The Only Thing Firefighters Hate More Than the Way Things Are is Change

[cornchip]

It’s hard, but worthwhile. Something like the Sharepoint you should expect to have to communicate maybe 20 times, and a lot of them need to be at decision points.

If you can get something to one-click email contents from the SharePoint page, that also points back to it as the source of truth, that will help people get used to it. Don’t just copy-paste from it yourself.

As far as people, I second that you need to figure out what you can successfully mandate or have someone else mandate, and what you need to bring about via consensus.

It also helps to estimate how much time you have to make an effective change in each area. E.g. some things you can push through with some initial energy in your role, that will be really hard later. Others you can build towards over 3-12 months without giving too much power to the status quo. If you have a lot of different projects in this area I’d actually list these out and put a number on them, to help you decide how to proceed or who to ask to help.

Build consensus by bringing people into what you’re doing from most to least excited/sympathetic. Refine your document/processes based on their feedback and it’ll be more palatable to the lazier or more hostile users later on.

Commit to spending personal time with anyone who seems like they are resisting it because they’re genuinely too busy, stressed or confused. Nobody gets left behind in the change. That attitude will be noticed by others and benefit the whole organization overall.

[Ben_Wah]

@waylan

Now I have to set up and remember another account username/password.

Everyone already has the Microsoft 365 account through the city so there is no additional account for them to set up.

@waylan

On the other hand, if you send out an email with a link directly to the training video,

Much of the videos are through Microsoft Stream so they have to log in to their account anyway.

I hope was to keep everything within Microsoft 365 so we didn’t have different versions of trainings/documents floating around and could collaborate on them, which we can’t do through the on-site server.

@waylan

Often, the only way others would be willing to adopt a new system is if they perceive that it is better for them.

This is the big challenge. I know it’s better for the department but everyone is so set in their ways that they don’t even want to look at something else.

[cornchip]

Also, if this is in-person work, pairing free food with information about changes really helps, haha.

[Ben_Wah]

I’ll offer an Oreo buffet for the next training. That should bring in people.

[TheOldDesigner]

No practical experience but from my reading it sounds more like not a case of resistance to new technology more resistance to your vision of how that technology needs to be applied

Sometimes you have to admit the two sides are just not a good fit and if they are not going to bend perhaps you either need to or walk away

[karlnyhus]

@Ben_Wah

a nice SharePoint website for trainings but no one is using it

Sharepoint by itself never caught on at the corporation where I worked but Slack made inroads, especially with younger programmers and the go-getters. Then Microsoft, for their own survival, offered Teams and that did a lot better. Slack and Teams made interaction natural and even fun. Nobody cared that they were using a nice Sharepoint site. They were just talking to their friends and coworkers and following useful links.

[Ben_Wah]

I tired Teams too but no one wants to download the app. That’s why I did the SharePoint site. They don’t have to download an app and can access from any computer.

[MacBookHipster]

We have both Sharepoint and Confluence at my workplace and nobody uses either. Just a few people in your position who have invested in trying to create something beneficial but unfortunately it’s difficult for other people to see the benefit or derive value.

Did you gather the requirements of your colleagues before designing and implementing the system or did you implement a system that worked really well for you under the presumption that it would therefore work well for everyone? I have to admit that if you just came out one day and said me and my team should go and create new microsoft accounts to have an easier life because of something you implemented without consultation I wouldn’t engage with it either.

In fact this is exactly how my department’s sharepoint site was delivered, and after two years it’s still used by exactly five people out of twenty.

You’ve made a classic ‘design by engineers mistake’. You’ve built something because you can and because it satisfies your own desires, not because it’s what your users want.

@Ben_Wah

It’s too much because it’s not an email.

This is not the case. It’s too much because it’s not better than an email from the perspective of your users. You haven’t met their needs; you’ve done something cool. It’s not the same thing. Why should they pay for extra Microsoft accounts? So that a system they didn’t ask for works better for them? That’s not just a hard sell, it’s self-sabotaging.

@Ben_Wah

I feel like creating the SharePoint site was making it simple.

It isn’t.

Putting asside my personal feeling that Sharepoint is absolute, unmitigated, and truly bug-ridden garbage (I have an actual document full of bug workarounds that I’ve built over two years), you’ve offered them something unfamiliar that needs new processes and new learned interctions with no incentive to spend resources on learning it or adapting to it.

You’ve actually added complexity.

@cornchip

I second that you need to figure out what you can successfully mandate or have someone else mandate,

If you want to exponentially increase the resistance you’re facing then sure, take this approach. You will never earn back the good will you spend by doing this, and those people will never fully trust you again.

Honestly your best approach is to involve them in the process to redesign this solution. Start with an actual requirements gathering exercise. Involve your users in refinement of the solution, and build something they’re invested in. You may end up with basically the same solution but you’ll also build users that are invested in it by following Human Centered Design philosophies.

If your users don’t want to use your product it’s not because the humans are defective. It is always the product.

[cornchip]

@MacBookHipster

If you want to exponentially increase the resistance you’re facing then sure, take this approach. You will never earn back the good will you spend by doing this, and those people will never fully trust you again.

To clarify, you do this in situations where they are already doing something someone told them to do. E.g., if their boss said, “you have to check these training emails every week,” you can get their boss to say, “starting on x/x we’re going to check this website every week instead of the emails.” It’s appropriate and effective for some kinds of changes and not others.

You’re right that it’s not especially trust-building to have a management hierarchy, but it’s not ruinous either.

Also, with their managers, the consensus-building and planning is still happening, though it’s probably a shorter meeting unless they have particular concerns.

[zkarj]

I recall a similar thread here a little while ago. My experience does not fit neatly with your situation, but there may be some learnings from it, or from other responses, that do.

Software in the Workplace

I use Microsoft products 5 days a week and I’m not sniffy about them… but I do swear at them constantly! I believe Microsoft’s software division motto is “Never let good enough be the enemy of shipped.” (To say nothing of the design department’s altogether more simplistic motto “MORE WHITESPACE!”) 100%. In fact… 200%. Outlook is a dumpster fire on Windows. Teams slowly gets worse but started out in a decent place. But to the OP’s issue, it took me years to get my team of 6 (including me) to …

[MacBookHipster]

@cornchip

have a management hierarchy

What I describd is not “having a management hierarchy”. I’m not really interested in having silly reductive arguments.

[chrisecurtis]

@MacBookHipster

If your users don’t want to use your product it’s not because the humans are defective. It is always the product.

If only life was that simple. I’d agree that seeing people as “defective” is not going to get anyone anywhere, but people might have all kinds of reasons for not wanting to use a product. Maybe it’s because of previous bad experience, maybe they want to resist change, maybe they don’t want to co-operate with management, maybe they’ve got too much to do to have room for any more, maybe they are too stressed, maybe they don’t have the skills or training that would enable them to use a product, maybe the product is the problem. If you want to make change happen you have to deal with what the real obstacles are.

[karlnyhus]

@chrisecurtis

If only life was that simple.

Life, in this case, looks a lot different if you’re management (herding cats) or a foot soldier (look at all this work I have to get done!)

[MacBookHipster]

All of these things are product problems. A product is not just the website, or the app that you download. Your product is onboarding, use patterns, update methodology, further development, and improvement methodology, user buy-in, and emergent use patterns. A product is also it’s own design process.

You cannot engineer individual people. If people are change resistant or for some reason deliberately uncooperative those are product issues and your product has to include strategies to cope with those obstacles or better still the design process needs to incorporate those obstacles. Your product is also training to enable use and the persuasion to encourage adoption.

If you’ve delivered something that you think is finished and you’re still having these issues, you’ve delivered an incomplete product.

Nothing about it is “that simple”. Delivering software with strong adoption, especially to users that have an established system, is never simple.

[chrisecurtis]

No use disagreeing about semantics, but I’d say those are at least as much HR, organisational and leadership problems as they are product problems. And of course you can’t engineer people, but you can develop them, train them, organise them, motivate them, team them, lead them, and sometimes, sadly, replace them.

[philstollery]

Senior management buy-in and dictating from the top.

This is where all our training docs are going to be kept and updated from now on. Use it, if you find it hard ask for help. Do not rely on information on emails or other folders/drives as it is out of date and will be deleted in X weeks.

Then - add quick links from where they used to be accessed to the new home in SharePoint. Write a guide in using OneDrive (included with M365 and Windows 10/11).

As lots of people have said it’s not the tech, it’s delivering the change.

[Bill_Aus]

@Ben_Wah

but everyone is so set in their ways

As a Change Manager I have to weigh in here ( ). You have probably heard of the acronym ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement) I’d say you have the Awareness in place but the Desire may be lacking. Not uncommon if there is no burning platform.

What is the benefit of them doing the training from their perspective?

Happy to chime in more if I can help.

[Ben_Wah]

@philstollery

Write a guide in using OneDrive (included with M365 and Windows 10/11).

I did this and showed everyone the three ways they could access the SharePoint site, Outlook, Teams, the web.

It seems to be going smoothly now that people are getting on board with it.

[Ben_Wah]

@Bill_Aus

What is the benefit of them doing the training from their perspective?

The benefit to them, which I’ve tried to explain, is that they will have access to the trainings from anywhere and will be able to go back and look at old trainings now if they want them.

I’ve also tried to explain that this is also for me in that it helps me keep the trainings updated and keeps multiple version from being out in the wild, so everyone is looking at the same thing, along with me not having to send out a new email with a new presentation to everyone when there is an update.

Since communication is a big issue in the department I’ve also tried to explain that I’m trying to have everything available for them to view, not edit, so they know what trainings are coming up.

[Ben_Wah]

I appreciate all the feedback I received on this topic and have taken steps on my end to improve the new process and really explain to everyone why it’s important to me that we do the trainings this way. This is a great community.