How To Maximize User Adoption For Your Document Management System

Following a sound user adoption strategy is important for all IT projects, but it’s critical when you’re implementing a centralized system that’s going to span multiple departments and business units, and change how an organization works.

With a centralized document management system, you’re improving many processes and changing the way people work together, and following a user adoption plan is essential for a successful implementation.

Here are five ideas that help to maximize user adoption:

1. Have top-level management communicate project goals: Since document management has a variety of applications that impact an entire organization, it’s important to get everyone on board. That means making sure everyone understands the big-picture goals and sees support for the project from the top down.
   
   It’s important to communicate the reasoning, goals and business benefits behind implementing a document management system. For example, “We’re going to implement a document management system so that we’re able to improve customer satisfaction by reducing the time it takes to service our customers by 50 percent.” In addition, consider messaging that shows how the individual users are going to benefit in terms of time savings, making specific tasks easier, etc.
   
   
2. Identify project leads: In all departments affected by a new document management system, identify a point person with process expertise. You’re looking for them to serve as product champions for this initiative, representing the department’s needs and answering questions and concerns for end users.
   
   Without these project leads or point people, it’s harder for departments to have input into what business processes they want to automate. These decisions are left to others who are not as familiar with their specific processes, such as the IT department or a third-party vendor. As a result, when you roll out the system, it’s probably not going to do what the individual teams need from it. 
   
   Once you identify these leads, make sure to allocate their time to the project. As a rule of thumb, allocate a minimum of 20 percent of a person’s time during the initial discovery process. Plan for about two days during a two-week discovery process. In a large, multi-department implementation, this business process discovery phase could take up to two weeks.
   
   For good user adoption, make sure these people are available during the go-live stage to help users quickly resolve any problems. You want their first experience with the platform to be positive. Your project leads should have 50 to 100 percent of their time allocated to making sure the new document management process is working well for the go-live period, which could take a couple of days or longer, depending on the size of your organization.
   
   
3. Require people to switch to the new system: If you don’t make people use the new system, they’ll often continue using the old tools and processes. It’s human nature to avoid change, even when the change offers benefits. Forcing the issue by switching everything to the new system is the best way to get user adoption for a new platform.
   
   The worst mistake is to allow old processes to run in parallel with new processes. As long as the old options are in place, it’s difficult to get broad user adoption for the new document management system. It also makes your organization less efficient, because these parallel processes or platforms mean that a document could be in more than one place, so employees are likely to spend more time hunting for information they need. 
   
   
4. Take action! It’s easy for analysis paralysis to creep in when you’re planning a centralized document management system. Instead of trying to create the perfect plan, break it into smaller, iterative changes. A good approach to consider is the “act, learn, build” cycle:
   
   •     Act: Take a small step in the right direction.
   •     Learn: Evaluate what you did, learn from it and measure your progress.
   •     Build: Repeat the first two steps until you reach the final overall goal.
   
   

   For example, maybe your overall goal is to have your office 100 percent paperless. If you try to create a sweeping strategy based on the idea that at a certain date you’re going to stop using paper and be 100 percent in digital document management, you’re inviting analysis paralysis. You could work on that strategy for years before you’re ready to implement the solution.

   
   Small steps are also more effective in driving user adoption, because people have a limited capacity for learning new things at the same time. If you try to completely change how people work, it’s extremely challenging. But when you take it one step at a time, you allow them to learn gradually, making it easier to embrace new technology.
   
   
5. Use an easy quick win to build momentum and enthusiasm: It’s always a good idea to start implementing document management with a quick success. Find a business process within your organization that’s easy to automate with document management and has a very high likelihood of success.

Ready to learn more about successfully implementing an ECM solution at your organization? Read our free e-book, An ECM Insider’s Guide: The 7 Factors For Success.