How to Improve ROI on Cloud Tool Adoption
Project managers and leadership often find themselves facing a serious dilemma: their companies spend billions of dollars annually on licensing CRMs and other cloud tools that their employees do not use.
Worse still, 49% of projects fail due to slow or no CRM adoption. That means low adoption not only wastes the investment made in these technologies, but also actively contributes to losses.
So why use it? Well, there are significant benefits of cloud transformation; a short overview of which includes:
Mobility
Cloud tools help create a dynamic workplace with much better collaboration, seamless remote working, and rapid work cycles.
Automation
Cloud tools help automate many important-but-routine tasks, leaving employees to focus on tasks that are actually productive.
Analysis
Cloud tools offer a clear and transparent assessment of internal operations and help identify bottlenecks that can be fixed in the next sprint.
Given such critical benefits, cloud tool deployment isn’t a matter of if, but when. But, as discussed earlier, many of these benefits rely on successful adoption. In fact, when it comes to cloud tools, poor adoption is worse than no adoption at all. Poor adoption just creates confusion and ultimately takes a toll on overall efficiency.
To take the simplest example, it’s great if everyone uses Google Drive. It’s inefficient but still tolerable if everyone saves their files offline. But imagine a workplace where some employees save files on the cloud while others save files on their local system - it’s just a nightmare for a collaborative environment.
To ensure a high percentage of adoption, follow these three steps:
Training
Some employees don’t use cloud tools because they aren’t comfortable with them. They haven’t used tools before and it just makes them nervous to switch. So every time you add a cloud tool to your stack, make sure there is adequate training and a buffer period for the transition. Then make sure additional and ongoing training is available.
Measuring
If you wish to improve adoption, you must carefully scrutinize the engagement curve. Prodoscore is a solution that helps achieve the same. It integrates with your cloud tools and generates a real-time report on how engaged each of your employees is with each of your tools. Useful at both micro and macro levels, it offers a comprehensive picture of your adoption rates and identifies those behind the curve.
Carrot and Stick
Low adoption, at its core, doesn’t have anything to do with convenience or competency; it's often more about maintaining the status quo. The thing is, people don’t respond well to change, regardless of its merits. The only way to make people adopt change is to nudge them towards it. Once you have concrete data on each employee’s adoption curve, you are all set to execute your adoption strategy. Initially, there will be only a few employees with high adoption. Incentivize them. This will gradually pull more employees towards adoption and after a few weeks, there will be only a few left with low engagement. In those cases, the incentives haven’t worked - so make them accountable.
Closing Remarks
To circle back to where we started this discussion, low cloud tool adoption isn’t a matter of simply exploiting the value of your IT investments, it’s a way to significantly improve their ROI by minimizing friction and improving efficiency. Prodoscore is an integral part of that process. If you are facing similar problems in your organization, get in touch now and we can discuss solutions in detail.
