Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/18157
A ROLLOUT THAT NETTED GOOD RESULTS For everyone involved, the document served as a central information repository. COMMUNICATE Blatantly obvious as a critical success factor for any project is timely and effective communication. Within our Timeline and Checklist, there are communication requirements with myriad purposes. Some involve early communication to the administrative and legal management of each office, some involve communicating events and expectations to end users, and others were primarily informative pieces, such as frequently asked questions, meant to share what we discovered. Two other important activities included in the communication bucket are effective marketing and follow-up. A successful project is a comprehensive one. Effective marketing must start early, and involve a variety of communication activities with the goals of generating excitement and laying the foundation for acceptance. Sell your project — the reasons for it and the goals — first to your team, and then to your user population. The follow-up is essential for full adoption. We chose to implement a weekly e-mail tip program in addition to typical follow-up and advanced learning opportunities. Each tip highlighted a particular feature that was instrumental in increasing the integration of the new technology into workers’ daily tasks. The tip program may have been the most well-received component of our project from the user perspective. It allowed for long-term, widespread capitalization of numerous features that would have been impossible to disperse any other way. The sheer volume of communication and complex timing with multiple offices dictated an additional organization must-have — templates. Centrally stored templates provided a level of ease and efficiency that turned out to be not only a convenience, but also a necessity. BE REAL Setting realistic expectations is crucial in enabling your team to be successful. In addition to setting the tone for team attitude, the project manager sets goals throughout the project lifecycle and must make plans and decisions that foster the desired outcome. If your primary goal is one of customer satisfaction (hint), you need to promote that outcome with all your messages and decisions. Realistic and idealistic are two very different properties. A great example to contrast the two is the traditional thought process behind training. The vast majority of attorneys are not going to attend classroom technical training, no matter how beneficial we know it would be. It is simply time to accept that as a fact and stop trying to force that to happen. The good news is that classroom training is only one way to deliver education. Determine what learning program, or combination of programs, would be well-suited to your user population and think of creative delivery methods. For example, we had success with a program designed to deliver a mini-lesson to each attorney one-on-one, or to several attorneys at their desks and on their timetables. You’d be surprised how many of them took us up on it, perhaps just out of sheer gratitude that we didn’t once again pester them to “waste” an hour in a classroom. If your goal is quick and smooth adoption of the new systems, you must be flexible in considering what will www.iltanet.org Project Management 13