8 years ago we began a journey of transformation at Goodman a large global property development company which resulted in the company wide file migration across to a web based platform. If you can imagine a diverse end user community of construction workers, architects, lawyers and funds management teams you may also be able to imagine the diversity of challenges that were encountered on this massive migration from shared drives to SharePoint.
Here is a little bit of insight into how we successfully obtained an average of 92% adoption against and industry average of 28%.(AIIM 2016)
The importance of data structure and taxonomy was the foundation of the success of the implementation. Spending time workshopping with various parts of the business and getting their feedback was essential to the architecture of the new platform. Buying a taxonomy ‘off the shelf’ with such a diverse user group was out of the question. So we set about doing the time consuming task of creating the structure from the ground up. Conducting 30 workshops across 10 different countries with a wide variety of stakeholders would be time well spent in the long run.
With our structure in place and end users taken on the journey the importance of communication and change management started to become clear. As you well know the technology is the easy part. We recruited a small army of change champions whose role it was to promote the new way of working and be the navigators of the new system for their teams. Did we mention we made sure that this role was part of their KPIs?
Next up a series of training workshops that were designed as much to be engaging and fun as they were to equip end users to successfully move across to a virtual way of sharing and saving documents. We enlisted incentives, scavenger hunts including prizes and of course the time-honoured trope of creating a little bit of competitive spirit between teams.
So how do you convince people to move across to something that is unknown and alien to them and as one end user said “what? You want me put my documents on the Internet?’. Well the first thing is you don’t give them an option. You close all the other doors. Shut down the file share, leave it there but make it read only. This is where governance comes in and the importance of having process and policy in place can’t be overstated.