Gather Input to Come up With the Next Steps for Your Software Rollout

If you are managing a software rollout and wondering what should be your next steps based on the current results I suggest you ask your target audience and listen to what they have to say.

There are times during a software rollout when we already have achieved some positive results or a big part of the goals and we wonder just how we are going to achieve the target adoption rate. I want to share with you some of my communication practices that I find really useful at these times.

I select random names of people who already use the software and follow the related practices and I select random names of people who should be using the software but aren’t doing it yet.

Then I or someone from my team will contact these people and ask for a short interview to help the rollout succeed.

From people who use the software we ask questions such as:

Did they have any concerns before they started to use the new software?
Why they started to use the new software?
Why they use the new software?
How would they convince the non-users?

From people who do not use the software we ask questions such as:

Why they don’t use the software?
What would encourage them to use it?

Then we use the findings in the communication to encourage the non-users to start using the new software and following the related changes.

For instance, we use the findings in the following way:

We state that many of the current active software users had [the concerns that they state in the interview] and that they have overcome these concerns because of [the feedback we received from their interviews]. In this communication it is important to mark out the benefits that encouraged the current active users to start using the software and the benefits that they receive currently because of using the new software and following the related changes. Knowing the beneits will encourage the non-users to start using the software and following the related changes.

To find out many more useful practices for software rollout communication, check out my book ‘How to Be a Software Rollout Rock Star’.

To your software rollout success!