Drive end user adoption.

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Change is an inevitable part of life and business, and yet we still manage to fail miserably at it nearly 75 percent of the time. (Craig Knight, PhD: Why Change Management Initiatives in the Workplace Fail; Make Your Work Matter.)

Workfront is a single place for all enterprise work—a platform designed for flexibility, collaboration, and keeping organizations connected. Many SaaS companies just offer a product. Workfront is more than that—Workfront offers a business relationship with each of its customers to help you achieve your goals. So it’s no surprise that the Workfront implementation process will involve some impactful transitions within your organization from both a people and product standpoint.

Today, we’re pulling three best change management practices to the surface, to help you drive change within your organization. 

   1. Explain the “why”  

Ensuring shared understanding across the team about how Workfront supports the overall vision and mission of the organization is critical to success. When building your approach, focus on answering the following three key questions:

• What is being changed?
• Why it’s important to not just you, but the team.
• How the team will get there.

Send out personalized messages to each department level within your organization so the goal is specific and individualized. This makes your employees feel inspired to take part in the change. 

    2. Communicate early and often

The more you communicate with your team, the better. There is no such thing as over-communication...especially when technologies, processes, and roles are changing. Repetition solidifies the message delivered by your leaders and keeps everyone reminded of the end goal. 

Employees are human, just like you, and they want to know their contributions are critical to the success of this change. Involving them in the tool design/use of new features, buzz building, launch activities, and ongoing learning helps them feel like they own—and are in control of—a part of the change.

As a system administrator, project manager, or team lead, instill confidence in your team by hosting office hours or lunch-and-learns to address questions and fully support them during this rollout. Take a look at Deloitte’s story to learn from their experience.

   3. Plan for training

Change isn’t easy. Workfront doesn’t expect you to be the expert overnight. Set aside specific time for training for you and your users to get familiar with the tool. Start with the role-based training on the Experience League Learning platform or Workfront Tutorials page, or view our official documentation articles on our Workfront Documentation page. Attend live, expert-led Experience League events, engage with other customers on Community, and, most importantly, share best practices among the team. 

Make ongoing training an expectation, and create space for it in your team’s flow of work. For example, hold regular “lunch-and-learn/brown bag” training sessions to both educate and share best practices across users and teams. Send regular tips and tricks to users, particularly around new features, via Workfront’s Announcement Center.

There are multiple resources available to your team online, but you also have the Workfront team to help you along your journey to success—those involved with the implementation, project managers, Workfront Support, the training team, and your account executive.

Learn more about effective change management best practices in Workfront’s blog post, The 8 Dos and Don’ts of Change Management. 

Make sure to “Like” this post if you find it helpful. To share your organization’s change management keys to success, please post the details in the comments section below. 

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