It is very common to start an Atlassian adoption lead by champions or people that ready know about the products. I am trying to find out what type of challenges are those individuals facing when they try to share the passion to the rest of the team members. I would like to help by providing some ideas in how to overcome those blockers.
Meanwhile, I will start sharing my experience in similar situations, feel free to add yours to the list
1. The passion that we have it is not always the same as other team members, that sometimes could be attached to the tools that we are replacing. In my case was RallyDev, SupportWorks and SharePoint (partially).Cold water can always get to your feet and wake you up. Be prepared and embrace for impact by having a plan to manage the situation and listen to understand where the problem really is... perhaps a little bit of extra attention and training can help overcoming those blockers.
2. Self pace training: no all the new users are suitable for self paced training and they prefer the classroom end users training instead of the train the trainers. Prior to our implementation we decided that the application training (provided online and self paced) will be a requisite for the actual classroom training where we have a role based focus. Unfortunately, an important number of participants didn't spend the time taking those courses and it was evident during the actual classroom training.
3. Training Budget: I know that sometimes to get the budget approval we need to minimize costs, don't make a mistake of considering Training as just part of the "cost". Be sure you include it as an investment and a protector of the actual "cost" incurred in licenses and implementation. Training will help with the Return on Investment. In our case, we assumed that the team will do their own "homework" by attending to the prepared training online so we reduced the training budget. Months later we had to request additional funds to provide more "formal" training.
4. Team engagement: It is not hard to identify those that really enjoy using the tools and are "recruited" as early adopters and champions. Do not forget that the Atlassian Products for them are the tools to perform their job, so the amount of time we can use to support the adoption could be tight and limited. Please find out first and discuss with their managers about how much time they could spend supporting the adoption effort. Probably a mentorship program, webinars or microlearning development could minimize their impact on their daily assignments.
5. A Step by step approach: go slow with critical concepts, we eventually forget that we spent a good time researching and learning about the products when we just started. Keep that always in mind when setting up knowledge transferring for new users, your own experience will be valuable understanding new team members. For us and after realizing the negative impact that we were having while we provided a massive content, we decided that we should slice it a little bit and implement microlearning and small training efforts so they can take it when they are ready and needed.
I am really interested in knowing how you face the initial implementation challenges (or continuous adoption challenges). Thanks for sharing with the community.
