In working with customers over the last few quarters around this transitional idea of going from traditional Project Management to Work Management, the main questions they ask me are, "How will this help improve my user adoption and involvement in delivering successful projects?" and "How is the idea of Work Management different?"
It reminded me of the questions my kids asked me when they were going from high school to college. They were anxious about how hard the courses were going to be and would they be able to perform at the same level as high school. We had a rule in my house, that they brought home As and Bs in exchange for their freedom, some money in their pocket, and keys to a car; otherwise, they were subjected to the Golden Prison House. So needless to say, the same rule applied for college. So I explained to them the difference was as simple as this: In high school the teacher’s organize your work for you, give you a list of tasks to do, check up on you, ask you for a status, and expect you to deliver on the curriculum they give you. In college, the professor will give you a course outline and curriculum with expected assignments and grading measurements. After that, they generally don’t help you, organize you, or monitor you; they just expect you to deliver on the curriculum any way you feel is best for you to deliver the highest quality work. They might give you some structure to work within, but don’t limit you to how, who, or what you use to deliver the results.
This is the difference between Project Management and Work Management in how you involve your people and get them to share in the responsibility of delivering the work required on a project, program, or initiative in any organization. You give them the structure, the framework to work within, and then provide them the freedom and ability to get the work done in the best way possible. It can lead to great strides in innovations at the ground level. It encourages the team members to get the work done more efficiently by improving processes and doing it the way they think will be easier and more effective. You then will have a higher quality of information about what is going on in your organization and can gather better intelligence from your teams and really understand what changes need to be made to deliver better, quicker, and more innovatively.
With that introduction, here are my top 10 techniques for getting high User Adoption within a Work Management Solution:
10. Evangelize the message of allowing people to get the work done in the best way. You need to market to the teams involved why a Work Management solution will make it easy to manage processes, work, and projects.
9. Show them how easy it will be to provide you with the updates on the tasks, time lines, and amounts of work involved. Let them know that this will allow them to tell you how, when, and who will be best in getting this done.
8. Take time to understand a day in their life and provide them with an easy to use solution for collaborating with their peers/teams/cross departments. Show them how they will do what they do today easily using a Work Management solution.
7. Make sure the solution makes it easy for them to see all of their requests and prioritize them.
6. Show them how easy it is for them to add their own task lists outside of tasks assigned or requested of them. This way they can review all the work, structured and unstructured in one place.
5. Make sure the solution allows for a calendar view of all their work commitments, so they can quickly glance at their calendar and see how they are going to tackle their day.
4. Allow for them to see what their team members are working on and provide information and content to help them work more effectively as a team.
3. Allow team leads/managers to announce (on-line in the Work Management solution) an incentive associated for the team to hit an aggressive deadline and provide progress updates that the entire team can view in real time.
2. Create an easy feedback loop for everyone to provide suggestions on improvements in the processes and projects they are involved in that can be incorporated in real time.
1. Give everyone at your company an "Easy Button". An easy to use, robust, collaborative Work Management solution (SaaS version is best). Give them a link and watch them get it done.
I run my entire Services Organization (Education, Consulting, and Customer Support) on a Work Management solution and have been for the last year. With every employee on the system, we were able to deliver an amazing amount of progress in the last year including development in the maturity of the organization, services we provide, and quality of delivery. The organization grew revenue by over 78% and margins by 300%.
I’m telling you, it’s the next technology solution to creating a competitive edge.
As always, I welcome your comments and encourage you to share your experiences.
In sharing secrets to success, we always want to get to the bottom line quickly. In other words, where is the BIG RED EASY BUTTON. Truth is that there are no real short cuts. It’s like my grandma used to always say "Life seems to be getting so complicated. It seems so much harder to do things faster to end up with nothing of value." Simple words of wisdom from a 90 year old, yet so true.
My Step-dad always believed in having the right insurance policies. As a skunk-works test pilot for Lockheed Martin for 30 years, he believed you had to always be ready for the worst. He was the original pilot on the SR-71, the first stealth plane. 
I love the enthusiasm that exudes from the project team in the first 30 days of any project. I call this the "Honeymoon period." We all remember the first 30 days of any relationship or marriage where everyone is all smiles, enthusiastic, positive, and ready to tackle the world.
Have you ever been to a kid’s dance recital? You know the 3 hours of back to back dances of all genres including tap, ballet, modern, jazz, lyrical and hip hop. You sit for the entire show to watch one of your family members dance for 6 minutes. Have you ever thought about the process they go through to put that show on at the end of the year? Many people wonder how the kids remember all that choreography and perform all those dances. They do it in small phases throughout the year. They teach one number at a time by creating classes or small groups of people to focus on a genre for a certain age group. By having many various small groups working separate dance pieces, they can focus on the quality of their technique and performance abilities. At the end of the year, they put all these groups together to create an amazing showcase.
