Adoption Strategies For Maximizing Sharepoint Roi

Maximizing user adoption is key to getting the highest return on investment (ROI) from SharePoint. When employees actively use SharePoint to collaborate, share documents, manage workflows, and more, companies fully realize SharePoint’s benefits around knowledge management, improved productivity, and cost savings. This article outlines key strategies and best practices to drive extensive SharePoint usage across an organization.

Defining Employee Usage Goals

The first step is defining concrete usage goals based on the specific business objectives behind the SharePoint deployment. Common goals include:

• Reducing duplicate document versions and data silos by storing all work products centrally in SharePoint.
• Breaking down departmental information silos by enabling company-wide content sharing.
• Cutting project delivery timelines by using SharePoint workflows to streamline reviews/approvals.
• Boosting productivity by providing employees with enterprise search for quick information discovery.

HR, execs, IT, project managers and other key stakeholders should help shape these goals. Establishing measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) is also vital for tracking progress over time.

Key Usage Tracking Metrics

Common SharePoint usage metrics to establish as KPIs include:

• % of employees actively using SharePoint on a monthly/weekly basis
• Total number of unique SharePoint visitors
• Number of total documents stored/accessed in SharePoint
• Number of documents indexed by enterprise search
• Number of workflows completed

By defining quantifiable usage goals aligned to business value, companies can better drive adoption activities and measure their ROI.

Selecting Departmental Pilots

Rolling out SharePoint broadly from day one risks low adoption. Employees may feel overwhelmed trying to adapt existing workflows. Instead, kicking off pilots within volunteer departments allows for controlled testing.

Good pilot groups exhibit readiness for disruption from new tools and willingness to work through hiccups. Project/product-centric and distributed teams who produce many documents are ideal candidates. Groups who rely on emailing files around will see the clearest benefits from centralized SharePoint document libraries. Technical teams like software dev may also appreciate SharePoint’s source code management capabilities.

Ask managers to nominate pilot participants who can provide constructive feedback. Emphasize that this core team will inform future rollout activities – securing executive review meetings can help incentivize engagement. Ensure stakeholders understand any temporary changes to workflows are intended to improve efficiencies long-term.

Providing Hands-On Training

Supplementary to any admin-led training, pilots should receive hands-on walkthroughs tailored to their daily tasks. For example, run sessions specific to engineering teams’ needs around CAD file collaboration versus marketing’s requirements managing collateral in the brand portal.

Cover key concepts like checking files in/out, reviewing version histories, co-editing Office docs, customizing alert subscriptions, and more. This specialized guidance ensures participants can effectively apply SharePoint to their work, increasing the likelihood of continued usage. Training at regular intervals (i.e. weekly) during the initial launch also lets users gradually onboard versus getting overloaded upfront.

Gathering Ongoing Feedback

Solicit early and often feedback during the pilot period. Send out monthly surveys covering:

• Ease of use/navigation issues
• Desired features or customizations
• Differences from previous tools and processes
• Usage blocking points

Meet regularly with pilot participants to discuss what’s working and challenges. Be ready to tweak site architecture, workflows, and permissions based on this user input before confirming a wider rollout.

Promoting Awareness Through Training

To support the transition company-wide, a multifaceted promotional campaign should educate all employees leading up to launch. The key objectives are demonstrating direct benefits from adopting SharePoint and outlining any process/policy changes.

Executive Endorsement Emails

Early awareness emails come from CXOs, positioning SharePoint adoption as a strategic priority. These underscore executive endorsement at the highest levels and aligns usage to core business goals employees relate to.

For example, the CIO promotes SharePoint as enabling secure and scalable content management befitting a high-growth company. The VP of Engineering touts cutting-edge collaboration empowering globally distributed dev teams. Marketing highlights brand portal capabilities for consistent, on-message collateral. Such top-down messaging breeds employee buy-in.

Lunch & Learn Sessions

IT and department trainers conduct lunch and learn sessions to walk through SharePoint basics – from signing up, to creating/uploading content, to site navigation, permissions management and more. These interactive demos in a casual environment allow questioning in low-pressure settings.

Recordings which people can reference later help reinforce concepts for visual learners. Mini skills assessments halfway thru training ensure comprehension. Completing these debriefs unlock access to the production environment and prime first-time login success.

Email Drip Campaigns

Ongoing email campaigns counting down to launch keep awareness piqued. Mix high-level news like added features with easy tutorials on upload workflows or site templates. Bite-size content is more digestible versus intensive training. Prominently displaying executive sponsors again signals this remains a priority.

Emphasize SOX, compliance, and records management policies require transitioning select workflows like contracts review and account audits. Positioning SharePoint as simplifying governance wins over skeptical teams.

Incentivizing Usage With Workflows

Beyond formal training, promoting day-to-day usage requires resetting workflows, access permissions, and policies around SharePoint.

Making SharePoint the System of Record

Remove network drive access and legacy software logins to funnel activity into SharePoint. Without alternatives, teams leverage SharePoint’s document libraries, wikis, and tracking lists by default. Reinforcing it as the sole system of record incentivizes engagement.

Double efforts here with external partners and critical software systems too. Sales contract and account management tools should integrate directly with SharePoint to align content workflows.

C-Suite Modeling

Executives publicly collaborating in SharePoint, from board decks to strategy wikis, signal its importance throughout the org. Employees emulate the behavior modeled by leadership. When the CEO references finding the latest gross margin report in SharePoint, adoption perceptions change.

Assigning top-down performance goals around usage directly to managers also communicates expectations clearly. Charge leadership with disseminating SharePoint’s value to their direct reports for a trickle down effect.

Gamification

Gamifying goals tap into innate competition and social comparison. Create a visible points/leaderboard system tied to specific SharePoint actions like file uploads, page edits, workspace hits. Reward challenge winners with gift cards, early office departures, raffles for vacations, and public kudos.

Foster team-level showdowns by displaying monthly adoption metrics by department too. Reinforce results during all-hands meetings when calling out leading divisions. Everyone wants their team at the top!

Tracking Usage Metrics Over Time

Measuring adoption levels involves gathering a mix of qualitative feedback and quantitative data.

Real-Time Analytics

SharePoint’s built-in usage reports cover activity levels across sites, pages, docs, users, groups and more. Dashboards with monthly views reveal trend lines and help quantify engagement.

Compare this record of document hits, search queries, logins, and workspace edits against the core adoption KPIs defined early on. Shortfalls signal areas needing promotion.

Surveys

Pulse surveys provide qualitative data around employee experiences, ease of use, feature desires, and reasons for (non) adoption. Ask targeted questions like:

• On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to continue using SharePoint?
• What aspects of SharePoint positively or negatively impacted your experience?
• How did the transition from legacy tools impact your workload?

Feedback identifies UX pain points, gaps in training, and other hurdles limiting adoption.

Focus Groups

Small group discussions let admins probe survey responses in more depth. For example, multiple teams rating file sync difficult to configure warrants further discovery – what specifically was confusing? Does a self-help guide address the challenge, or is UI rework required?

Review pilot participant feedback separately to assess modifications needed before going fully live. Their input as test users offers invaluable direction.

Addressing Adoption Roadblocks

Tracking usage metrics highlights adoption gaps needing attention. Common hurdles arise around migration struggles, missing capabilities, and underutilized features.

Migration Management

Transitioning legacy tools and network drives to SharePoint inevitably meets resistance. Some teams cling to previous systems out of unfamiliarity with the latest processes. Provide additional training walkthroughs showing how SharePoint enhancements directly benefit users’ daily work.

Data migration channels, like the SharePoint Migration Tool for file transfers, also ease the switchover. Marketing these aids helps users see administrators invested in their success.

Feature Parity Issues

Entrenched products likely have niche capabilities SharePoint’s out-of-box configuration lacks. Shortcomings around image renditions for creative assets or international regulatory handling in finance systems causes usage blockers.

Bridge common gaps with apps from the SharePoint App Store. For advanced scenarios, develop custom web parts and components using SharePoint Framework. Fast iteration on user wants prevents deficiencies from hindering adoption.

Underutilized Capabilities

Alternatively, problems arise when employees default to basic SharePoint functions and overlook advanced tools. Collaborative work management solutions see low initial usage despite tremendous productivity potential.

Addressing this requires proactive education through email templates, quick reference guides, and webinars focused on highlighting lesser-known features. Infusing adoption goals and training with messaging spotlighting these tools is key.

Maintaining Momentum With New Features

Wide launches mark just the starting point for long-term SharePoint adoption. Maintaining momentum involves both technology enhancements and company culture shifts regarding information sharing.

Rolling Out New Capabilities

Regular platform upgrades introduce fresh features into the SharePoint ecosystem. New mobile apps, intelligent content services, and security controls augment existing tools.

Announcing each release via email, internal social channels, and webinars sustains awareness amid continual change. Complement with launch parties, prizes for early feature usage, and self-help portals to sustain excitement.

Encouraging Knowledge Sharing

Transitioning to open information exchange behaviors also cements SharePoint’s role. Employees hesitant to share works-in-progress or organize documentation for company-wide visibility slows maturation.

Foster shifts here through team-building exercises involving contribution challenges. Reinforce values of trust, transparency, and collective benefit during all-hands meetings. Leading by example, executives publicly collaborating accelerates culture change.

Ongoing Skills Development

Provide ongoing training programs allowing employees to expand SharePoint skills over time. Migrate lunch and learns to an online portal or webinar series accessible on-demand. Infuse quick how-to videos into onboarding curriculums.

Digital skills badges rewarding those mastering advanced features taps into innate desires for achievement. Such programs produce experts within business units to support peers – bolstering durable usage.