Ever thought about why projects fail?

If anyone has ever thought about this question, the blame often gets put on the technology. But really, is it the technology that has failed? Sure in some cases this might be right, maybe the requirements were gathered poorly and the resulting solution didn’t meet the needs of business, or the new system was over complicated for tasks that previously took less time and so on and so on. But ... more often than not, technology projects fail because of people, yes that's right it's a PEOPLE PROBLEM!

The Bonzai Training Approach

Our philosophy has always been people-first. It has to be, who else are we building this stuff for?!

Bonzai implementations always have a training component and this is communicated to the business early on in the project planning stage. This helps the business understand what they need to do in this area and are better equipped to execute the training plan when it comes time to it.

Here are 6 reason why training is important with Bonzai:

1. Nobody Reads

If you think that writing a big long manual is a good training plan, you are sure to fail because no one these days will sit down and read anything, let alone re-read if you happen to make some changes. You have to talk to people or at least find creative ways to engage with them. With Bonzai, we provide a variety of training materials and approaches to make sure that we accommodate for the various learning styles.

2. Introduce the Tool

This gives you the chance to describe the full functionality of the tool, not just what people will see when they poke around for the first time. Plus, this is when you can sell people on why they should use this new technology, and what cool things it can do. This has to be the most exciting part for us because we have built in some really great functionality that we are really proud of.

3. Communicate the Value

I really like this part because I’m usually well aware of the business problems that the solution is meant to solve and that makes me excited to share. Plus if people don’t see the value they will always find workarounds to get what they need. The goal for us is get people to not want to fall back on these workarounds and use the technology in the way it was meant to be used. This part is a big driver to gain user adoption.

4. Establish Roles and Tasks

People don’t need to know absolutely everything about the tool you are introducing, they want to know what THEY need to know. This is a chance to make those roles and associated tasks really clear. We do this early on so that the business can determine who is the most appropriate to fill the role but we carry these conversations on into the training sessions so that the people have a clear idea of what they are responsible for. This clarification can take you a long way to ensure that stuff doesn’t 'fall through the cracks'.

5. Opportunity to Ask Questions

I’m sure you have already experienced this With any new solution there will always be a lot of questions. This is where you get to clarify what is and what isn’t. For example, you’ve just launched an intranet and now people are not supposed to send email about company updates. Take the time to explain how their behaviours need to change, otherwise you will leave people confused on how to share that information and they will just give up. The end result, you are in a worse situation now because there will be no communication. We often have the sponsor in the room when we are training to answer the specific business related questions as its more appropriate coming from them than an external consultant.

6. Remove Fears

People need training because they often think they are going to break something. Support through this transition will help people get used to completing tasks in the new way and see that with a little training they can operate just fine without breaking anything. This is really important, and we make sure that we are on-site to provide support after the training sessions are complete and the real change in process begins. This provides people a good amount of hand holding until they are ready to take it on by themselves.

By using these 6 reasons to guide us in our training and rollout strategies, we aim to provide a sustainable approach to our clients so that they can see a return on their Bonzai investment and continue to evolve and grow their intranet.