Essential Change Management Tips for a Successful Smartsheet Implementation

One of the worst experiences you might have as a Smartsheet Developer is the moment you realize that your colleagues don't like your application and don't want to use it. You spent weeks building this amazing tool. You know it's not perfect, but it's a good application and a massive improvement over the existing process. You know that if people would just give it a try they would see how much value it could bring, but no one is willing to even give it chance.

If this scenario sounds familiar, it's likely because you spent too much time focusing on the technical aspects of your project and not enough time managing your stakeholders.

Implementing Smartsheet Applications is no different then implementing any change to business process. When changing process, resistance is inevitable. If you want to create Smartsheet Applications for your organization, you need to learn how to effectively manage change resistance to prevent it from slowing or completely halting implementation of your applications.

In this article we discuss steps you can take to ensure your applications are adopted successfully.

Identify Your Stakeholders

The most important part of change management is identifying and communicating with your stakeholders early, before you begin development. Determine which groups at your company will be using your application or will be impacted by your application and identify at least one representative from each group to serve as a liaison.

Remember to include stakeholders who are upstream and downstream of your process. You might uncover dependencies you never expected.

Seek engagement and support from people who have decision making authority and who are demonstrably influential and ensure that they see the value in your application. You need to be able to confidently say that the application has support from upper management and is aligned with your company's goals when you are ready to implement. Some of your end-users will need to know management's expectations before they are willing to change what they are doing.

Engage Your Stakeholders

Once you’ve identified your stakeholders, get to know them. Learn about their role in the process your application is going to improve. Ask about the pain-points from their perspective. Figure out what concerns they might have about implementing a change. You may already have some of the answers, but resist the urge to share your perspective. Let them talk.

One of your goals when engaging your stakeholders is to create a sense of ownership so that they will be more likely to buy-in and encourage others to buy-in when the time comes to implement the change. The more they feel like they have contributed to the ideation, design, and implementation strategy, the more invested they will be in seeing it through.

Your stakeholders are your subject matter experts. They should be actively involved in drafting requirements for the application and designing the user interface. Solicit feedback frequently to ensure that the application meets requirements and actually does improve the process you are targeting. Keeping them actively involved should also help them better see and appreciate the potential value that your new application will bring.

Prepare Your Audience

Not every stakeholder can be involved in the design and development of the application, so you need to try to manage them in other ways. This is where communication and transparency are going to serve you well. You need to let your broader group of stakeholders know that a change is coming and why. Give an opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback before the project progresses too far. Provide updates when appropriate and make sure that your go-live date is clearly communicated. If possible, provide a demonstration of your proof of concept with a comparison to the original process or tool, highlighting the changes and the value those changes will bring. No one should be surprised when you are ready to go live and hopefully some people will even be looking forward to the change.

Plan Your Implementation

Even small changes can have a large impact if not implemented effectively. Do your due diligence and perform an analysis of the processes your application will affect. Understand the full scope of impact and draft a plan for how you are going to mitigate any possible disruptions, migrate data, provide access, deprecate existing competing tools, and train end users. Lean on your subject matter experts to create and enact this plan. Failing to lead a smooth implementation will not only hurt the chance of success of the current application, but could also be damaging to your reputation and make your next attempt more difficult.

Create User Documentation & Training

A major barrier to adopting a new tool is the lack of understanding and the reluctance to spend time learning it. Providing your users with training and documentation detailing how they should interact with the application is a must!

Training sessions are great, but memories can be short. It’s important to have clearly written reference documents, work instructions, or even FAQ documents easily accessible to help your users use your application in real life when the training session is over. These tools will also be invaluable when onboarding new employees.

Technology is wonderful, but it cannot solve problems alone. Employees need to understand how to use your Smartsheet Application and be able to build process around it. You may find that in addition to technical training that you need to help your end-users adapt their current workflows around the new tool. If your colleagues think that using your application will risk them not completing their usual workload, they will be extremely reluctant to adopt it. Be sure to budget time to help your users update their workflows when you draft your implementation plan.

If Smartsheet is relatively new to your organization, be sure to provide basic training on how to use the platform. You might be surprised by how many people will avoid using your application solely because they don't feel comfortable using the platform itself.

Provide a Mechanism to Report Issues

Smartsheet has limitations and even expert Smartsheet developers will make mistakes. Provide a way for your colleagues to report any bugs they run into and to make suggestions for enhancements. Establish their trust by monitoring their feedback and responding promptly to address any issues that come up. You need to let your users know that you are committed to providing tools that will work for them

Remember that your colleagues are probably used to being handed out-of-the-box software solutions that cannot be customized. The concept of being able to make changes fast might be foreign to them. As a result, they might have found a really annoying bug that they are just working around or have great suggestions for improvement, but are not letting you know. You may need to solicit feedback in different ways to start to encourage this behavior in your colleagues.

Establish Trust

If you've developed one Smartsheet Application, you'll likely develop another. Use every implementation as an opportunity to further improve your relationships with your stakeholders and earn their trust. They need to see you as a team player and a problem solver. Say yes whenever you can and be accountable. The more your colleagues trust you to deliver value-added applications, the easier each implementation will get.

Conclusions

A perfect Smartsheet Application that is never used will never create value for your organization. Good change management can be the difference between a successful and failed software implementation. Change management should begin as soon as you've decided to create a Smartsheet Application to solve a problem to ensure that you've minimized resistance and maximized support for your application by your go-live date.