BPC: David Mann Evangelizes "Supporting Users - How Technologists Can Help 'Mere Mortals' Get the Most Out of SharePoint"

I kicked off the afternoon of day two at the Best Practices Conference with David Mann's session, "Supporting Users - How Technologists Can Help 'Mere Mortals' Get the Most Out of SharePoint."  David, the acknowledged expert on workflows, took a break from his workflow specialty to spend an hour evangelizing the importance of end user adoption.  The primary goal of the session was to answer the question, "what can we do, as technical resources, to make people willing to use the SharePoint implementations that we've rolled out?"

David began with a disclaimer, the result of having been called out on evaluations of past presentations of this content for not having included technical content (this despite the fact that the session had never been represented as being of a technical nature), which essentially boiled down to: "yes, a lot of this is common sense ... but nobody does it!"  As such, another goal for the session was to "get people to think about [these things] and then put [them] into a project plan." 

David flatly and emphatically began by stating that end user adoption "is probably the single most important thing in your project ... we need to make sure people use what we implement, or else it's a failure."  David went on to underscore the point by saying, "if people aren't using it, anything else you did doesn't matter."

Breaking the areas of concentration in achieving the goal of end user adoption into several buckets, David broke them down as follows:

• Communication. Listen to what your eventual users say and what they don't say (and follow up when you can tell they're holding something back - privately, if necessary), and if at all possible, get the boss out of the room when gathering requirements.
• Manage Expectations. Know what your users expect out of the implementation, and adapt your message to line up with their expectations. If necessary, lower expectations so you can't fail on your first phase of the rollout. Ending on an admittedly cynical note, David said you need to give the people what they want ... but first you need to tell them what they want.
• Help. Recognize that most people won't read an instruction manual, and figure out what context-sensitive online help can be embedded directly into the application. Such help must be clear and useful to users. Bottom line: make help easy and intuitive to get, and easy to understand.
• KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). End user time and frustration level is more important than the developer's time and frustration level, so spend the time to simplify. Show users only what they need to see, only when they need to see it, and no more. Severely limit functionality initially and roll out incrementally. Remove features that don't directly apply to the primary goal (Don't need wikis or blogs? Rip 'em out!).  Absolutely change the default UI in your first phase - make it look right and act right for the organization that will be using it. Limit SharePoint Designer use initially, because "it increases your surface area for problems in an area you have no control over."
• Walk the Mile. No, not the Green Mile (though, come to think of it, that may be exactly what you'll find yourself metaphorically walking if you fail in attaining the necessary end user adoption), but this refers to the maxim, "you can't understand a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes." As such, the first pilot group should be the project team itself (most definitely including you), and should be limited to 10-20 participants. With a successful pilot, these are the users who will ultimately be championing your implementation within the organization.
• A Perfect World. If you do everything right, your implementation should be: Adaptive, Simple, Fast, and Anticipatory.

Following some reinforcing advice of the "nuts and bolts" variety, David remarked in conclusion that attaining successful end user adoption "is an art, it's absolutely not a science," but the message was crystal clear:  it's an art that anyone who's aiming for a successful deployment had better master.