With changes in technology happening all the time, the pressure is on businesses to have the ‘latest and greatest’. Business leaders are now facing increasing challenges in successfully implementing these technologies in much quicker timelines.
Here are six tips to help you implement new technology successfully and efficiently in your business.
This might seem like an obvious one but it is so important that you have selected the right technology to fit your business goals and not the other way around. Starting your change management journey on the wrong foot will set you up for failure, so make sure you’ve taken the time to thoroughly research, test and select the right product for your business.
Have a plan in place for the implementation that includes the key people involved, timeline, milestones and budget. Having a clear plan means people know what is required of them and how the project is tracking.
Setting a timeline also sets realistic expectations of your staff and stakeholders and informs them when important changes will be taking place. Matching your timeline with milestones also allows you to prioritise which features need to be up and running before others and lets you track your progress on the project.
There’s no point setting a timeline, if you don’t let people know about it. Continual communication is key to keeping stakeholders in the loop and helps to ease staff into the change. Letting them know about the project once and then six months later they come into work and their systems are different won’t end well.
Provide ongoing training to all staff so they feel comfortable using the new technology and can hit the ground running on go live day.
Additional training as they start using the product will also help them get up to speed faster and gain confidence and efficiencies. You may also need to highlight staff that need additional training and support to get comfortable with the new technology.
The people who know the product the best will be the people using it every day. Make sure you are scheduling times for employees to provide feedback, offer ideas and engage in the process as they may have highly valuable ideas.
This can also help with the overall attitude towards the change as positive feedback will help influence other staff to embrace the change, and even negative feedback will allow employees to feel that their concerns are taken on board.
You need to measure your project to make sure that it is actually having a positive impact on your business the way you intended it to. Measure user impact metrics, ROI, KPIs or any other meaningful data to see the effect on your staff and business, then you can use that data to make the technology better over time.