How does your organization roll out new tools across departments?

[#1]

Hello Enterprise Community Members!

My name is Alyssa, and I work on the product marketing team at Atlassian. One thing we’ve been thinking about lately is how to make sure our customers get the most out of our tools so we can deliver on our promise to unleash the potential of your teams.

We’ve heard time and again about the critical role champions like yourselves play in leading adoption initiatives. Champions can speak from personal experience about the value of using Atlassian tools and offer technical tips, which help ease concerns that may arise when trying to onboard teams or individuals who may have never encountered Atlassian tools before or who are attached to existing tools and workflows.

Whether your organization is new to Atlassian and you’re looking for first-time onboarding tips or you’re a seasoned Atlassian pro responsible for spreading these tools to new teams and/or departments, we’d love to hear from you and learn:

• What advice would you offer admins getting ready to roll out new tools or struggling to get teams to adopt after the initial rollout?

• What is the most challenging part of getting new people, teams, or departments to adopt Atlassian tools? What’s the easiest? What’s the most surprising?

• What adoption-related challenges are you facing? What additional resources and/or support would be helpful?

Leave your thoughts, questions, anecdotes, etc. below - looking forward to hearing your perspectives!

P.S. We’ve just released this new guide Atlassian Adoption 101 that tackles the basics of adoption - take a look and let us know what you think in the comments below.

[Eva Kasiak]

@Alyssa Warren  great post and many thanks for sharing the Atlassian Adoption 101 guide. I am in the environment where transformation started around 5years ago. The organization was treating Team's self-organization literally and let them decide what should be their Scrum projects configuration within Jira. We have around twenty Scrum teams and each has almost their own setup of board, workflows, issue types schemes (or if inherited then they don't use).

The differences between are not huge, however, if you think about enterprise agility I guess the way to go is to consider some standards. We have Governance team which is overlooking standards within Jira, yet some teams and projects have the majority of "standard" not in use. Because they don't need it.

This makes me think about "unleashing the potential of our teams". I am sure that our adoption of various Atlassian tools is still mostly ahead of us. The simplicity, agile standards, integration, and automation is something I'm trying to promote within our Teams.

The advice I would give is to understand what is important for the whole enterprise - in the context of agility. What reporting levels of Agile metrics different organization's entities will need to make decisions and keep the work and its progress transarent. I would advise that if you want to onboard new people to the tools - ask what problems they were facing before and what is they would like to see in place for them to make work easier. Last but not least: I would roll out incrementally.

Based on a solution-focused approach to problems defined by the Teams and management I'd create a prototype project which would become a playground and a basis to provide feedback. From there I would improve it further based on user's feedback and aim to launch when it's meeting the bare minimum. Once on production, I'd start rolling out the next phases of the Agile standards to increase unleashing team's potential and build in a good data structure along with reporting methods.

[Liam Green]

As someone who works on a very small cloud team, this is somewhat outside of my day-to-day work, but I find it all very interesting and I'm looking forward to reading the Adoption guide

[Alexis Robert]

I find that the best way for adoption is to keep people in the loop before the roll out, and to schedule "Hands-on" sessions to explain why we've made this choice and how it can help them in their daily work.

[Brant Schroeder]

What advice would you offer admins getting ready to roll out new tools or struggling to get teams to adopt after the initial rollout? 

1. Get support from the top down. 
2. Show everyone the value of the tool.
3. Include everyone in the rollout planning. 
4. Create robust documentation.
5. Have lots of training sessions.
6. Create a user group.

What is the most challenging part of getting new people, teams, or departments to adopt Atlassian tools? What’s the easiest? What’s the most surprising?

• Most challenging: Implementing sound processes.  The tool can be great but poor business processes will kill it.
• Easiest: Showing them the value the tools bring to their teams.
• Surprising: How some of the biggest critics always become those who end up backing it the most.

[John Funk]

@Alyssa Warren  Thanks so much for posting this and being open to feedback. 

One aspect for adoption to me is to know your competition. Even within your organization, there are those that have their own favorite existing tools and might feel threatened by a new coming in. After all, they might be experts in the tool and if that tool is replaced or is "downgraded" to a lesser role, they might feel their position do the same thing. 

So know the objections you are going to get in advance. Know the strong points other tools promote. Even if it is just Excel or Google Sheets. There's always competition. Be prepared to offer why the Atlassian tool is better or solves a problem that other tools don't. 

You can also promote the suite of products that Atlassian offers as already being integrated for the most part. Or even on the same invoice with saves time with procurement. 

Then create some prototypes and examples and show people how good the product really is. 

[Sharon Helms]

We've found success in rolling out new tools by starting with a smaller pilot program... by starting with a small number of teams, we can offer dedicated support and discover pain points, and ways to work around them. Once a pilot program is off the ground, we have a better understanding of how to internally "market" or "sell" the new tool to our teams. Also, the teams involved in the pilot usually generate interest from other teams through word of mouth. 

For example, our Confluence instance started with the dedicated interest of just one team. Once we were able to demonstrate the value Confluence provided to that team, we had more teams asking to join. It wasn't long until our leadership team saw the value in bringing everyone into Confluence.

[Ollie Guan]

What adoption-related challenges are you facing? What additional resources and/or support would be helpful?

• The system administrator cannot support all more than 30,000 users. Do a good job in the authorization and training of the space administrator, and the space administrator should maintain their own territory.
• Occasionally a single node restarts in turn, once every 1 to 2 months, the page opening speed will be significantly improved;
• The attachment size is limited to 50MB, and the user explains that Confluence is not a storage tool;
• Archive the abandoned space regularly, refer to Clean up your Confluence instance
• The built-in MarkDown function in Confluence is the most unsatisfactory function reported by users.

For more information, I have described it in 2 recent article.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/China-Confluence-DC-user-webinar-at-the-end-of-2020/ba-p/1578188

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/How-to-use-Confluence-Cloud-to-manage-enterprise-knowledge-base/ba-p/1600014

[Ignacio Pulgar]

One of the challenges about the adoption of a new tool is the human resistance to change.

The best way I've found to overcome that initial resistance has consisted of training users by showing them how to use the tool by sharing my screen while explaining what I'm doing, accepting any questions at any moment. The recording of the session can also be reused and has been proven to be great training material.

[Alyssa Warren]

Hi everyone! Thanks so much for all your comments. This is really helpful as we start to think through how we can provide ongoing support for customers like you trying to push for broader and lasting adoption :) 

Before I dig into some of your responses, I did want to share that we have an upcoming webinar on this topic this week. We'll spend ~30% of the webinar sharing data/trends from our largest customers about how Atlassian tools spread, ~30% walking through some common use cases that we see at the organization and department-level, and ~30% talking through the Adoption Guide with lots of time for questions at the end. Hope to see you there! Link to register here.

[Alyssa Warren]

I should have written this as a discussion so I could reply in line. Alas, hope you'll forgive my replies and tags here. 

@Eva Kasiak - love that idea around creating a prototype project as a playground. That takes our idea of use cases to the next level of depth from the guide - beyond "how can Jira help" to "how do I actually set up this workflow" It's so important for people to see how it looks in product to get them to the "a-ha" moment. 

@Liam Green  - glad to hear it! I think you'll find a lot of the Adoption guide content is relevant for teams of any size and deployment as it's heavily focused on practices and processes :) 

@Alexis Robert - do you think there is anything Atlassian could be doing to help make those "hands-on" sessions easier to manage and facilitate? when you run these, do you have an agenda/template that you can re-use? I agree that's a key piece of the roll-out of any new tool and worth the upfront investment. @Ignacio Pulgar same question to you as I think you are describing something similar.

@Brant Schroeder - very interesting re: your most surprising point! Then when you win over the biggest critic, you'd have an awesome Champion to help win over other people who are still skeptical. Any tips for how to win over that individual? 

[Alyssa Warren]

@John Funk - you raise a very interesting point re competition with internal tools. That's something we did not address in the Adoption guide that we should include in the next iteration as a step in preparation for roll-out. If you're trying to roll out to a new team, research what tools they use today and why they love (or hate) that tool, anticipate objections, and prepare responses. 

@Sharon Helms - we are big fans of the internal pilot here too - so much easier to adjust and adapt plus the added bonus you mentioned as serving as an internal early win that you can use to get the next people on board and excited. 

@Ollie Guan - nice articles - 30k Confluence users/month! I think you bring up an excellent point around scalability. I could see Atlassian Adoption 201 (or whatever we call the more advanced version) start going into some considerations around how to train space admins and ensure instance hygiene as you grow. Is there anything else you were thinking of that Atlassian could do to make it easier to address some of your current challenges? 

[Brant Schroeder]

@Alyssa Warren Step two and three handle the critic.  If they see value and feel that their opinion matters they are more likely to adopt the tool.