A common question from my customers: How would you define a successful digital adoption program? To define success we also have to be aware of what factors could limit success. Here are the 7 potholes most commonly encountered – and avoided – by best-in-class digital adoption programs.

Avoid this #1: Treating WalkMe differently to other softwares

WalkMe is a disruptive product and requires a paradigm shift. However, at the end of the day, it’s a software – and just like any other software, it requires cross-functional collaboration, learning and development, subject matter expertise, a reporting and value strategy, and a change management strategy. 

If you take the “WalkMe” out of it, the shape starts to look familiar. Your organization may not have created a digital adoption Center of Excellence before, but you’ve most likely created and scaled something cross-functionally in the past. And with it, you’ve likely had a strategy to consolidate knowledge in a knowledge base or shared communication platform. 

The American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) defines primary components to a Knowledge Management (KM) strategy as follows: 

• Embed KM into the systems and processes where people do their work
• Build a network of champions
• Create a rewards and recognition program
• Strengthen relationships with partner functions 

These sound pretty straightforward – because they are. Chances are, you have enablers already in place from your other Knowledge Management initiatives. You can leverage these for WalkMe. And in addition to the what (the knowledge management content) and the where (access point), consider the who: Which department led this initiative? How did they cultivate the cross-functional positioning and respect to make this successful? 

Avoid this #2: Assuming you need a finished program before you can publish WalkMe in-app content

For anyone who has signed a limited or full enterprise licensing agreement for a software, you know: the (virtual) paper is barely off the signatory’s desk before there’s chewy, palpable pressure to justify the spend. Show me the value. Now.

With this comes the pressure of standardization. If we’re going to do it right, we have to do it right from the beginning. The Type A in me is twitching when I say this, but I’ll say it anyway. Not necessarily. 

Consider the Digital Adoption Maturity Matrix, a leading framework to measure evolution of a digital adoption program (pictured). In its definition of stages Emerging through Established, those for Emerging have an undercurrent of ad-hoc. And quick-win, ad-hoc value…is still value. 

Going live with a couple projects first is actually preferred. It helps you understand how WalkMe falls in your ecosystem, how difficult/easy it is to move through red tape, etc. Once you’ve published content on a couple platforms, use those wins to establish a strong framework and get it on the executive agenda. Don’t underestimate the power of starting from the bottom-up. 

Avoid this #3: Thinking you have to go in alone 

One of the most common (and most unwelcome) impacts of the Covid-19 economy on our operational strategies is the need for tighter budgets. And with a financially conservative, “suck-it-in” mentality, thinking about hiring additional headcount to specialize in digital adoption may feel a bit ridiculous.

Since Gartner created the Digital Adoption Platform category in 2019, digital adoption has become increasingly popular as a marketable skill. According to The State of Digital Adoption 2022, the number of individuals listing digital adoption as a Linkedin skill has increased 39% since 2021. Rather than playing tetris with your internal budget, why not leverage the market proficiency as a lower cost option? 

One common example: Your company might already be partnered with a Global System Integrator for another digital initiative – chances are, that GSI might offer digital adoption services. Why not bypass the headache of onboarding another vendor and expand the purpose of your current partnership? 

Start small, start contracted, and get your feet under you. Bonus: If you’re eventually hiring internally for your digital adoption program, you’ll have a much better handle on the ratio of headcount input to content output. Creating a business case for an internal hire just got that much easier.

Avoid this #4: Never saying “no” to a project

After 30 years in Sales, my dad decided to start a Willie Nelson Tribute Band as a retirement project. In year one, they took every gig that was offered to them – county fairs, dive bars, the works. In “leading with yes,” they grew their network and perfected their approach. 

In year two, the band got more than double the inquiries and had to start saying “no.”  What was their “brand” and which gigs aligned with that image? Which options were financially and geographically most desirable? 

Your Digital Adoption Program is a dad band. Lead with yes, and know there will be a time where you can’t (and shouldn’t) give an immediate yes to everything. With the groundswell of knowledge comes a need to be selective so you can preserve your strategic alignment. If you’ve scaled to the point where you’re losing brand cohesion and people are suffering from burnout, you’ve gone too far. 

As your program grows, the robustness of your intake process should grow as well. Don’t be afraid to put the onus on your Lines of Business to pitch you – Why should you play their gig? Make sure they put in the time to create a good business case, baseline metrics, etc.  You’ll inevitably get some pushback, but remember – a program that says “no” is infinitely more respected than one that doesn’t. And the foundation of a successful program is, ultimately, respect. 

Avoid this #5: Not incorporating maintenance into resource scoping 

If building new content is the yin, maintenance is the yang. Building new content without maintenance ultimately lands you in one of the following scenarios, all contributing to a subpar end-user experience: 

• Content breaks
• Content is strategically misaligned (all engagement, no impact) 
• Workflows are oversaturated with visible in-app guidance 

On the flip side, you don’t want your skilled builders to be spending all their time  maintaining the status quo with no room for growth and innovation. To keep content fresh and reduce maintenance time, conduct regular health scans to reassess and remove outdated and irrelevant content. Less (high precision) content = less resources to build new content. 

So, how long should I budget for maintenance? Similar to the point in Avoid This 3, be kind to yourself with forecasting in Year 1 of your digital adoption program. Just as you’re not going to know your exact headcount/output ratio from the get-go, you won’t know exactly how long WalkMe maintenance takes until it’s a part of your workflow. The sooner you start maintaining content and filtering those actuals back into your forecasting, the more accurate your forecasts will be. 

How to start: The next project you scope, tack on a + 50% multiplier for maintenance over the next 2 quarters. Revisit at the 2-quarter mark and look at your delta. Wait! Require my employees to track their time? No thanks. If this brings up friction for you, do some discovery into how your product teams forecast and manage without time-tracking software (story points, anyone?). 

Avoid this #6: Assuming you know the value story your executives want

We’ve all had a situation in the past where we thought we knew exactly what someone wanted…only to be dizzily disoriented in finding out we missed the mark. 

Earlier in my WalkMe career, my champion and I were dually-presenting an executive business review to a newly appointed CIO. We had a beautiful presentation and air-tight engagement data. But as the meeting got underway, we knew something was off. 

I then realized my mistake – though the prior CIO had taken WalkMe engagement data at face value, this new CIO had some aggressive KPIs for compliance risk reduction. Basic engagement numbers weren’t interesting to her. She wanted to pull up PowerBI dashboards and talk through the movement in data quality metrics in the last quarter (a leading success indicator for her KPIs) because the board was breathing down her neck.

The moral of this story: One size does not fit all when talking about WalkMe’s value. Leadership in your digital adoption program is leading with curiosity (and not only when new executives are hired). 

How to start

Find 20m for a more informal meeting with your executive prior to your next WalkMe business review or status update. Similar to Avoid This 1, take WalkMe out of the picture for a minute. Reframe the leader not as the recipient of your message, but as a human with needs, fears, goals and preferences of their own. 

What is this person’s style? What are their motivators? What are their most intense pressures and where/who are they coming from? What are they measured on? What “wins” would make them look like a hero? 

Treat your executive like the individual they are. Confirm the language they want to speak and you can guarantee they’ll be engaged. 

Avoid this #7: Set it & forget it

By now, you know optimizing your content is important (if not, see Avoid This 5). To be a best-in-class program, you have to be iterative with your process as well. 

One of my customers has a “Program Retrospective” cadence for one hour, once a quarter. Two weeks prior to the meeting, they release an optional survey to their primary points of contact from the Lines of Business, asking for anonymous input using the Start, Stop, Continue framework. Each quarter, they publish “Program Release Notes” in their KB, citing specific feedback and noting changes they will incorporate to address said responses. Two examples from this most recent quarter: 

• Feedback: We heard radio silence after submitting our intake form and weren’t sure when the CoE was going to get back to us.
  • Response: Adding an SLA for a time expectation between Date of Intake Submission and Date of Project Approval 
• Feedback (from multiple stakeholders): Translations elongated the time of the project and it took 2+ weeks longer than originally scoped 
  • Response: Adding a question to the Intake Form about a) Number of languages required for translations and b) Language priority

In conclusion 

The most successful digital adoption programs draw from historical context, but don’t get caught up in it; they reflect on the past (see Avoid This 1), but aren’t bound by it. 

In a complex business ecosystem, digital adoption should be a fresh breath of fluidity. Because of its uniqueness, it can simultaneously draw on institutional practice and find wiggle room to be nimble. 

So stay nimble out there – and watch out for those potholes!

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has been a bookshelf staple for nearly three decades, and for good reason – it’s timeless. I myself enjoyed reading it, and found it inspiring, both professionally and personally.

So I figured it would make for an interesting exercise to take this framework of 7 principles and apply it to digital adoption programming.

Here are 7 habits you need to help you on your digital transformation journey:

1. Define what “highly effective” means to your business

Let’s get something out of the way first: Efficient vs. effective. I’ve come to understand (more recently than I care to admit) these are not interchangeable, though they are related. 

Efficient is more focused on inputs – containing costs and eliminating waste – while effective is focused on outputs – valuable and precise outcomes. And so, as net value ultimately considers cost, high effectiveness by nature must incorporate efficient processes. 

But these are just standard definitions. The goal here is to take these terms (especially “effective”) and define them specific to your business. 

I recently read Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead. She has a whole chapter discussing values, followed by an exercise in which you define your primary values. We can talk about “living in alignment with our values/living with integrity”, but unless we’ve done the work to add context, this discussion dies in the buzzwords. 

TL;DR: Regurgitating the line “create a highly effective digital adoption program” in your annual big room planning meeting, checking the room for nods and smiles, and moving on – won’t get you anywhere. 

What you need to do: 

Start by talking to your executive stakeholders. Define what “effective” means to them. If your digital adoption program got an award for the “most effective program in [X] company,” what does that look like? If your stakeholders respond with “maximized ROI,” push on them to tell you more. Maximized ROI is an output, or a lagging indicator. What leading indicators can your organization measure, to show the program is on a positive trajectory for excellence? 

2. “Know thyself” – commit to self-awareness

Knowing thyself as a business is tough. Tough in the same way an HR initiative to survey employees on company culture is tough. Finding a cross-section of individuals whose voices can be liaisons for a huge spectrum of ideas and experiences, is a challenge. But, if you want to stand up a successful program, you have to commit to a research-minded, analytical approach on what makes your business tick. 

What you need to do: 

No matter where you are in your digital adoption journey, conduct a standard SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) initiative and analysis for your organization. Hold multiple meetings with different stakeholders.

Some conversations (i.e. with your current Center of Excellence team) will focus more on the current state of digital adoption. Bring in other stakeholders (i.e. highly tenured employees) to discuss the company’s broader ecosystem, and other cross-functional (even non-digital) initiatives.

What was the biggest recent initiative that impacted a large group at the company and who was involved? How are software purchasing decisions made at your organization?

One of the best questions I’ve heard a Digital Adoption Program Manager ask, as she led a SWOT discussion – Is there a department at your organization that has cross-functional leadership (even implicit) where if a directive comes from that department, employees will comply? Can you give an example of why you might believe this to be true?

Notice this isn’t asking anything explicit about digital adoption. However, when asked, it teased out helpful information about the presence and power of authority. It also helped us identify critical detractors we needed to build relationships with, to continue augmenting digital adoption evangelism at their company. 

Which brings me to habit #3 – 

3. Cultivate “SuperChampions” (and convert detractors in the process) 

Gallup’s StrengthsFinder is built on the principle that we have natural talent in specific areas. It states that identifying and focusing on growing this talent more than improving our weaknesses will create a disproportionately multiplying effect. If you’re naturally great at shooting a basketball (a 5 on the scale of 1-5), then focusing a level 5 effort on growing this talent, can get you to a 25 (5×5). Whereas if you’re only a 2 at basketball, focusing a level 5 effort will only ever get you to a 10 (2×5). 

Your “talents” are your internal Digital Adoption Champions – those who already share the broader vision, understand how digital adoption fits into transformational strategy, and/or engage the Center of Excellence with strategic and well-defined projects. Focusing a level 5 effort on your level 5 talents, will make them SuperChampions (25s). SuperChampions are digital adoption thought leaders. 

SuperChampions radiate energy through the organization. They share their case studies in internal “roadshows.” They consistently use data to tell their value stories. They lead by example by complying with the CoE’s policies and procedures. And – drumroll – they engage in tough conversations with those at the organization that aren’t “all in” on digital adoption just yet. They surface potential risks and detractors to the CoE with an innate desire to help.

At this point, “Digital Adoption” might be in that SuperChampion’s job title. So not only is it ingrained as somewhat of a passion project, it’s an act of job security to make sure the vision of digital adoption is a lasting one.

What you need to do:

Make a list of potential SuperChampions and why they’d be a good fit. Create an Advocacy plan with activities and rewards for continued growth as a digital adoption ambassador. These folks need to feel seen, respected, and elevated in order to help spread the digital adoption love.

4. Treat your stakeholder map as a living document

You probably already have a “map” of all primary contacts from all major business units. Perhaps you’ve even identified where the gaps are and an outreach action plan. But challenge yourself to go one step further.

What you need to do:

Building off of #3 – be honest with yourself on the strength of the relationships in each business unit. Keep this as an internal document for your core Program/Governance leads. Revisit this document at least quarterly to make updates.

Consider adding the following information to it: What is important to this person? How long has the CoE had a relationship with this person? What are this person’s primary concerns (if any) with our digital adoption program or solution, and what specific instances led to these concerns? Does digital adoption have any documented “wins” for this person? (If not, can we create an action plan to get one?)

Bonus: If any of them have the possibility of becoming SuperChampions (see #3), star/bold/underline/highlight them… and if any are in a key decision-making seat, strategize how you can leverage the SuperChampions to help convert. Prioritize your time accordingly on the relationships who could positively influence those Detractors in important seats. 

5. Commit to clear stakeholder expectations

Note: I know, we’ve been talking a lot about the people in your program. But even if you have killer SOPs and a beautifully documented knowledge base, if your people aren’t bought in, you’ve got nothing. So we’ve got one more principle specifically focused on people. 

If you’re in a workout class and the instructor yells “okay class, do burpees! Go go GO!!!” vs “ok class, 10 burpees! Go go GO!!!” – which are you more likely to push yourself and do? For me, that first one would give me a strong urge to pick up my things and bail. Are you kidding? How many of these are we supposed to do? Ugh. At least the second one, I know I can gear up, grit my teeth and do 10. 

Expectation-setting is powerful. Psychologically, it’s associated with feelings of respect and trust. This person is taking the time to clearly outline what they need from me. Enough information allows me to prioritize accordingly and put my best foot forward. 

Best-in-class digital adoption programs are excellent at stakeholder expectation-setting. They focus on answering the following questions and ensuring there is easily-digestible collateral (visuals, one-pagers, etc) to display the answers: 

• What kinds of skills do I need to be successful?
• What does my “customer journey” look like when engaging with the CoE? z
• How much time can I expect to spend, and on what tasks? 
• Who else at the company is embracing digital adoption, and what does their success look like? 

What you need to do:

Interview a couple current stakeholders who have already benefited from the CoE services. How did they feel the up-front expectation setting was, as they started an implementation project? What about the aftercare/ongoing relationship after their first phase was live? What areas of confusion did they have? How could they have felt more supported through the process? Did the CoE send clear and concise materials that answer the questions above? 

Alright, enough on the people. This next one’s on program governance. 

6. Create a prioritization framework

If you’re emerging in maturity as a digital adoption program, you may not feel this is relevant. But if your backlog isn’t overloaded, you haven’t expanded beyond 1-2 departments, this is exactly the time you should be putting a prioritization approach together. This is committing to those regular dental appointments to avoid getting a cavity. Preventative care, folks.

Challenge yourselves to think about prioritization along initiative lines versus application lines. Limiting yourself to “Which is more important, Salesforce or ServiceNow?” glazes over the innate interconnectivity of these applications and the user journey. Your users think of their day in terms of tasks, which more often than not, span multiple applications.

If the fundamental goal of digital adoption is to improve the user experience, look at your prioritization in the plane of user workflows, not applications.

What you need to do:

Make your first goal to create a qualitative framework (i.e. Urgency vs Importance) and gradually work up to a quantified framework (i.e. a calculator). Use the time in between to identify what inputs are most important to your business and would have a place in a calculator. 

7. Be iterative and stay curious

Best-in-class programs are always looking for ways to improve. Treat every Standard Operating Procedure, piece of collateral, policy and procedure as a living document. Commit to revisiting key documents on an annual or bi-annual basis to assess viability and make changes.

What you need to do:

Here are a few examples of how to turn static documents into living documents – 

• Any time you make a sizable change to a Standard Operating Procedure, look at the “T” (Threats) of your SWOT analysis and ensure your rollout plan for these changes is cognizant of potential risks
• Track the amount of time you spend on each implementation project and use data points to update forecasting tools accordingly 
• Update your Stakeholder Map every time you turn a Champion into a SuperChampion

Commit to adopting these habits. Commit to making your program timeless. 

Learn the fundamentals of digital adoption and the integral role it plays in achieving effective digital transformation.