Plug the Digital Skills Gap

Maximise the value of your Microsoft 365 or tech investments with
tailored training and user adoption strategies. Empower your employees
to understand, adopt, and make the most of today's dynamic business
solutions.

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Close the skills gap to empower employees

Most business tools today are dynamic, with frequent updates that require
users to continually adapt. However, many organisations leave employees
to learn as they go—with limited guidance or structured training.
Without support, users may only discover a fraction of the tools'
capabilities, leaving features and opportunities untapped.

Why does this matter?

Your organisation has invested significant time, effort, and budgets into
deploying these solutions. It only makes sense to ensure you’re getting
the most out of them. Efficient user adoption doesn’t just maximise your
ROI; it enhances productivity across teams and the business at large.

User adoption isn’t just about training users but embedding new ways of
working that benefit individuals, teams, and the organisation as a whole.

Our strategic adoption approach helps organisations:

Boost productivity
Achieve user satisfaction
Close the gap between tool potential and actual usage

User adoption is a strategic and structured process that encompasses a number of disciplines working together to help your users embrace new technology, boost productivity and maximise efficiency.

The Five Steps To Good Adoption

A user adoption programme is an organisation-wide activity that involves a number of different elements including skills and persona analysis, learning & knowledge provisions, communications, analytics and support. Crucially, executive and management-level endorsement is required, not just at a financial level, but with engagement, reinforcement and recognition.

In reality, a full, all-encompassing adoption programme can be a daunting proposition for an organisation to take on and it can be difficult to get such a project approved.

Consequently, we have developed a pragmatic approach to training and user adoption, which includes five key steps and enables your organisation to deliver an adoption programme in a more flexible, modular and manageable way.

At the initial stage of an adoption project, you’ll need to understand what your people do or don’t know about the solution(s) you are planning to adopt. This allows you to develop a baseline view of how they are using it, and equally importantly, how they feel about using it to get their work done.

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At the start of an adoption programme, you need to understand how ready your organisation is to run such a programme.

The adoption process touches on many different aspects of your organisation, such as communications, training, logistics, management and, of course, the users themselves. If some or all of these areas are not ready, included in the process or not aligned with the desired targets, then the programme may not run smoothly or be as successful as it should be.

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In the past, when an organisation brought a new application online and needed to train its users, it would probably have run traditional ‘tell-see-do’ training but, in our experience, very few organisations now have the resources to train all staff on all aspects of an application. This is especially the case with a suite such as Microsoft 365 that contains 30 applications.

In the case of Microsoft 365, the large number of applications, the high rate of change and the flexible choices that people can make about how to use its tools mean that traditional training is typically unsustainable.

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With the business case agreed, organisational readiness confirmed and a learning solution in place, all the building blocks are in place to support good user adoption. However, there are other challenges to be overcome, ranging from resistance to change to a lack of understanding of how to turn learned knowledge into real business value.

This is where a champion network comes into its own.

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The final element in an adoption programme is operational management.

Even though Microsoft 365 takes away a lot of the burdensome management and administration associated with legacy on-premises solutions, there are still many tasks and activities that need to be completed. However, in our experience, many organisations introduce Microsoft 365 without full consideration of the management and support processes that are needed to ensure the smooth running of the environment.

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Accelerate your adoption programme

Since we know that adoption projects are difficult to initiate, we have created several ‘accelerators’ – quick-start mini-projects – that cover each of the Five Steps to Adoption. These are intended to provide an entry to each stage of the programme, without the need to create a monolithic project and all that entails. Read more here.

Overcome your training & user adoption challenges with Chess

Our experienced team provides user adoption consultancy and fresh thinking when it comes to technology and how to make the most of it.

Whether your organisation needs a full, end-to-end adoption programme, or you wish to take a more flexible approach, we are here to help you get the most from your investment in people and technology.

Contact us to talk about your adoption and change management requirements today.