Forum Discussion
Realising what we take for granted
Hi Cory Banks. Thanks for sharing that story. It sounds like you discovered your assumption in the best way, through experiencing the client’s environment. That in turn, motivated the “work from anywhere” scenario in your adoption project.
I think we can all learn a lot from working alongside the people we are about to help.
This gives me an idea for an approach to adoption project work, if the client allows it. At Adopt & Embrace, we either work in co-working spaces, from home or from client’s work places. Like many consultants, we don’t start visiting the client site till we are also starting the project.
But what if we started the discovery phase early by co-working from our client’s environment. We could be working on something quite unrelated to the client’s project, going about our usual day. But by being embedded in their environment, we begin to get a feel for the culture. Through side discussions and informal chats, we start to hear stories of work life in our client’s environment. What an invaluable perspective. Using our “work from anywhere” tools, we just get on with our regular work and don’t even need to consider it as a chargeable exercise. When we finally start the discovery phase of the project, we have already been discovering the environment, culture and challenges. We have potentially gained trust from the people we are about to help, identified champions that will play an important role in our adoption project.
Great insights, darrellaas & Cory Banks!
I am reminded of the need to put our adoption rollout plans into context with every client we work with. Particularly, "old school" clients who may not be using collaboration tools. For instance, we work with folks in the forestry or heavy equipment industry. In these kind of cases, it is important, in my perspective, to understand their current state and design a rollout strategy that would be a good fit for them in collaboration with IT. (IT Teams need to be onboard before anyone else as they will need to support the technologies implemented and they will be the ones answering questions after the adoption team leaves.) I can go on forever about this and would be pleased to jump in a call to discuss further if you'd like!
Cheers, Agustin