Initiatives with excellent change management are six times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management[1]. This fascinating outcome perfectly sums up the importance of recognizing the human aspects in order to experience result. Softline’s Chief Cloud Adoption Advisor Zsolt Bátorfi highlights the key areas of adoption and shares real life scenarios with solutions.

Management is the driver

Top management and decision makers have a strong effect on the outcome of any IT projects, as expressed in the previous article. For them to understand the potential benefits and to become advocates, relevant experiences and examples are necessary. Through our strategic advisory services, we can help top management to understand what cloud productivity solutions can provide to their team and to the company.

‘Special strategic briefings help top management to experience the richness of the cloud platform. During the briefings we can map out their current knowledge and, as a result, we can address misconceptions with hands-on trainings. Through immersive coaching sessions we understand and find solutions for the personal and organizational productivity challenges, so tailor-made suggestions can be provided.’

Services offered by cloud based solutions are incredibly diverse. For example, when doing research for a presentation, you need to collect and organize different types of information from different sources. Digital notebooks like OneNote offer a platform accessible by multiple colleagues across different devices that can easily store all the necessary contents. This type of cloud knowledge management saves valuable time. Another common challenge managers can face is being scattered. Understanding and experiencing task oriented way of work and agile work tracking tools can help leaders overcome fragmentation of focus so we guide stakeholders to build skills in this area.

‘Our experts support the company in appointing a dedicated change management team and, with a one-day long workshop, we guide them through the process of developing the customer success adoption plan including the required trainings, communications, sponsors, champions, resistance management and reinforcement plans. We can think of it as a customized script that aims to address all stakeholders so they can fully understand and use the service. If this process is not being followed, benefits won’t be understood,’ explains the expert.

The right approach for the right audience

‘The centre of an adoption program are the users themselves. However, depending on their knowledge and job, they are quite a heterogenic group. Softline’s consultants offer various types of readiness services focusing on specific needs. We approach IT Pros with best practices and provide an overview of the platform to create end-to-end understanding of the building blocks. On the other hand, the influence of the early adopters cannot be missed. Their ability to teach and support other users can create outstanding value for the company. Naturally, we also address end-users with short, practical webinars focusing on one particular feature at a time. Last but not least, we educate and inspire DIY appmaker candidates about the Power Platform capabilities, so advanced users can even develop unique business applications integrated into Microsoft Teams. For example, with the knowledge we offer, users can develop mobile data capture solutions that can be used offsite by the service team, so the company has instant access to important data through the cloud. By examining the specific challenges a department faces, our experts can also offer solutions by developing these applications themselves,’ as Zsolt Bátorfi describes the possibilities.

Actual solutions for real-life productivity challenges

Through our productivity solutions services, we identify different challenges and provide multiple scenarios to them. For instance, efficient collaboration requires all participants to know each other’s tasks, role and deadlines during a project. We can design a team specific work tracking system using Microsoft’s task ecosystem (Planner, ToDo, Project Online) and modern agile methodologies (Kanban).​ According to our experience, the end-to-end management of a meeting is usually also causing productivity issues. Therefore, we create a solution for leaders or teams to manage the full lifecycle of meetings from preparation through facilitation to follow-up using productivity platform elements. When the process is clear all of these business processes become faster saving enormous time and ease workload on colleagues.

‘We can design and build all sorts of custom business applications integrated into Teams to capture, organize and visualize data on PC and mobile devices. In other words, your company will receive specific, ready-made solutions without the time and expense of custom software development,’ adds the expert.

All cases of adoption and change management require unique solution. Schedule a meeting with our experts and start your adoption journey with us.