How to you engage team members to utilize collaborative tools such as blogs, wikis, Microsoft SharePoint and the like?
Good Answers (10)
Karl G.
Enterprise and Knowledge Architect/Business Strategist
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The lack of adoption is generally more of a cultural issue than technical (or, sometimes team members just hate anything MS based). Even in the old days of email, shared network drives, and phones, we did some great, distributed, collaborative projects (although these really required a disciplined PM and more rigidly defined tasking and CM).
As far as tool adoption, some lessons I’ve learned have been:
1) Establish corporate policies to allow usage. I’ve been on several multi-company, distributed projects where critical team members couldn’t get access to project websites or Sharepoint until the project was almost over. Delays over 1 day ensures that members will find workarounds (usually email) that will undermine the entire adoption.
2) Setup a decent project environment before the project kickoff meeting and make sure team members already have access when they show up. Maybe it’s easy enough for the PM to setup or get a good administrator. Before the meeting, setup the project wiki and have a blog to discuss the kick-off meeting. And tell team member to go there and BEFORE the kickoff.
3) At the kick-off meeting, have just-in-time, project-specific training in the collaboration environment you’re using – NOT product training, but project policy training. (If you really need end-user product training beyond 15-30 minutes just to get started, then the product is too complicated for end users).
4) Ensure all relevant project documents are immediately posted to the environment and if people request documents, send them a Sharepoint link rather than the document itself.
5) Update the blogs/wikis daily (or multiple times/day) to reflect current project status and meeting results. Without up-to-date info, people stop using it. Often the PM does this, but having a specific person assigned to this is often very helpful.
6) It’s a productivity tool, not a burden. Don’t force people to artificially use it if it’s not productive (for the team, not just the individual). Developers don’t need to update the blog with daily status updates if you covered that in a standup meeting, but the PM should note the results of the standup on the blog.
Juha H.
COO - TELLUS International, Inc.
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We run a virtual company. This means that you can operate at 100% efficiency anywhere with a phone and an internet connected laptop. We use SharePoint and Salesforce.com. These are integral to our communication processes. If you want information on templates to use, existing contracts, contact information, email threads, marketing campaign status, etc. the only way to do this is through these portals. The key to getting people to use the portals is to place data that is important to them on them. Comissions are only paid on projects that are closed and reported on in Salesforce.
We use Wikis through SharePoint. It a depository of company best practices. This is where our sales consultants go to cut and past from when they are making offers or explaining our processes. When ever I as a manager see a best practice form I create a SharePoint to-do for the person, which will keep on sending reminders until the task is done.
Blogging and partcipation in company Facebook group discussions needs to be a voluntary excersise. Some people are bloggers and some are better not blogging at all. Encourage your good writers to contribute. Blogging is always ones personal opinions. Its a way of self marketing as much as promoting the company and its expertise. Allow and encourage your employees to self market.
Mitchell L.
CEO & Publisher at THiNKaha (http://thinkaha.com)
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For us, each book is a separate project. We're using Basecamp which is a great tool for collaboration. Our team members us it because it's much more efficient than "e-mail only" communication and it keeps track of progress with both milestones and an activity trail. In short, it's just more efficient for all of us.
We also have a book on the topic, called 'Collaboration 2.0', that I'm sending along to new authors as we sign them up. After they get it, I have a conversation about the tools and their usage.
In short, we need to educate and show folks that it's more efficient for all parties.
Hope this helps.
Mitchell
Hope this helps.
Links:
Bethany S.
Building Your Online Presence: WordPress, Email Marketing, Web Design, Social Media. Consultant • Speaker • Instructor
Your question was how to engage a team to use a collaborative tool, right?
The best way to get people to use something is for them to see how it will benefit them directly.
Why not propose a short collaborative project to evaluate certain tools (or have one person do an evaluation) and share the pros and cons of each with the team.
Then have the team determine which tool is going to be the most productive to the whole group.
Maybe if they have a say in things, they will be more likely to utilize the tools, but limit it to 2 choices, to start with. If they come back with a 3rd they are more excited about, that is great, but don't make it harder by giving too many options upfront.
Hope that helps,
Bethany
http://UniqueThink.com
You have to show them how it will make some important aspect of their job easier. Whether that is sometime as simple as submitting a ticket to the IT department, or viewing HR announcements, it has to be sold to the user base as something that will improve.
After that, you need influencers inside of certain groups to evangelize a bit and to use it more than just a little bit themselves. Having these people to do things like run contests over SharePoint (scavenger hunts) and post helpful notes will get people thinking more and more of the value.
After that, you want to have some type of cutoff period. This is that time when any old system is completely shut off and the new one is the only one. This should be a date that seems far off, but will hit quickly (like at the turn of the fiscal year the new system comes online). This lets people know that they have to learn the new system, and will hopefully not find a mass exodus of people learning at the last minute.
Tina M.
Executive Coach, Leadership Coach, and Facilitator, Author of Meaningful Coaching
Get the team together to experience one of the People on the Go workshops. The team doesn't even have to be together, just get each one on the phone. A lot of getting "no" has to do with the unknown, and fears of wasting time. Get them on a short tutorial, they will see the benefits!
Rick C.
Business structure expert
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Pierre, we've attacked this question in two scenarios: among our closely connected team and across an extended/distributed enterprise of small firms and independent professionals.
Internally, we have found that the technique that works best is trying out the options on smaller discrete projects so that if a tool doesn't work well with our natural inclinations, we're not tied to it permanently. The biggest obstacle that we've seen is that, in our firm, Outlook becomes the default desktop: we do most of our work centered on Outlook rather than different applications or tools (although Excel is a close second).
For the extended group, we have had success in the past in pushing all work on a project to a standalone solution, e.g., Groove, by making the functional case to a decision-maker at a high-enough level to enforce adoption. The primary factor that made engagement easy: it was a new project and so there was no "incumbent" technology or process that we were working against.
At the end of the day, a tool has to be useful for the intended purpose. We too often see people thinking of all these tools as interchangeable, but blogs are more of a one-to-many tool as compared to wikis that are better at capturing widely held knowledge, which is different from SharePoint, which is much better at organizing document-focused work, e.g., word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, with collaboration more often in a supporting role.
Collaboration is not an event. As a business owner/manager we need to ensure that teams evolve to using this tools and they become culture. The transition from "tribal" teams to ones that are fully collaborative is something that must be reinforced daily or at least weekly.
One of my favorite sayings is "you can't push a string" - Mangement has to use these tools as well!
Geoff
Mark P.
Principal, Vertabase Project Management Software
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Make it very easy and convenient for them to use the tools to do small but important tasks.
Start with baby steps, like checking a blog for information, or publishing an update on a specific item to a blog (rather than email).
For what it's worth, it seems that wikis are a very difficult concept for many people in companies to grasp. I'd start save those for later.
You could start small by engaging those team members that have a natural tendency to collaborate and are good early adopters. Form a tiger team and do a pilot project. You can work the kinks out before a larger roll out. It is easier to get additional buy in once there is an initial success. I think forcing people to use these tools can be counter-productive in the long run, but the late adopters may need some nudging and/or arm twisting. Watch out for performance and usability issues. Rolling out too quickly, before the tools are really ready, can be big set back.
