comes to adoption and change management. They are typically more behind and not integrated with adoption efforts, despite being the place employees go to for help. To better utilize a CSC, be sure to push them into the adoption first and then strategically align them with the adoption process. This way, when people turn to them for help, they can offer a solution based on the new technology. This will get employees to use new techniques and help change their way of working.

Evaluate Learning Strategies

It’s important to have an evaluation metric set for the training and development you’re doing in conjunction with the adoption. This will help give a guide for how well the adoption process is going. A good example of this is when switching to Microsoft 365. One way of evaluating how the adoption process is going is checking your usage methods to see how many emails are sent internally. M365 is designed for internal communication to be done on teams, and external communication to be done on email. If the number of internal emails is higher than the M365 chat messages, then you know that employees are not adopting the technology as well as they could be. Additionally, Microsoft offers a?productivity score . This is a collection of numbers based on how many documents are stored in OneDrive, how many channel messages are sent in teams, how many documents are created in the cloud, etc. These metrics help give a sense of how your enterprise is doing. One more helpful tip is to assess a satisfaction score from employees. This could be asking them questions on how the instructors are doing and how prepared they feel. Overall, it’s important to give your organization some guidelines to measure performance.

Strategic Communication from Leadership

Moreover, it’s necessary to remember that people learn by example. Organizations are much more successful when the strategic communication is sourced from CEOs or top executives. In these enterprise-wide communications, ensure that the new tools are being used for these communications. This could involve changing company policy. For example, switching from email to teams. You want your higher-ups to be the example for how you would want them to communicate with the new technology. At the end of the day, employees want to impress their boss. So, demonstrating by example will encourage them to do the same.

Bravo’s Guide to Adoption & Change Management

Here at Bravo, we offer a strong adoption and change management strategy to ensure your employees are ready for the cloud. Our services focus on three key benefits: building relationships, leveraging technology, and making learning fun. When training employees, we want to establish a strong relationship to deliver a valuable learning experience. Furthermore, we ensure that we’re utilizing the technologies that we’re teaching. This way, Bravo can act as a model and lead by example. Lastly, we want to make sure that we have a good time and that the adoption process is a positive experience for employees. There’s no better time than now to switch to the cloud, and we’re here to guide you through?every?step.

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This article first appeared on the Bravo Consulting Group, LLC blog at?Best Adoption & Change Management Strategies - Bravo Consulting Group (bravocg.com)